Freedom and Law
Out topic is freedom and its relationship to law. In order to bring some focus to this topic, I am going to focus on what the OT calls Torah, or divine law. So I will not be speaking of law in general, even though according to the great 13th century theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, all law, whether human or divine, ultimately points in the same direction; that is, all law serves the common good. When it comes to the Torah, Aquinas thought that, “The goal of the law is the love of charity, for all law aims at friendship of people with each other, and with God”. To speak of freedom in the same breath as law is, in the OT tradition, to simply describe what human life resembles when ordered towards the sharing of a common life with God and each other. Before I develop this line of thinking, I first wish to say something about Israel and the giving of the Torah, or divine law, at Sinai.
The 20th chapter of the book of Exodus is where we find the first account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God after Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. The first commandment goes something like this:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. “You shall have no other gods before me.”
God announces himself above all else to be the God of freedom, the one who delivers the people out of bondage or slavery. The first characteristic of this God is that he is a liberating God. What seems strange is the first thing this liberating God does is lay a whole set of commands and restrictions on his people. One might expect the God of freedom to leave the people alone; to let them be free and make their own decision and run their own lives with whatever laws the people seem appropriate. Freedom, we might expect, would consist of people doing what they like as they please with the people of their own choosing. In theory, it is no doubt true to speak of freedom in this way, but it is equally true that Israel, as one people among many, had an uncanny ability to enslave themselves to other gods when given the chance. The important thing, we discover in this first commandment, is to be found by the right God – the God who frees the people from slavery – and reject and struggle against the others. For the OT tradition, the worship of any god other than the LORD was a form of slavery; “to pay homage to the forces of natures, to the spirit of a particular place, to a nation or race or to anything that is too powerful to understand or control” was, for God’s people, to submit to an inferior kind of human life and community. The only true God, Israel discovered, is the God of freedom. The role of Torah then was to define the sort of community Israel would be when they were living most free with their God and with each other. Freedom was not automatic; it depended on how people related to the common good; in other words, how they related to the law revealed by God to God’s people.
Freedom and law in the terms of the OT tradition – the tradition, by the way, out of which Jesus lived, healed and preached – looks and smells different to what is generally accepted in our own society. I think it is fair to say that freedom for the modern West is a freedom from. There are many of us who think the kind of society in which there is freedom is one where the claims of society (or law) are a hindrance to freedom. The law exists to keep us from doing injury to each other, to protect us from the claims of others, and to guarantee a certain kind of limited peace. Freedom in our society means doing our own thing as far as we are able with the recognition that we live under certain regulations. If only we could be free from constraint, free from the tyranny of the laws of others, then we could be truly free. The assumption is that we have a certain sort of society because people just want to be free from each other. What we learn from the tradition of the OT and of Jesus is that we need a certain sort of society – one where we share a common life and strive for the common good – for there to be free people in any shape or form. Instead of freedom from, the witness of scripture gestures towards freedom for: free for God, free for neighbor, stranger and even enemy.
As we discover throughout the gospels, the whole point and purpose of the Law was, and always has been, to define and maintain a certain way of living together, what the New Testament writers call koinonia, sharing a common life with God and each other. We agree to something less than worthy of a flourishing human life if we fail to subscribe to an understanding of divine law as preserving us and liberating us from captivity to the gods of place, nation, race or things. The way of living together that Jesus called love, heals and liberates our corrupted desires for total security and utter control by opening our hearts and minds towards a life of service and peace; a life partly defined by rejecting and struggling against the idolatry of work, an indifference to human suffering and the degradation of the very young and the very old. The point is not an illusory utopia, but the hope of human community that is learning to receive its life as a gift; a gift from God that matures through a life of friendship and gratitude.
It would be impious of me to allow this reflection to end with an extended platitude. To the unsentimental eye, any appeal to a community shaped by love and friendship is obviously rubbish. To attempt to sustain a human community on the kind of thing we ordinarily think of as love or freedom or law is most clearly an exercise in futility. That is, of course, unless the kind of love, freedom and law is of a different sort. What was special about the kind of freedom God provided to Israel, the kind of law that God revealed in the commandments, and the kind of love that Jesus speaks in relation to society, is that none of it undergirds just another theory about how people should get along. What was special about what the God of freedom revealed through the given of the Torah and sending of Jesus, is that God alone is the source of the freedom and love that Jesus embodies and the church proclaims. The question we face is whether we are prepared to accept freedom as a condition for living in peace, whether we are frightened by such freedom, or whether we are prepared to risk a life shaped by the God of freedom.
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