Some of the most intelligent theologians separate the commandments of the Mosaic law into two categories: ceremonial law and moral law. The ceremonial law refers to the aspects of the Mosaic law which were meant for the particular time and culture the Israelites inhabited, while the moral law refers to the aspects of the law which are universal. It is the moral law, these theologians assert, which we remain obligated to follow. How do we know which aspects of the law are moral and which are merely ceremonial? That’s tricky, they’ll tell you, but a good litmus test involves asking whether the command is repeated in the New Testament. If it is, we know that it transcends the Mosaic law as a moral principle to which everyone is bound.

Although you may already be able to tell that I’m critical of this viewpoint, I don’t strictly disagree with it. There is a sense in which some of the restrictions of the Mosaic law are certainly helpful today (e.g. “do not kill”) and others are not (e.g. “do not wear clothing woven from two different kinds of thread.”). And using the moral guidance of the New Testament for support in distinguishing the two is wholly wise.

But the issue with separating the Mosaic law into a moral law and a ceremonial law and declaring Christians to be obligated to one and not the other is as significant as it is subtle. It’s the word “law.” The law framework is obsolete; we are no longer under law, but under grace. When we apply the law framework to our moral understanding (i.e. “moral law”), we begin to chart a slow but awful deviation which can have drastic consequences for our entire Christian walk and, indeed, for the very soul of our religion. Rather, we should leave the Mosaic law to the Pharisees, understanding it to be fully obsolete, and build our morals on what Paul calls “the new way of the Spirit”: the same solid foundation that Paul, Jesus, and the other NT authors built their lives upon.

Paul

To explain what I mean, I will begin with the writings of Paul. I begin here not only because Paul writes most extensively on the law, but also because we are charting my own journey of growth, and it is thanks to Paul that my true Christian growth began.

Over my short life, I have read the Bible, Paul’s letters especially, a lot. I grew up on the stuff. When I look back on my upbringing, I chart my life in terms of Bible studies, Bible quizzing, Bible camp (“heavy on the Bible” was the motto), and Bible classes. I’ve memorized (and mostly forgotten since) many chapters of the New Testament, most of them Paul’s. By the time I was fifteen, I was leading Bible studies for other teens and surprising adults with my Biblical wisdom.

I don’t bring up this history to demonstrate how smart I was. To the contrary, perhaps the most interesting thing about my upbringing is that, despite my obscene familiarity with Paul’s writings, I somehow managed to spend my entire life completely missing his point. When I look back over my years of close study, I’m incredibly surprised that I couldn’t see what Paul had most plainly written, emphasized, underlined, and bolded for his reader, and that I had picked up on so many things that weren’t actually there.

My point is that, despite the number of times I’d read and regurgitated Paul’s teachings, I still had a whole lot to learn. So as we move forward into a discussion of Paul’s writings on the law, I want to invite you now into the same humility which has been forcefully imposed upon me: to consider that there may be some points in Paul’s writings that you have overlooked, no matter how knowledgeable you may believe yourself to be.

So what is it that I was missing? I’m not sure it can be fully summed up in a single statement, but the portion most relevant to this chapter can be expressed in this way: The extent to which Paul sees the law as a destructive force in Christians’ lives cannot be over-emphasized. In fact, I will say it again for emphasis: the extent to which Paul sees the law as a destructive force in Christians’ lives cannot be over-emphasized. It’s been a few years since I began to recognize this in Paul’s writings, and I’m still surprised by the sheer strength of his broadsides against the law. And they are foundational to him. If you don’t understand Paul’s beliefs about the law, you are likely missing the thrust of nearly all of what he writes.

To demonstrate this as briefly as possible, I’ve compiled below a non-exhaustive list of some of Paul’s strongest statements on the law. Though I am generally against quoting verses without context, the purpose of this list is breadth rather than depth – I hope it makes clear to you that the problem of the law was incredibly important to Paul. Though I would love to delve into the context of each verse, I leave that as an exercise for the skeptical reader.

