Law vs. Love

Law vs. Love 

12/19/21

This will be just random thoughts as they well up in my brain. Edits will come at the end.

Today I watched a film at church on the heroic lives of two Unitarians, the Sharps, who went to Europe as WWII was starting, in order to help people escape from the Nazi horrors of the concentration camps and the mass killings that went with it.

A disturbing thought came to me as I watched the film, tied in with my lifelong study into the debate between Law and Love, in Biblical terms.

Most people believe the bad guys were the Nazis, who were also the law abiding ones. Of course, they wrote the laws they wanted, including the law that made Jews no longer citizens of Germany and worse, making them subject to the “The Final Solution.”

Nevertheless, millions of loyal Germans followed the law, and will forever be known as the “bad” guys.

The “good” guys, a husband and wife team named Sharp, who were Unitarians from the US, made it their business to break any law that would keep them from forging documents and visas to sneak prominent Jews out of Europe before the Nazis could find them and kill them. They found ways to sneak them across the border into Spain and Portugal, bribing border guards with money and cigarettes.

Hundreds of Jewish children were smuggled onto ships bound for the US, many of whom never saw their parents again. All because two faithful people were willing to break the law and risk their own lives to do the right thing.

We are replaying this scenario at our southern border with Mexico today. Just as in the old days, parents are sending their children  ahead alone, hoping they can find a safe place in America before the “death squads” or “drug cartels” kill the whole family in Guatemala or El Salvador. 

Once again we have the “law and order” people out catching the refugees as they cross the border, arresting them, jailing them and deporting them.

Once again there are people who risk arrest by leaving water and food out in the desert to try to assist the refugees. I would call them the “good guys.”

When I joined the Unitarian Universalist Church, I did not know of the long history of activism for justice that this church is known for. They fought against slavery, they marched for civil rights in the South, (some died there) and many are still engaged in active pursuits of justice and charity.

Nobody asked me about my beliefs or about any doctrines I might have held. And it occurs to me now that Jesus never asked those things either, before he fed the people or healed their infirmities. In fact, he criticized scribes, priest, and Pharisees for rigidly following the law but having no love for their fellow humanity.

Actually, that is the moral of the parable of The Good Samaritan, but most people now think it’s about being nice to somebody hurt beside the road.

The whole of the New Testament is a fierce debate about keeping the Law, or having Love and compassion for our brothers and strangers within our gates.

James and the original disciples remained Jews all their lives. They advocated strictly keeping the Law (James 2:10), monotheism (James 2:19), circumcision (Galations 5:2,3), and kosher dietary laws (Galations 2:11,12). I can find no specific texts that they still kept the Jewish seventh day Sabbath, but since James makes it plain that all the Law is to be followed, I am sure they did.

Also note that the book of James makes no mention of Jesus as the Son of God or as the Redeemer on the cross. He was the Lord, the Messiah, Christ, (Anointed One) but not the Son of God.

Paul’s church was a new religion, with Jesus as the Redeemer, sent from God to ransom us from our sins, and take away the condemnation of the Law by paying for our sins on the cross.

Paul’s answer to the problem of sin is to change us - make us new people inside - to have love in our hearts. Faith in God’s mercy and love in our hearts is the only thing Paul believes will save us in the end. I believe it will make us better people, too.

I believe Paul got closer to Jesus’s message (at least as recorded in the Gospels) than the Twelve Apostles did. 

But others think differently. I have a book by David Danizier called “Betrayal of Jesus” which takes Paul to task for changing the original religion of Jesus. He seems to believe that we should all go back to carefully keeping the Law, completely missing the point that if we have God and love in our hearts, the Law will be kept, (or fulfilled), but for the right reasons. 

It is better to have Godly love in our hearts, and break a few laws, than to keep the law perfectly and be a hateful a**hole or Nazi or ICE officer.

If Paul had not founded his new religion, I believe we would never have heard of the Christian religion again. Paul’s church at Antioch was the first church called Christian, for obvious reasons. The church at Jerusalem was a small sect of Judaism, which was driven out of Judea by the Romans in 70 AD.

My mind is drawn to the life my wife and I lived in Nevada, where the speed limit between towns was whatever you wanted it to be, using your adult judgement about what was safe, but that would be way off topic.

Maybe I’ll go there some day later. I still remember what freedom felt like.

Don Rogers