Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Luke 4.21
 

One of the most interesting places on the Web is a site called The Edge   Every January its creator John Brockman poses a question and invites a long list of distinguished scientists, philosophers, writers, artists and other thinkers to post their responses.  A couple of years ago the question was “What’s your question?”  This year it is “What’s your law?”  Brockman was after some rule, some principle to which you are uniquely attuned, some underlying pattern you rely on to make sense of the world, a maxim for your life.  The responses so far range from the practical: If it feels good, don’t do it! (that’s O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration), to the possibly profound: Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it, to the paradoxical: Don't just do something. Stand there, and from the pessimistic: Everything leaks, and  93.78654% of statistics are useless, to the downright cynical: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

Answers to the query “What’s your law?” reveal a lot about who you are, how you see the world and what matters to you.  Some of the answers Brockman elicited were intriguing or at least entertaining, but what struck me is the assumption that everyone has a law; there are no genuine antinomians among us; it’s a question of what law we live under, what laws we identify with, not whether we do.

Today’s reading from Nehemiah is about a law, a law all but lost yet suddenly restored.  In the cataclysmic year 587 B.C. the Israel was overrun by the Babylonians and their allies.  Jerusalem was laid waste, the Temple destroyed, the elites killed or carried off into exile in Babylon.  This looked like the end for Israel; the royal family disappears without explanation; the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of God’s presence with his people, vanishes, never to be seen again (despite what Steven Spielberg might say to the contrary).  It looks as though little Israel’s Yahweh can’t compete with the gods of the gentiles, or – maybe worse – that he could but he’s finally really given up on poor, faithless Israel.  Yet fifty years into the exile, beyond all hope, there’s an amazing turn of events.  The Persian Empire swallows up the Babylonians, and the Persian ruler gives two captive Jews, Ezra and Nehemiah, authorization to go back to the land of promise, to bring the exiles home, to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple.

This is where today’s lesson comes in.  Ezra assembles the returned exiles in Jerusalem and reads to them from the torah, the book of God’s law, the law they’ve lost track of in those years of exile, the law they’ve not been following very well, if at all.  They respond the way I do, when I hear about laws I haven’t been paying attention to: whether they come from Washington, the Dean’s office, or the pulpit, they’re bad news, more irksome regulation, more ways to go wrong, to get in hot water, yet another revelation of the things done I ought not to have done and things left undone I ought to have done.  An occasion for frustration and regret.  But Ezra tells the people: Do not mourn or weep!  This law is good news!  It’s time to party, to eat the fattening stuff and drink the sweet wine!  The return of the law means that after all, despite decades of brute fact to the contrary, God is holding up his side of the covenant. God is faithful and his faithfulness overcomes the waywardness of his people.  Again and again they fail to keep his law, but he fulfills it anyway.

Keep in mind what that law is.  Its principal purpose was to form a people, to generate difference and create an identity; it marks boundaries identifying who is in, and who’s not in, the people of God.  All those regulations, a strange mix of the moral and the medical, politics and religious ritual, rules about what to eat and what to wear, about what and when and how to do all sorts of things, many of no intrinsic significance, the little things that pervade daily life.  This law is a constant reminder of who you are as a Jew, that you’re God’s child living in God’s world.  To have this law restored is to recover your identity as the people who belong to a faithful God.  It’s the sign that God still loves you, beyond all that’s fair or reasonable.

This is reflected in Ezra’s concern with the condition of the walls and gates of Jerusalem.  The chronicle of the post-exilic restoration that he leads makes much of the rebuilding of the city’s walls and the repair of its gates.  The ceremonial reading of the torah recounted in today’s lesson takes place at one of the gates they’ve just finished rebuilding.  Those walls and gates represent keeping the foreigners, the invaders, the gentiles who do not have the law, safely outside.  The well-walled and gated city symbolizes an Israel secure in who it is, keeping God’s law and protected by him.  Still, gates are inherently ambiguous items; they let people in as well as shutting people out.

And that brings us to today’s lesson from Luke’s gospel.  The passage from Luke is, in his account, the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry; it’s parallel to the story in John about Jesus making the wine for the wedding.  Jesus returns from his temptations in the wilderness and sets out on a tour of teaching in the synagogues of Galilee.  He comes to the synagogue in his hometown and reads that marvelous passage from Isaiah:  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.  Having heard the scripture, the congregation awaits the commentary, but Jesus sits down.  Into the expectant silence he announces: Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.  Those words that for generations had been about a hoped for future suddenly are about the present.  Jesus makes his messianic claim: I am the anointed.  God has at last acted. The deliverance of Israel is at hand.

It’s important not to construe this simply as the confirmation of a prediction.  So far as we know from Luke’s story the miraculous events referred to in the Isaiah text have yet to occur.  Jesus hasn’t healed anyone yet; the sick are still sick, the blind blind, the captive captive…so far all he’s done is teach in the synagogues.  Yet this is enough.  This is about a covenant being honored by one side even though the other party has repeatedly dishonored it.  God has promised to be with his people, to redeem and restore in some ultimate way, in some way earlier restorations and deliverances – like the one recounted in Nehemiah –only foreshadowed.  It is not anything Jesus has done that fulfills the promise.  It is the sheer of fact of his being there, the sheer fact of his being who he is, his being God with us, that means God, even in the face of disloyalty, rebellion and disobedience, remains steadfast, true to his covenant.  This is underscored by what Jesus does – really what he doesn’t do. He rolls up the scroll, hands it to the attendant and sits down, as though there is nothing more to do.  He does not launch a program for an intensified commitment to keeping the law that will at last convince God Israel is worthy of deliverance.  We’re past all that, the law is fulfilled; the terms of the covenant have been satisfied, not because people have complied – they haven’t – but because God wants us anyway.   Jesus presents himself as God’s irrevocable decision to be with us, to accept humanity not as good enough – we’re not – but as well-enough loved.