• “‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” – 1 Corinthians 15:55-56. (If you missed it, Paul is stating here that the law is the power of sin. The power of sin.)
• “Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?” – 2 Corinthians 3:7-8. (Carved in letters on stone? Yes, Paul is here referring to the law as “the ministry of death.“)
• “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” – Galatians 1:8-9. (Note that this is the intro to a letter rebuking the Galatian church for requiring members to adhere to certain elements of the law. The “contrary gospel” Paul is referring to here is one which mixes faith with the law.)
• “If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” – Galatians 2:21b
• “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” – Galatians 3:1-3.
• “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.” – Galatians 3:11a.
• “Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law.” – Galatians 3:12a.
• “The law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.” – Galatians 3:17. (Here, Paul is making a fascinating argument that God’s promise to Abraham and, by extension, all of us, pre-dated the law, and therefore the law can have no say in it.)
• “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” – Galatians 5:1. (This is one of my favorite verses, and though it doesn’t contain the word “law,” the context is clear: Paul is calling the law “a yoke of slavery.”)
• “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” – Galatians 5:14. (Note the word fulfilled here; we’ll delve deeper into it in the section on Jesus below. For now, recognize that Paul’s statement here is not just that the law is summed up by those words, but fulfilled, as a shipped package fulfills – and in doing so, makes obsolete – an online order.)
• “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” – Galatians 5:14.
• “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” – Ephesians 2:14-16.

The problem with this list (beyond being too short and lacking context) is that, though it demonstrates Paul’s message, it doesn’t give it time to sink in. It took months of close-reading Galatians for me to finally consider that maybe Paul wasn’t a huge fan of the law. It took me more months to finally accept that “the law” here isn’t qualified to mean “the ceremonial law” or “the parts of the law that don’t apply to us.”  Paul is adamant and dreadfully clear that the entire framework of the law has been superseded by Christ, and he’s more adamant on that than he is on any other belief. If this idea strikes you as at all discomfiting, I can only encourage you to not only finish this chapter, but to spend a great deal of time doing a very close, and very honest, reading of Paul’s letters, beginning with Galatians, as I did. I hope it is as life-altering for you as it was for me.

But while you are here, I’ll do my best to make clear the very basics of Paul’s understanding of the law. I think his understanding is best expressed in Romans 7:4-13 and Galatians 3:19-26. Beginning in Romans:

Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.

For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. (Romans 7:4-13)

And Galatians:

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Galatians 3:19-26)

In these two passages, Paul writes his most concise description of the purpose and workings of the law. And yet, if your eyes glazed over while you attempted to read them, you’re in good company. Even after having read them over and over again, it still takes a great deal of work for me to comprehend Paul’s most meaty statements, which is part of the reason he is so often misunderstood. But let’s take the time to really process what he’s saying, because there’s treasure there.

By No Means!

In the Romans passage, Paul makes a couple of bold claims, which he then rushes to clarify. He asserts 1) that the law aroused our sinful passions, and 2) that we who are in Christ have died to the law and are no longer held captive by it. This is, of course, controversial. After all, we were given the law by God. Is Paul claiming that the God-given law is sinful? Anticipating this line of argument, Paul eagerly and forcefully denies that conclusion (by no means!) and explains exactly how the law gives sin its power.

But his explanation is abstract, and can be difficult to follow. What does it mean for sin to lie dead, or worse, for sin to become sinful beyond measure? And I thought sin was an action, not an actor which deceives, kills, and seizes opportunities? Truly, this passage is a series of headscratchers. But it’s not impossible to understand. In fact, there’s a story in the Old Testament that I’ve found especially helpful in elucidating Paul’s reasoning here: the story of Adam and Eve.

I think it’s safe to say that the commandment Paul chooses to use here (covetousness) is an example for the sake of illustration, rather than the only one he could have chosen. That is to say, he could just as easily have referred to the commandments against stealing or bearing false witness and the general idea would remain the same. In the same vein, I think God’s commandment to Adam in the garden of Eden can be helpful for the sake of illustrating Paul’s message. So let’s re-read Romans 7:7-14 side-by-side with the example of Eden.

There is much more discussion to be had on this subject – enough for a whole book just on Adam and Eve and sin – but that is for another time and place. For now, let’s remember our objective – we want to understand Paul’s writings on the law, and this concrete illustration helps to clarify Paul’s opaque language.

