Rules and Regulations

This is another one of those "overflow" blogs, where I've been working through something for a sermon or a teaching and I just have a few things I want to add that maybe don't need to get into the actual finished product.  The Lectionary Gospel for today is Matthew 5: 17-20, from the Sermon on the Mount, which pretty much means that it is heaps of trouble for people who want Jesus to be a mascot for whatever mix of prosperity and imperialism they prefer.  It reads as follows in the NRSV:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets: I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all is accomplished.  Therefore, whoever breaks 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 the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

 It is tempting to read this with whatever hermeneutic lenses suit you best and sit back and assume that people who disagree with your way of reading have obviously strayed into error and become those who will either be "least in the kingdom," or better still not get in at all.  But please notice that this is part of a longer teaching, and unless you believe that Jesus was as poor a public speaker as certain public figures today, who jump disjointedly around from soundbite to soundbite, you must also consider what leads to this and flows from it.
The Sermon starts with the Beatitudes, which present the upside-down "blessings" of the Kingdom.  The entire scheme being introduced here is that God is present with us in some of our most unpleasant places. It is the beginning of the unpacking of the Good News that God is with us.  Jesus is going to spend much of his most famous teaching challenging the way we think things work and offering those with ears to hear a different paradigm for understanding.  It is no different for the Law.
What Jesus pretty obviously challenges in the Sermon on the Mount, is the idea that just following the rules is "good enough."  The Beatitudes are a challenge thrown down to people who would claim God's blessings upon power, authority, success, wealth, and suchlike. Jesus then proceeds to insist that we must be salt and light and a city on a hill, people who live kingdom lives must stand out.
The foundation of such distinction is the Law, the simple rules of living a God-oriented life, distilled in the Ten Commandments, which I will list in the form that I find most helpful to remember:

1. Have no other gods, One God is absolutely enough.
2. Don't make idols or even representations of divine things that might become idols.
3. Don't use my name in sloppy or profane ways.
4. Keep a Sabbath, because rest is Holy, even God rests.
5. Honor your father and mother.
6. Don't kill other people.
7. Don't have sex with people you're not married to.
8. Don't take other people's stuff.
9. Don't speak falsely, especially if it will harm others.
10. Actually, don't even get jealous of other people's stuff, that just leads to more trouble, and usually to breaking rules 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Now, there are 611 other no-nos prescribed by the Torah (611 also the numerical value of the word torah in Hebrew, Rabbis sometimes have too much time on their hands), plus commandments one and two, bringing the total number of laws in The LAW to 613.  That's an awful lot to remember, and honestly a lot of the rules were pretty obscure and prohibited fun things like tattoos (because pagans tended to have tattoos that essentially amounted to idols on their skin), and eating pork and various sorts of seafood, which honestly would be a deal breaker for me.

Fortunately for me and my fixation with Maryland Crabs and southern BBQ, Jesus actually summed up the law in a way that allows me to both endorse the goodness of the law and the prophets, while elbow deep in old bay and pulled pork, again I will paraphrase:

Love God with all that you are, and love other people too.

That is really quite brilliant, because if you go back to the original 10, you will notice that everything is covered by those two little rules.  Nothing passes away, in fact, I would go so far as to say that those little rules are pretty close to universal.  People might argue about the definition of God, maybe even try to deny that there is such a thing, but ultimately we come face to face with a the reality of something that is beyond ourselves, and we have a choice: love it or hate it.  If you hate it, you will be in Hell, always and forever, as long as you exist.  You will be forever at odds with your own nature and the nature of everything that is and you will be always be cursed.  If you can't love that which is at the heart of being, how could you love anything?
Conversely, as Jesus points out, if you do not put that love of God into practice with other actual beings and things, you can't really claim to love the source of their being.  In other words, if you don't get the reasons for the law and grab a hold somehow of the fact that God's love is at the core of it all, you can't possibly hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  The scribes and the Pharisees, along with legalists throughout time and space, have surgically extracted the love from the laws, sucked it out and spit it on the ground like it was snake venom.
The rest of the Sermon on the Mount is more or less a description of what actually following the Law would look like if it was done completely and consistently. He certainly does not ease up the requirements, in fact, he makes them even tougher in the rest of Matthew 5 (Matthew 5: 21-47).  Jesus' life is a demonstration of putting that description into practice. Being a follower of Jesus is a lifelong practice of learning the truth and putting it into practice, both things, always and forever, and they will never pass away.