Nor does Jesus rally the faithful for a war of liberation, for a triumphant purifying of the land so sorely contaminated by pagan Romans.  Jesus’ reading of second Isaiah’s commentary on torah is a mirror image of Ezra’s reading of the law.  Deliverance in Ezra’s day came by securing the walls, closing tight the gates, purifying the land, repenting from consorting with the gentile outsiders, doing everything necessary to ensure holy Israel’s separation from everyone else.  But now Jesus the long-promised messiah throws open the gates: God’s love is at last poured out on everyone, Jew and gentile, pure and impure, those under the law and those outside it.  Jesus goes on to act this out, healing, freeing, even sharing table fellowship with notorious failures at keeping God’s law.  The unutterable strength and depth of God’s love remains to be revealed fully: years of misunderstanding, rejection, betrayal leading to abandonment and death lie ahead, but the fateful step is taken, God casts his lot with us, we can do our worst, we can reject him, but he is with us.  The God who is in Christ, as William Countryman tells us, rejects our rejections, breaches our defenses, draws us out of our fortifications (Dirt, Greed and Sex, p. 267).  It’s time, Jesus says, to put aside the law for what that law was always for: to make of human beings people who know the love of God.  It’s time to open the gates and welcome the outlaws.

The risk Jesus takes here was, as the facts of course bear out, enormous.  It is no surprise that in treating the torah not as eternal truth, but as an agreement whose terms are now unilaterally satisfied by God, Jesus arouses confusion, fear and murderous anger.  Law imposes order on chaos, it delineates right from wrong, proper from improper, clean from dirty; it tells us what’s pure and impure, what’s natural and unnatural.  It separates us from them.  It tells us who we are in the world…take it away and there’s nothing, no Israel, no people of God on earth…or so it seems.

St. Paul was keenly aware of how Jesus demolishes our carefully defended identities, our convictions about what makes sense, our investment in distinguishing good from bad.  In the Epistle to the Romans, his great sermon on law and grace, after characterizing the gentiles in ways with which pious Jews – and his Jewish Christian readers – will resonate, that is as hopelessly beyond the pale of God’s life-giving torah, unclean, given to all sorts of excess beyond anything lawful or natural, he pulls the rug out from under his too confident readers.  He moves on to speak of those unsavory gentiles – that’s us, folks – as a branch grafted, contrary to nature, onto the olive tree that is God’s people (11.24).  God’s world-saving work in Jesus, his love even for gentiles, for the likes of us, is excessive, beyond propriety, unnatural, lawless.  Even Paul, the great preacher of the gospel, never loses his sense of how crazy it is.  He follows this description of the extremity of God’s behavior with the exclamation: How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable are his ways! (11.33).

So where does this leave us, so weirdly and improperly adopted into the people of God by a love that breaks the barriers, violates the laws?  What’s our law?  Do we even have one?  We are, of course, beyond the torah of Israel, as we are beyond the religions, the moralities, the plausible programs people are constantly devising to create identities for themselves and to situate themselves on the right side of whatever god or gods they imagine.  But that doesn’t mean we have no identity: we are people coming to know ourselves as beneficiaries of God’s forever surprising gift of himself in Jesus.  God in Christ utterly rejects every possibility of relating to him on the basis of law, on the basis of anything other than pure gift.  It’s on the basis of this – and this alone – that we can answer the question “What’s our law?”  Karl Barth wrote:
 

if the essence of God as the God of man is His grace,  then the essence of men as His people, that which is proper to and demanded of them in covenant with God, is simply their thanks….Thanks is the one all-embracing, but as such valid and inescapable, content of the law of the covenant imposed upon man….That he should be thankful is the righteousness which is demanded by him before God. (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, §57, pp. 42-3)

You and I – fellow gentiles – live under the law of thanks.  Imagine: someone who loves you does something wonderful for you (maybe she agrees to marry you!)  She hopes you will respond with gratitude, not because she needs you to do something for her in return, not because she’s keeping score and wants her rights respected, but because she hopes you will act to strengthen the relationship, to more richly love her and know her love for you.  She hopes you feel thankful and act on those feelings, but it’s in the nature of the thing that there’s no prescribed way to respond.  It’s entirely up to you, you’re free; you can be totally ungrateful.  Even that wouldn’t lessen her love for you a bit, but who wants to be an ingrate?  In these matters the more creative and unpredictable the response the better.  You want to surprise her.  If there were a particular thing you had to do to show your thanks – “She sent me a present last Christmas so I have to send her one this year” – you’d be in the realm of law, of duty and reciprocity; you’d be outside the magical circle of gift and gratitude, love and grace.  I’m thinking this is how it is with the law of our lives with God.  The way here is not exactly easy.  We’re freed from bondage to the law but precisely because of that we’re infinitely far from “anything goes.”  The law of gratitude is, as often as not, complicated and demanding; it’s usually a lot easier to figure out what the rules are and do your duty.  It’s harder to discern what makes sense in light of the good news of God in Christ.  It’s often far from obvious where the path of thankfulness leads.  But it is a path of joy and Jesus is with us.

Amen.

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