I’ve always had a mixed relationship with the law. That’s not a confession or an admission of guilt. It’s just honest. I try to be honest whenever I can; and I think I got that from my mother.
My mother taught me to be honest and to respect the law… but she never told that there are different kinds of law. According to Moses, there’s the Law of the Covenant, with its stipulations in the Ten Commandments. There’s the 610 levitical codes that cover everything from eating Dungeness crab to the proper way to stone an adulterer to death. Moreover, according to that medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, God has ordained not only the laws of Scripture, which he calls divine, but also the Eternal Law, the Natural Law and the laws made by human beings and human institutions. My mother never told me how complicated the law is. She just told me no. She told me no when I screamed and threw a hissy fit at the grocery store. She told me no when I wanted more cotton candy. She told me no when I wanted to watch more television.
And, you see, I have a theory that this is where that mixed relationship with the law starts. It starts with that first no. It starts with that primordial limitation that’s been imposed on us from the outside, presumably for our own good, or for our long-term benefit. It’s almost as if our mothers have privilege of channeling the voice of God in the Garden of Eden: ‘Look, here’s this amazing place for you to play and eat and wander around naked and not be ashamed… but do not, I’m telling you, do not even think about touching the fruit of that Tree over there!’ More or less, I think, our mothers are the first to communicate the gist of that biblical story.
“The woman you marry will thank me,” I hear my spouse, Sheryl, say to my son, Philip, who is 21 years old on Tuesday. She says this while Philip is learning to sort laundry or to make his own hash browns for breakfast or to say please or to offer the inevitable I’m sorry. And immediately, as I see him absorbing this latest round of behavior modification I think back to how things used to be. It used to be that we could fling our mashed potatoes across the kitchen table. It used to be that we could wear clothes that didn’t match. It used to be that we could stuff pebbles up our nostrils and call people nasty names and steal cookies from the cupboards. Ah, for the way things used to be. And then, our mothers told us NO long enough and consistently enough. And now look at us. Listen to us. We’ve grown up. We’ve matured. No one has to tell us NO anymore. Or do they?
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face!
I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel Gentiles to live like Jews?” (From Galatians 2)
Now what’s fascinating to me about this argument is that it marks an incredible transition in the life of the first century church community. When Paul, the one-time outsider to the faith in Jesus, denounces the preeminent insider to the faith in Jesus, we don’t simply have a stand-off. We have a new direction. And that direction is hard to explain. It goes beyond the guilt and shame that we feel when we disappoint our mothers. And it even goes beyond the anxiety we experience when the police are called or when we’re summoned into a Court of Law. This new direction, made possible by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the yes that we’ve longed to hear, but first it seems like a no to the no that we’ve internalized all our lives:
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face: You mama’s boy!
Now, before you dismiss what I’m saying as being anti-mothers, I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that Peter had been raised by a good Jewish mother to be an observant Jewish man, and there’s nothing wrong with that in the slightest. In fact, Jesus had met Peter’s mother and even cured her of a fever before letting her serve them a good, kosher meal.
But consider the NO that Peter had imbibed with that hearty supper. That is, if Peter had learned anything from his Jewish mother it was NOT to hang around with people who ate pork. Pork is forbidden. And if Peter had learned anything from being raised as a Hebrew, it was that you don’t work on Saturday, which is the Sabbath Day. You just don’t do it, even if it means losing out to those who did work, like the Greeks or the Romans. And if Peter had learned anything about bearing the mark of God’s covenant, he would have learned from his mother that having your penis circumcised is a prerequisite for holiness. Plus, let’s not forget: no faithful Jew would even dream of sitting down for lunch with an uncircumcised Gentile whose nibbling on a pork sausage after working on a Saturday! NO. NO. NO. Absolutely Not! It’s like the father in Fiddler on the Roof says to his daughter, who secretly wants to marry a Russian Orthodox Christian, “A fish may love a bird, but where would they make a home together?”
