The Law of Love

This is what the Law is all about, right???

I am always surprised at how most people, and probably most Christians, think of God’s Commandments and of all morality as arbitrary. This is why they think “gay marriage” can exist. We moderns think all law is man made, all rules and regulations are simply pulled out of our hats, and subject to the whims of culture and passing fancy. That the Moral Law is like the law of gravity – something inherent in nature, something discovered and not invented – is beyond the ken of most folk walking among us. In their eyes, law, like the rules of baseball, is simply conventional – something we concoct and then agree on as a group that allows us to play the game, whatever that game might be.

But the distinction between the Designated Hitter rule, which is not inherent to the nature of the game, and therefore can be changed and adapted as circumstances warrant, and the rules of marriage, which are inherent to the nature of love and human happiness – and which are also (rather obviously) built in to the nature of biology – is beyond even 90% of the people sitting in the pews around you on Sunday.

And even more astonishing to most folks: the Law of God is not meant to snuff out life and love, to restrict our hearts, but to liberate them, to cultivate the fires of life and love.

In Jacob’s Ladder by Peter Kreeft, there’s a scene where we pick up a dialogue between two women who are talking about the relation of Law to Love. The first speaker is a Catholic who knows her stuff, the second is a secularist who believes only in positive law and not in natural law (in other words, she believes that all laws are simply invented, not discovered), but who, during the course of this discussion, has come to recognize certain principles of the Moral Law as given, intrinsic, natural. The Catholic leads her even further …

Indeed, the relation of the New Covenant to the Old is simple. Jesus comes to fulfill the Law, not to abolish it, because the whole point of the Law (including the Ten Commandments, and all of the minor transitory regulations followed by the Jews) was love.

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Mat. 22:36-40)

Or, as St. Paul says …

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. (Rom. 13:8)

How different would we be as Christians if we simply kept it in our minds that every single thing God reveals to us and asks us to do – everything – is about changing us into people who love, who love really, truthfully, loyally.