Perhaps it’s surprising to you, as it was to me, that Paul’s narrative fits the Eden story so precisely. But the compatibility of the two stories is just evidence of an important fact: Paul is not speaking narrowly of the Mosaic law here, he’s speaking of the law framework itself. Note verse 6: “we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” It isn’t that we are leaving behind a particular “written code”; rather, we are leaving behind “the way of the written code” – the whole framework itself. Paul’s message is that, whether they are written on stone, spoken directly in a garden, or declared in any other way, commandments from God are tests that we are doomed to fail. And as long as we attempt to follow those commandments to life, sin will always rise up, deceive us, and bring death to us.

So why, then, the law? If the good purposes of the law are thwarted by sin at every point and it ultimately brings only death to us, why did God give it to us in the first place? Didn’t he know? If we are to believe Paul, God indeed knew. And not only did he know, he was always one step ahead of sin. Despite what I once believed, the law’s true purpose has very little to do with life and righteousness and very much to do with death and sin.

For Freedom

This is best explained in the Galatians passage (go back and read it again!), where Paul tells us that “the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin” in preparation for the promise that would come in Christ. Paul, of all people, knows that prison is not a good place to be. And yet, in these verses, he blames our imprisonment on both Scripture and the law. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’ll say it again: the extent to which Paul sees the law as a destructive force in Christians’ lives simply cannot be over-emphasized.

But prison, to Paul, is not solely a bad place. Paul notes in Galatians 4 that a child is no different from a slave, as all children are locked up in their homes and ruled over by guardians. Similarly, Paul notes here that the law served the dual-role of prison guard and guardian for the Israelites, not only condemning and entrapping them, but also keeping them safe until Christ came. “Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made,” Paul explains. Even though the law imprisoned the Israelites through the condemnation of commandments they could never keep, and even though it could never help them become righteous, it was also a guidebook for living. It shielded them from the violent excesses of lawless society, and gave them something to strive for as they waited for the one who would bring true life.

But now that Christ, the offspring, has come bearing the promise of true freedom, something new is required of us: we must be willing to leave behind our old prison cells. In Paul’s words, “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” Just as children eventually grow out of their home-slavery, we cannot stay captive under the law forever. Becoming a follower of Christ is like entering into adulthood – the strict rules that once bound us fall away and we must enter into the complexities of real life. It is easy, even natural, to feel a homesickness, a powerful urge to return to the safe simplicity of spiritual childhood. But when we feel that way, we are like Moses’s Israelites, who at times wished they had remained enslaved in Egypt instead of following God into the wilderness. “For freedom Christ has set us free;” Paul proclaims in Galatians 5. “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

If we want the freedom of life outside of prison, we have to leave behind what imprisons us. This is not just sin; it’s the law as well. If we refuse to leave the law behind, we condemn ourselves to slavery, and we can never be free from the power of sin. Remember Romans 7 – it is through the law that sin gains its power. It is only when we move from law to grace, from the old to the new, that the power of sin is broken. But if this is a true statement, it contains an urgent warning: if we do not move from law to grace, we are still held captive to the power of sin. Do you see now why Paul spoke so drastically about the law? Do you understand the urgency of his polemics in Galatians 1:8-9 (quoted in the list above)? At stake is our salvation from the power of sin. As long as we hold on to the law, we consign ourselves to slavery to sin.

But Paul’s message does not end with bad news. In fact, it’s exactly this realization – that fealty to the law is itself slavery – that gives the gospel its radical power. The law has taught us that, left to our own devices, we cannot do what is right. Without a law to protect us, we would only harm ourselves and each other. We need a prison guard and a guardian; we neither deserve nor know how to live in freedom. But when Christ came, everything changed. He demonstrated to us how to live in love and freedom without falling prey to sin. And then he went a giant step further: he took the weight of our sin upon himself, forgave us, and, inexplicably, looked beyond our sinful nature and trusted us enough – loved us enough – to let us live in freedom as well.

Again, it’s only natural to feel homesickness, to react against this freedom. We say, “I know I can’t do right without rules, without a law that promises to punish my disobedience, and I certainly can’t trust others to do so! If I step out of the guiding framework of the law, not only is my own sin no longer deterred, but neither is anyone else’s sin! If I don’t condemn sin, there’s no way we’ll ever be free from it!”

But Paul continually points out that after all this time, the law has not stopped us from sinning (Rom. 3:20, Gal. 3:21, etc.). So why do we continue to believe that it will? It’s of extreme importance that we escape from the power of sin, but the law’s condemnation was never going to help us do that. If we want to join Christ in freedom from sin, we’re going to have to take the radical step of faith of leaving the law behind.

