July 2, 2005
Confidence
Pentecost 7/9A
We’ve got law on our minds. With resignations and presidential appointments at the very highest levels of the judiciary all over the press and getting more attention than usual, we can’t help but have law on our minds.
Nobody is above it, we insist. But neither do many seem to be beneath it, not when it comes to maneuvering it to their own ends. The judiciary ranks on par with the executive and the legislative, the law makers and the law enforcers, but when push comes to shove, the courts are our system to set them all straight . Even they are not above the very laws they themselves are supposed to make and implement.
This is the American political experiment. It’s the greatest gift we can give to the rest of the world. We give it best, of course, by making it work for us, by show and tell, not by breaking it and wrangling over it and being underhanded with it. Even so, it remains a major source of our confidence.
The proper lections this Sunday are about that confidence. The prophet Zechariah cautions Israel about placing its weary confidence in temporal rulers (Zech 9.9-12). With a strange irony, he even calls them “prisoners of hope.” Paul warns Jewish Christians about placing absolute confidence in the law (Rms 7.15-25a). Even its most careful keeping hardly liberates us from sin, he counsels.
Matthew goes into detail and reminds us not to romanticize the historical Jesus (Mt 11.25-30). If the law veiled this with the reverence of ordinances and stipulations to protect our frailty, the incarnation of the Word tore the veil away once and for all.
Further, the confidence of the faithful community is of a kind that binds friends together, no longer the kind that binds lawgiver and subject together. Such confidence finds wisdom in loving, not killing one’s enemy. The faithful community’s confidence is robust from within and based on the Christ. It makes nothing relative but the irrelevant. Jesus turns the common tradition of the Judaic yoke of legalism through his own offer of manageable gentleness. “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Where, then, is our confidence? Many claim us to be a Christian nation. As many more confirm that our religious pluralism is the better source of our strength. We pledge to be one nation under God, but even that is questioned by our judiciary. We’re never quite sure where prayer and the location of the Ten Commandments is really appropriate.
As Christians, where, then, must be our confidence? If, as Jesus so calls us, we place our confidence in him and accept the offer of his gentle yoke, we then become agents and servants of his love for God and neighbor and self, implementing that in our lives. For better or worse, we live in this land and in such a system by God’s grace and pledge the kind of citizenship to help make it work. Might the law in some strange irony incarnate grace, be motivated by the Great Commandment as it takes shape in justice and peace for all? Might that be our mandate? Might that be where we place our confidence?
Understandably, we’ve got law on our minds. Yet might we join the prophet Jeremiah and welcome God to put that law on the tablets of our hearts, as well?