You see, I’m not being anti-mothers. I’m just pointing out this mixed relationship that Peter must have with the law. Consider this: Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. The full embodiment of it. And yet, when we read the Ten Commandments there it is in black and white: Honor your father and mother. Well, what gives, dear Jesus? This new direction seems circuitous and indirect… and not very straightforward.
Why, when your own mother comes to you with your brothers and sisters, do you honor your mother by saying this in Mark 3:35?
Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and MOTHER.
The point is — either Jesus is not honoring his mother by saying this, or he’s going deeper into what honoring your mother actually means.
“Ordinary People” was a best selling book before, in 1980, Robert Redford made it into a movie. The mother in that film, of course, was played by none other than Mary Tyler Moore, who only a few decades prior, had been the dutiful mother and wife on the “Dick Van Dyke Show.” Anyway, what I’d like to recall with you about “Ordinary People” is the way we have to cope with loss. That is, the mother in this famous story couldn’t resolve how one of her sons had died in a boating accident on Lake Michigan and how the other one survived but felt guilty about his survival. Now, although she appears very sweet and she smiles a lot, her life is governed by a rigid set of holiday customs and family rituals. That’s how she holds it together, and who can blame her? The only problem is — she won’t move toward the messiness of grace. She won’t take a step in that new direction that Jesus recommends. And so, when Conrad, her suicidal son, finally forgives himself and forgive her for not knowing how to love him, she has a choice that only she can make: she can hug him back and hold him close and weep all over his shoulder, or she can remain in the clear-cut world in which everybody knows their place.
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.
Forget these boundaries. There’s a new direction that your good-intentioned mother knows nothing about. Or perhaps she does know. But, if she’s a woman of faith in the resurrected Christ, she knows that only you can give yourself over to grace. And grace doesn’t move in a straight line. Grace doesn’t respect personal or religious boundaries.
Destruction is decreed, overflowing with righteousness… On that day his burden will be removed from your shoulder… [Isaiah 10:22 & 27]
And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. [Galatians 2:16]
Before having our kids, when we first moved to Spokane, in 1988, Sheryl and I bought a dog and named him Zacchaeus. We bought him from this breeder of Brittany Spaniels and he was the most adorable, little puppy, and yes, as newlyweds, trying to love one another, we thought that if we could love this creature of cute fluffiness, maybe we wouldn’t screw our future kids up too badly.
Well, as you might have guessed, Zach grew and dug holes and chased birds and invaded the neighbor’s chicken coup… but mostly he ran. He ran and ran and ran. And sadly because we didn’t own a large backyard at the time, we had to chain him up among the bushes and the landscaping rocks and the trees. And that’s exactly how I remember Zach right now. He ran with his leash around and around all these different obstacles on this small and now raggedy carpet of grass. And he howled. He howled for me to come release him from these entanglements. I didn’t feel like such a good dog owner at the time, but regardless, Zaccchaeus loved to see my face.
In fact, when I found him on the coiled leash, he naturally wanted to jump straight at me. But inevitably, with the leash being so tangled, he choked himself on the collar again and again. I couldn’t simply unlink him from the leash (because, in all likelihood, he’d run). And so, here’s what I remember doing: I whispered to him. I told him to wait for me and then, grabbing him by the collar, I slowly led him around each bush, and each landscaping rock and each tree trunk. It didn’t seem natural and it wasn’t. But the path to freedom doesn’t go in a straight line.
You see, what if the resurrection of Jesus makes room for a new direction that seems to take us back and to the side and over here and over there and under this tedious relationship and around that addiction and into and out of the very knots that we ourselves have made for ourselves? What if?
Please picture this analogy: Even though we believe in God’s unconditional love in Christ, we are wrapped around laws and ritual behavior that choke us. We’re tangled up in feeling guilt and shame and often we accept these feelings as if God wants us to feel them. NO. NO. NO.
Absolutely not!
God may be leading us in circles, but each strange twist is a new direction. Each turn away from depression is a new direction. Each moment of tension we experience may be the very hand of God leading to freedom.