In other words, we’re going to have to step out of the boat. Just as the apostles thought their boat was safe until they nearly died in a torrential storm and realized that Jesus was the only one with the power to save them (Matthew 8:23-27), we are prone to thinking that we are safe from sin within the boundaries of the law. But this was never true. What’s true is that you can’t walk on water unless you leave behind your fear of drowning. John puts it most succinctly in 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” If we fear the consequences of leaving the law behind, that is only because we have not yet been perfected in love.

So what does it mean to walk in this newfound freedom? I’ll describe it in more detail in the following section, but in brief, it is to follow Christ’s example: to walk in love. Our role is no longer as children and slaves, but as brothers and sisters of Christ – “heirs according to the promise.” So our duty as Christians is different from that of the Israelites. We are no longer compelled to obey, fear, or keep any law; we are instead compelled by the love of Christ towards a higher calling than any law could ever contain. This calling is love – something obedience to the law could never quite replace. In Paul’s words:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. (Galatians 5:13-15)

The law is the domain of children, slaves, and prisoners – those who aren’t trusted with complex moral responsibilities. But Christ has chosen to trust us with the offer of freedom, and freedom comes with the responsibility to learn to love each other. This means that we can no longer solve our disputes by simply looking to the law (though the law can, of course, be helpful guidance). We have to look to Christ, to the Holy Spirit, to wisdom from the Bible, to wisdom from others. In our freedom, we will stumble. But love covers a multitude of sins. We will sometimes fail to love properly, and sometimes fail to forgive. But that’s why Christ died. It’s not our obligation to be perfect; Christ has already paid for every one of our sins. Our job is only to keep on trying to love.

There’s much more that could be said on this subject as well; Paul wrote many letters and they were all about these topics in one way or another. But hopefully this is enough to convince you, as it convinced me, that the law’s specific purpose was to contain and condemn, not to serve as a replacement for love, and that the call to follow Christ is a call to leave all appeals to the law behind. In fact, I hope you see that, to Paul, this very point is the essential difference between Christianity and Judaism.

I am aware, however, that all of this is very theoretical. I have not gone very far in explaining what the life of a law-denying, love-abiding Christ follower actually looks like. The next section, on Jesus, is an effort to describe in more detail Christ’s relationship to the law, and what it looks like, practically, to live by the Spirit, not by the law.

But first, as a note in closing this section on Paul, I want to make clear to the theologians out there that I’m familiar with the loose collection of beliefs known as the “New Perspective on Paul,” an important corner of the vast corpus of writings about Paul’s writings. The general idea behind these beliefs is that what looks like antagonism to the law in Paul’s writings is actually an antagonism to the things the Jews used to set themselves apart from the Gentiles. Circumcision, dietary restrictions, and the keeping of festivals, the theory goes, were markers of Judaism, and Paul was emphasizing that Jews were no longer set apart from the Gentiles in God’s eyes. I agree fully with this idea (with a minor quibble on Romans 11) and I think Paul himself sums it up very well in Ephesians 2:14-16, which is quoted in the list above. But I think it’s clear from what I’ve quoted of Paul’s writings that tribalism is far from the full extent of his concerns with the law. I find it very hard to look at Paul’s writings on the law and not conclude that there is a very real extent to which Paul believes that the framework of the law is antithetical to Christianity. And I agree with him.

Jesus

When reading the work of Paul, the original Christian theologian, it can be easy to forget that he is the only apostle who never met Jesus face to face. To non-Christians, this might appear to be a source of concern – are we really comfortable with the only self-appointed apostle of Christ laying down much of the foundation of our religion? But in reality, those concerns are no more than a passing curiosity; Paul’s writings are remarkably well-aligned with the rest of the New Testament, and the words of Jesus himself. In fact, it’s not hard to see Jesus lurking in the background (and foreground) of our exploration of Paul’s writings above.

When Paul writes of transcending from law into grace, we might remember Christ’s encounters with angry Pharisees whenever he healed on the Sabbath (Mk. 3:1-6, Lk. 13:10-17). And “for freedom Christ has set us free” in Galatians 5:1 merely echoes Jesus’s words in John 8:36: “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” In fact, Jesus’ whole conversation in the latter half of John 8 mentions slavery, sons, freedom, and Abraham’s true offspring. Many of Paul’s most powerful statements can be seen as rehashed versions of things Jesus said long before him.

