The Law and Modern Society

November 14, 2021

We are all familiar with how laws and the legal system works in America. If you break the law, you get punished with fines or prison. Police enforce the law, judges apply the law to specific situations. There’s some room for flexibility, but the whole system is supposed to be more or less objective.

That is not how ancient laws worked. There were no police to enforce the laws. There were no prisons to throw law-breakers into. By the first century they had soldiers who would function sort of like police officers and they had some prisons, but that way of functioning seems to be more Greek or Roman than Jewish, and even then, there was not an objective or uniform application of the laws. Judges had a lot of latitude in applying them.

So in Israel, the laws were not just commands to be followed, but they were precedents to inform how people lived. They still had to be followed—“do not steal” means you are not allowed to steal—but their application should also be made more broadly. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest,” (Lev. 19.9) does not really apply to people living in the city. They don’t have land to harvest. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t inform how they live.

This seems to be the real issue with the Pharisees. They thought you could take the Law and make each command a box to check. “Do not steal.” Check. “Do not reap to the very edges of your field.” Just mark that one out—I live in the city, so it doesn’t apply to me. “Do not murder.” Check. “Give your wife a certificate of divorce.” Check.

Jesus comes along and calls us to return to the true purpose of the Law. He is the one who rightly explains what the Law was meant to do, how the Law was meant to be used. He came, as he said, “to fulfill” the Law and the prophets. After all, “You shall not murder,” was never simply a box to check—“I haven’t murdered anyone, so I’m good here!” It was a command to reflect upon. “Don’t murder—why should I not murder?” “Don’t commit adultery—why should I not commit adultery?” 

Jesus isn’t exactly deepening or broadening the Law. He’s telling us and showing us what the Law was always meant to do and say. His disciples harvest food on the Sabbath, causing the Pharisees to accuse them of breaking the Law. “No,” Jesus says, “the Law doesn’t work that way. Consider David. Consider the priests. The Law grows wisdom within us, so we understand when it applies and when it doesn’t.” Paul does much the same thing in 1Cor. 9.9.

This approach to the Law is especially helpful when it comes to passages like Lev. 19.9. This law doesn’t “apply” to us, but it does inform how we treat the “poor and the alien” and who we understand “the LORD your God” to be.

—John Coffey