Sermone by Theodroe A. Gill on Romans 13.8-10

Love is the fulfilling of the law
A sermon by Rev. Theodore A. Gill, Jr preached in the Ecumenical Centre chapel, 21 July 2008,

Text: Romans 13:8-10

Before Paul became a follower of Jesus, he tells us,
he was a student of Gamaliel… one of the greatest of the Pharisees,
a renowned scholar of the Torah, or Jewish law.

And although we, too, profess to follow Jesus,
we are raised as students of Linnaeus, whose 300th anniversary
was celebrated just last year. It was Linnaeus who taught us to
* analyze all of life according to
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species
* place each of God’s creatures in its category, to understand its
particular characteristics.
It is the ideal scientific method in an age of fragmentation,
for a philosophy of radical individualism
that leads to a culture of specialization.

But occasionally the voice of the generalist breaks through,
especially in the reading of pre-scientific texts:

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another;
for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

The Law, the five books of the Torah, was made up of more than 600 statutes,
and each has received ample attention over time.
The statutes have been categorized and arranged according to subject matter,
in the hope of discovering how to render God what we owe,
and how to keep our accounts even in relation to one another.

Paul and other New Testament authors had a good deal to say about the law,
and those of us who were raised and educated in churches of the Reformation
have tended to focus on the more negative reviews that were rendered.
But a generation ago, E.P.Sanders raised this question:
Isn’t it possible that the 16th-century Reformers
projected a good deal of their own context, their own struggle with canon law
into their reading of the early church’s situation –
anachronistically discerning the legalistic dynamics of Roman dogmatism
in first-century Pharisaism and among the later rabbinic traditions –
committing eisegesis as well as exegesis in their interpretation of Paul?

Gamaliel, and his student Paul, were capable of a generous approach to the Torah
that sought a unified, positive meaning underlying the larger system of “law”.
For them, the biblical law was much more than the sum of its parts,
and less complicated that it may have seemed.

This approach is echoed in a saying of a later rabbi (Deut.R., Berakah, XI, 6):

“Rabbi Elazar said, What was the blessing which Moses said over the Law when he received it? ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, who hast chosen the Law, and has sanctified it, and hast pleasure in those who fulfill it.’ He did not say, …in those who labour to study it, or in those who meditate on it, but in those who fulfill it. A man may say, I have not learnt wisdom, I have not studied the Law, what am I to do? God said to the Israelites, All wisdom and all the Law is a single easy thing: he who fears me, and fulfills the words of the Law, he has all wisdom and all the Law in his heart.”

There are strands of testimony to the idea that God’s law may be fulfilled
without scrupulous or obsessive attention to each of its many statutes.

Jesus said, “I have not come to overthrow the Law and the prophets but to fulfill them.”

And listen again to this verse from Paul, interpreting the law with generosity:

“The commandments ‘You shall not commit adultery’;
‘You shall not murder’; ‘You shall not steal’; ‘You shall not covet’ –
and any other commandment – are summed up in this word:
‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”

This was not a notion original to the early Christians.
Listen to this story from the early rabbinic writings (T.J. Ta’an, 1, 4, 64b, line 54):

“[In a time of drought] it was revealed to Rabbi Abbahu in a dream that Pentekaka [i.e., ‘the man of five sins’] should pray for rain. Abbahu sent and had this sinner fetched to him. He asked him what his trade was. Pentekaka replied, ‘Every day I commit five sins. I hire myself out to harlots; I deck their theatres; I take the harlots’ garments to the baths; I clap and dance before them; and I beat the tympanum for their orgies.’ Rabbi Abbahu said to him, ‘Have you ever done one good deed?’ He said, ‘Once I was decking out the theatre when a woman came and wept behind one of the pillars. When I asked her why she was weeping, she told me that her husband was in prison and that she was going to sell her honour to obtain his ransom. So I sold my bed and coverlet, and gave her the price, and said, “Go, redeem your husband, and sin not.”’ And the rabbi said to him: ‘Worthy art thou to pray, and to be answered.’”

Or as Paul writes, “love is the fulfilling of the law.”

It is a more comforting phrase than the earlier verses in Romans 13, the passage for which this chapter is widely recognized, in which Christians are advised to honour the Emperor and to acknowledge that the power of empire has been given the ruler by God. That’s the passage we Americans have heard quoted from podiums and pulpits to defend aggressive foreign policy, from the days of the war in Vietnam to contemporary justifications of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I was glad to see that the daily lectionary calls our attention to these later verses today, and not to that earlier passage.

But the late Zurich theologian Emil Brunner saw a connection between these two portions of the letter to the Romans. He notes that the teaching regarding the authority of the Emperor is immediately preceded by the verse, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” And it is followed by the beginning of the passage we have been considering: “Owe no debt to any man.”

Brunner wrote concerning Paul’s explanations of imperial authority:

“Yet the remarkable fact remains that these explanations are interposed between two instructions concerning Christian love! Obviously, there exists for Paul a hidden relationship after all. I think it is not too difficult to find. Love is not a levelling; love meets everyone as the person he is and takes him seriously in his particular being. To confront the representatives of political power, with the intention of giving them their due, is an outworking of love.

“Neither Paul nor Christians in their lives are concerned with the abstract entity of the State, but with persons who have something definite to do, who occupy a definite position and expect something definite from them. To give them what is their due, to owe them no debt, is the command of love. Indeed, love itself is not abstract and theoretical, but it consists precisely… in fulfilling the law by acknowledging everyone in the place in which God has put him and giving him that which he requires for the fulfillment of his special task of service. How can one love the official if one does not acknowledge his office and its dignity? Love does not presuppose justice, but love spontaneously fulfills the demands of justice…”

(Following up on this commentary from Brunner: Just as it is said, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner”, perhaps we might add, “Honour the Emperor, but confront the empire.”)

Elsewhere in Romans, Paul asserted that “Christ is the end of the law” – the telos, the goal. In the teaching of Jesus, so similar to that of rabbis like Hillel and Gamaliel, the whole Torah is summarized in the commands to love God and to love one’s neighbour.

These traditions, Jewish as well as Christian, lie behind this morning’s word from Paul:
“Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Amen.


Sources:

Emil Brunner, The Letter to the Romans ET (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959), 110f.

C.C. Montefiore & H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1974), 179f.