But there is one statement Paul gets from Christ which, to me, stands out as particularly important. He writes in Galatians 5:14: “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” This declaration echoes two of Jesus’s most powerful teachings, which we’ll examine to close out this chapter. These teachings helped me to understand not just the position of the law in our lives, but also what the alternative – what Paul refers to in Romans 7:6 as “the new way of the Spirit” – is supposed to look like.

“Teacher, Which is the Great Commandment?”

The first and most obvious basis for Galatians 5:14 is in Matthew 22, when a lawyer asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest. Crucially, Jesus’s response is not the equivocation we might expect (all the laws are from God and therefore should be followed equally). Instead, he gives a very direct answer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40).

Love – for God, neighbor, and self – is, to Jesus, the foundation upon which all other commands depend. I find it helpful to think back to Paul’s metaphor of childhood here. Parents give their children many rules, but the individual commands (never leave a mess without cleaning it up, always go to bed when you’re told) nearly always follow from greater principles (be hardworking and considerate, value rest). In fact, sometimes these principles may override the very commands they inspire, like when a child hurriedly leaves a mess they made to go help a friend who has fallen. And when children grow into adulthood, they’re no longer required to follow their parents’ commands. Instead, they’re expected to believe in the principles that those commands depended upon.

Similarly, Jesus is telling us that the specific commands of the Bible (do not murder, honor your father and mother) come from the greater principle of love, and we must never let the lesser commands interfere with that principle. This is why, in passages like Mark 2:23-3:6 (cf. Matt. 12, Luke 6), Jesus butts heads with the Jewish authorities. Here’s that passage:

One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

What I love most about Jesus is how brazenly radical he is. Reading the Gospels is, for me, nearly always an exercise in astonishment. This passage is particularly surprising; there are many details here which demonstrate how passionate and transgressive Jesus’s attitude towards the law was. I’ll run through the five details that stand out most to me:

1. First, and most importantly, when the Pharisees rebuke his disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath, Jesus affirms that the Sabbath restrictions can be breached if they get in the way of loving self or others. “Because they were hungry” is a perfectly good excuse to Jesus, which means he cares more about our day-to-day physical afflictions than about the Sabbath restrictions.
2. This is not an example of Jesus working on the Sabbath, but of his followers doing so. This means we can’t assume that Jesus is the only one with the authority to override the law. Jesus clearly wants his followers to do the same.
3. The example Jesus chooses as a defense is even more surprising – non-priests eating the bread of the Presence is a huge deal. You could call it sacrilegious, and Jesus explicitly refers to it as “not lawful.” This is important, because some people claim that Jesus only supports breaking Jewish tradition, not the Mosaic law. To the contrary, he is quite explicit here that David broke the Mosaic law, and he strongly implies that it’s okay to do so when the law gets in the way of loving self or others.

Then, in the synagogue:

4. “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” I love this question because it upends a traditional understanding of the law. Taken naively, the dichotomy borders on nonsensical. It is unlawful to work on the Sabbath – there is no mention in the law of doing good or harm on the Sabbath, saving life or killing. But Jesus is urging the onlookers to see the principles underlying the law – the two great commandments. What is truly lawful is what is loving, and when we let adherence to auxiliary laws impede that basic truth, we are not really getting the point of the law at all. When adherence to a particular law gets in the way of love, true lawfulness compels us to breach it.
5. Interestingly, this is the only time the Bible explicitly states that Jesus is angry. (The word anger isn’t even used in the famous clearing-the-temple scene, though I don’t doubt he was angry there too.) Even more interesting is that the Pharisees don’t do anything to upset him – they don’t even say a word. Instead, Jesus’s anger is inspired by their unwillingness to allow the law to be broken, even when the outcome would clearly be good. This legalism is called “hardness of heart,” and it both angers and grieves Jesus.

The gospels are riddled with these types of stories. Jesus heals others on the Sabbath in John 9 and Luke 13. When Jesus prevents the Pharisees from stoning a woman caught in adultery in John 8, he is interrupting the law’s prescribed punishment. All it takes for Jesus to belt out six woes against the Pharisees in Luke 11 is for a Pharisee to note that his disciples don’t wash their hands before eating, in violation of tradition. A large part of the reason the religious leaders hated Jesus so much was because he kept casually dismissing the laws and regulations that their religion held most sacred.

