Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
I often get asked, "Why is Christianity so legalistic? Why are there so many rules?" This seems intuitively wrong to many, especially when they read that Jesus himself broke laws. For instance, Jesus broke the Sabbath in order to heal people (see Mark 3). He favors mercy over legalisms and love over obeying a rule that doesn't lead to more love.
Today's scriptures enable us to reflect on these questions a bit more. In the first reading (Acts 15:22-31), the apostles are responding to a major concern and question people have been asking: do non-Jewish Christians have to follow all of the Jewish laws? This is a concern because Jesus himself was Jewish, and so are the apostles. People want to be following Jesus in the right way and so they wonder if they've got to be Jewish too. Some missionaries to non-Jewish Christians had been enforcing Jewish rules so rigidly that non-Jewish converts felt they couldn't ever really be Christian.
No wonder the answer the apostles give is a source of delight! Not all the rules were necessary.
But...there are still some rules that should be observed. For example: they shouldn't eat meat offered to idols and they should marry according to Jewish law (Jewish marriage law is particularly concerned with how biologically related a couple is).
Why these rules? Why any of the particular rules that Christians profess?
One of the answers is in today's gospel reading (John 15:12-17): "This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you." Love isn't "anything goes." If love is to be real, and if love is to mean something significant, we must have ways of distinguishing between loving actions and non-loving actions. Rules help us make sense of when something is loving and when it is not. There are times (as when Jesus healed on the sabbath) that rules might be broken, but only a person who knows why the rules exist in the first place can offer good reasons for why breaking a rule in a particular instance is actually more loving. This is one of the reasons why Jesus says he came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. He knows the law well enough to know what it means to fulfill it.
So: Why not eat meat offered to idols? Partly because it is an action that suggests perhaps you don't really love God because you're giving food to someone who is not God. But food is even more significant than this. In Jewish law one of the food rituals was that people be certain they were eating whole, healthy, unblemished animals; whole food for holy people. The kind of care a person takes with food is symbolic of who who they understand themselves to be in relation to God and to other people. So it is today: the food we offer to guests and eat with our families is also a symbol of how we care for others. If I invite someone over for dinner, but then when they come, I hurriedly microwave a meal and say that I've already eaten, this is hardly welcoming, nor does it recognize the great gifts God gives to us in our food and in each other.
The same is true about marriage: why care about who we marry? Among other reasons, it is because the ways we relate to each other are always tied up in the question of whether we are loving each other as Jesus loved us. Marriage is not the only way we humans try to love each other, but it is a significant way.
Today, let us seek opportunities to follow rules that help us love better, and pray for God's grace to know when rules might prevent us from love.
- Jana M. Bennett