The word “Christian” does not mean “follower of Pharisees”; it means “follower of Christ.” And yet, how many of us find ourselves playing the role of the Pharisees in conflicts like these – indignant at the rule-breakers – rather than playing the role of Christ, who routinely broke the law out of love for his neighbor? Let me be the first to raise my hand. For most of my life, I could be found following the Pharisees far more often than I’d like to admit. I have only recently begun to learn to follow Christ in this way, elevating love over law.

But isn’t it strange how easy it is for us to miss this? If Jesus is so adamant that the law is, at best, secondary to love, and Paul is so adamant that the law is behind us, why do so many Christians today still believe that we need to adhere to it? I think much of the confusion can be traced to Jesus’s most famous speech of all: the Sermon on the Mount.

“Whoever Relaxes One of the Least of These Commandments…”

The second statement Paul echoes in Galatians 5:14 is much more subtle than the first, but just as important. It is Matthew 5:17, near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ declares: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

As I mentioned in the section on Paul above, we should pay special attention to the word “fulfill,” which is not quite the same word as “observe” or “follow.” That is to say, when Paul writes that “the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” we should not take him to mean that loving our neighbor is equivalent to following or observing the law. This is an exceptionally easy mistake to make, but it’s still a mistake. The word “fulfill” is slightly different: it means to bring something to completion, or to fully accomplish what has been promised, as when an order for a package is fulfilled. When Paul writes that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” fulfills the law, he is saying that this great command completes what the law only promised; it is the full accomplishment of what the law only began to reify.

Similarly, we should recognize that Jesus is not stating that he came to follow the law. Instead, he came to fulfill it – to fully accomplish the work that the Law and the Prophets began.

But here, the discerning reader should probably interrupt me and complain that I’ve gone too far. Because what I just claimed (“Jesus is not stating that he came to follow the law”) is actually pretty hard to square with the immediate context of Matthew 5:17. Here’s the whole paragraph:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17‭-‬20)

With this context in view, a very different picture emerges. Here, it seems that Jesus is the strictest of legalists, and he lays out his full allegiance to the law in no uncertain terms. Not only does he claim that one must be more righteous than the Pharisees (the most law-abiding Jews of all) to get into heaven, he also refuses to allow us to relax even the least of the commands. It’s no wonder that many Christians think we are still bound to the law – Jesus practicality says it himself!

To escape this theological pickle, some argue that Jesus is just pointing out that no one is righteous enough to get into heaven, and that the only way to heaven is through the forgiveness that he would soon sacrifice himself to secure. I agree with this, but to stop there seems dismissive to me. That may explain the final claim above, but what about the other claims? That nothing will pass from the Law until all is accomplished? That whoever relaxes the least of the commands is least in the kingdom of heaven? This is a hard passage, of the sort that those looking for simple answers might prefer didn’t exist.

But Jesus, the perfect radical, doesn’t always say what we’d want him to say. In my experience, I’ve found it deceptively easy to brush away some of Jesus’s most consequential statements because they don’t fit with my preconceived theology. But I’ve also found that I learn the most when I compel myself to take Jesus at his word, no matter how confusing. This passage is no different. After taking the time to understand these statements, not only have I found that they are not grounds for returning to the law’s slavery, but I’ve also gained a clearer picture of what love looks like. So let’s consider these statements carefully.

To be clear, Jesus doesn’t actually say here that we are bound to the law, only that it will not pass away until all is accomplished, and that we will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven if we relax any part of it. As I see it, there are a few different ways to read this, so let’s weigh them all. It can mean that:

1. We are bound to the law entirely.
2. Our responsibility to the law went away after Jesus died – i.e. when he said “it is finished” – because that was when “all was accomplished.”
3. Those who relax any commands will indeed be called least, but being called least in the kingdom of heaven is not actually a bad thing. After all, this is the same Jesus who says “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35).
4. The law has not passed away, and we still must not relax it, but “relax” means something different from “disobey.”

Reasonable people disagree on which of these four Jesus meant to convey, and each has its measure of merit, but there are a few facts that the discerning reader should consider before settling on an interpretation. First, of all four readings above, the first seems to conflict most with Jesus’s other teachings. If Jesus really meant that we could never disobey the law, then much of his life and teachings were in conflict with this belief, including a statement just a few verses down, where he directly contradicts the law’s “eye for an eye” provision (Matt. 5:38-39). If Jesus intended to instruct us to obey every part of the law at all times, no matter how small, he would not then promptly ask us to disregard its clear provisions for justice and adopt new ones. Remember, context is important, even when it extends beyond a single paragraph.

The next two readings are significantly better, but they don’t fully convince me. I can see how Jesus’s death on the cross was the most consequential accomplishment in all of history, as the second reading notices, but “until heaven and earth pass away” is a sticking point for me. That seems to imply that Jesus is referring to a moment that is still in the future. Similarly, I like the humility and poeticism of being willing to be called least in the kingdom of heaven, as proponents of the third reading are, but I’m just not convinced that Jesus is doing that kind of value reversal here. He is referring only to our heavenly state, not to what we are now, so such reversals seem unnecessary: it would seem that the “least in heaven” refers simply to the “least in heaven,” not the “greatest in heaven.”

It’s the fourth reading that I find most convincing, because it seems to align most clearly with the rest of the sermon. If we simply keep reading Matthew 5, Jesus seems to clarify what he means when he refers to “relaxing” the commandments. Immediately after these verses, Jesus makes a series of claims in a distinctive pattern: He first says “you have heard it was said,” followed by (usually) a quote from the law. Then he says, “but I say to you,” followed by an even stronger, extra-legal command. Where the law regulates behavior, Jesus goes further and regulates hearts. “Do not murder” is not enough, according to Jesus; we must not even insult one another. It’s not enough to simply love our neighbors; we must love our enemies as well.

Why would Jesus make these extra-legal claims? Is he really claiming that the law isn’t good enough? Well, yes. That’s entirely the point. Remember Paul’s teachings: the problem was never that the law was bad or wrong, just that it was never meant to do for us what we keep wanting it to do for us. It won’t make us righteous, and it’s a poor substitute for love. Even if a person were to follow every iota of the law, their actions would still only be a shadow of what love is. The author of Hebrews puts it best, I think: “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship” (Hebrews 10:1, NIV).

This is what Jesus is demonstrating as he points out example after example of ways in which the law falls short of the higher principle of love. Remember again the metaphor of the child. As adults, we can easily look back and remember how limited and insufficient the specific rules our parents mandated were, but we also still follow many of the principles those rules imperfectly embodied. Christ expects his followers to transcend the rote memorization of – and blind obedience to – specific rules and instead follow the higher principle on which they depend: love for God, others, and self.

So why, then, does Jesus say that the law will not pass away? Likely for the same reason that Paul says “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” in Romans 7:12.  The Law has its purposes, as we discussed in the section on Paul. But that does not mean it takes precedence over love.

And why, then, does Jesus tell us not to relax the least of the law’s commandments? In context, we can see that the message he’s ramming home is that love always requires more of us than the law’s commandments ever could. Relaxing the commandments means doing less than what is required, not more. If I choose to forgo my Sabbath rest to heal the sick, I am not relaxing the law, I am strengthening it! Love always seeks to give more, to go further. At the end of Matthew 5, Jesus sums it all up in this way: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” He doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect to be loved by him – that’s the whole reason he came to Earth. He means that those who seek to follow him, to love as he does, must seek after a calling that is much higher than the law: love.

This is what the “new way of the Spirit” looks like. It looks like what Jesus describes in Matthew 5. It looks like how he lives throughout the gospels, and how he dies for us. It’s healing, not hurting, nor standing by when others hurt, regardless of what the law says. In a recent sermon at my home church, Quest Church in Seattle, Pastor Gail Song Bantum put it this way: “As Christians, we no longer judge by what is right and wrong; we judge by what gives life and what brings death.” The new way of the Spirit entails doing everything we can to give life, and abstaining from everything that brings death, even if that means disobeying the law.

There is, of course, much more to be said on this subject. Jesus said and did many things relating to the law, and nearly every New Testament author had their own, unique way of making the same foundational point. Here, I have written mine. Friends, let’s leave behind the old way of the written code, and serve in the new way of the Spirit.