In Matthew 5, Jesus said, “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law…” At first this seems pretty obvious, but when compared to other verses, it gets less so. I found six passages where Jesus appears to ignore Mosaic Law.
First, we will look at where Jesus doesn’t follow Hebrew Law, then we will look at how he only appears to be breaking the law. Discovering that appearance, and reframing what happened in light of other passages, will then change what Jesus means when he says not one word of the law will pass away.
Keeping the Sabbath Holy
The first passage is the least of them; in Matthew 12, Jesus’s disciples picked handfuls of grain on the Sabbath. Here Jesus says He is breaking the laws of men, not God. What’s interesting here is it isn’t clear what Jesus means. He could mean that the law regarding not working on the Sabbath was not God’s idea. Or he could mean that the Jews had taken the definition of work too far. The Jews were trying to avoid any appearance of work, and so limited what you could do a great deal. Do we ever do that? Go too far when trying to follow a simple concept God asked of us? It’s always worth considering.
The next two are very like this one:
In Luke 6:6-11, Jesus heals a man with a withered hand. Before he does, he asks the Pharisees this: “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” That question lends credence to the conclusion I have come to on the law.
In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind, again on the Sabbath, and it causes a great kerfuffle.
One thing is very clear in all three of these passages; Jesus never says that what he or his disciples are doing is not working. Instead, he says in various ways, that in these circumstances, it’s okay to work on the sabbath.
Unclean Hands
The second passage is similar; the one where Jesus did not wash his hands before eating (Luke 11, Mark 7). Here he says that what’s inside, not outside, makes someone unclean. What would happen if our children noticed this passage? Would they stop washing their hands before meals? (Boy, it’s hard to be tongue-in-cheek in print.)
Still, washing hands is one of the best ways to prevent colds and other diseases—which is probably why this is in the Law in the first place. A number of the Hebrew strictures are about health concerns, like unleavened bread—yeast, then, often had hallucinogens in it. A lot of being kosher is because of things we know how to avoid now: like not eating pork. Well, back then trichinosis was common, so let’s avoid it.
On the other hand, by the time Jesus arrived, the washing may have been ritualized to the point of inefficacy. Again, however, this doesn’t seem like a huge transgression, especially we who no longer keep kosher or strictly follow the cleanliness laws.
Jesus at the Temple
The third passage challenges our conventions a bit more, so much so that no one pays attention to this aspect of the passage. I have never heard or seen it mentioned (although someone must have noticed it over the centuries). It’s simply this; Jesus as a twelve-year-old at the temple disobeyed his parents. He was twelve years old and not stupid; He knew his parents were leaving and knew they expected Him to be with them. The kicker, of course, is the last verse. Here’s the whole passage;
The Boy Jesus at the Temple
41Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. 42When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom. 43After the Feast was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
49“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” 50But they did not understand what he was saying to them.
51Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them.
His parents were certainly upset about this; I’m sure they felt disobeyed, and frightened when they couldn’t find him. The last sentence implies he wasn’t obedient to them in Jerusalem. And more, that he had a choice, and chose to obey them afterwards. We resist thinking of this passage in this way because it challenges our conventional notions on how to raise children. For me this brings up some questions, for which I may not have answers. This passage, looked at this way, brings into question how we tell ourselves to raise our children. We teach our children to obey us, even force our children to obey us. Does this concept on raising children come from God? Or ourselves?
A Language Lesson
Another point to ponder on that is an interesting language lesson. In Ephesians and Colossians where Paul talks about Children obeying parents; who does he address the admonition to? To put is another way, does he say, “Parents, force your children to obey you”? For that matter, does he say, “Husbands, force your wives to submit to you”?
No, he doesn’t; Paul says three things:
- Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church
- Wives, submit to your husbands
- Children, obey your parents
In each case, he’s addressing the husbands, wives, and children, as though they have a choice in the matter. They do have a choice in the matter; the loving, submitting, and obeying are choices of the person doing them. i.e. they are not something forced from the outside. Jesus, at age twelve, shows us this by choosing to obey his parents.
Paul is making an admonishment to children, not to parents. It’s also an admonishment to husbands. One imagines it’s because this is something they might overlook. The same as an admonishment to wives, although I have a friend who says in Greek the word submit means something more like “stand in support of.” Wives, stand in support of your husbands.
When the rubber hits the road, however, even the boy Jesus in Jerusalem is not a definitive breaking of the Law, it’s just kind of bending it. It does introduce the idea that perhaps some laws take precedence over others. Does being in the temples, worshipping God, take precedence over obeying your parents? It seems so.
Since the passage with Jesus at the temple challenges our assumptions on children, we will always shy away thinking of it as Jesus disobeying his parents. The last passage, however, is a different animal and most telling of all.
Crime and Punishment
Is there a place where Jesus directly disobeys Mosaic Law? Yes; the Woman Caught in Adultery. Leviticus 20:10 is pretty clear; “10If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” It seems unlikely that this happened often to the men. And yet, Jesus forgives her rather than stoning her. (In fact, he does so before any evidence of repentance on her part.) Take a look:
John 8 – The Woman caught in adultery
3The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
While the other five passages can perhaps be explained away, this one cannot. Jesus did not do what the law demanded. The law says to stone her, and Jesus, who was without sin and could have cast the first stone, did not condemn her. Some might say he knew her heart, and that she’d repented, but it doesn’t say that in the passage. More, the law does not say “Stone her, unless she repents.” It just says to stone her. Jesus did not do that.
And yet Jesus also said that not one word of the law would disappear. How can Jesus not obey the law, but still have the law not disappear? The answer, I think, is in re-framing how we see the law. To put it another way, not all commandments are equal.
The Greatest and Least Commandments
The clue is in another passage, the impetus for the Good Samaritan. Here is the passage from Luke 10:
25On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
28“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Jesus and the expert in the law agree on the greatest commandments; love God and love your neighbor. The Good Samaritan a couple verses later shows that everyone is our neighbor. There is, however, an implication here that we often gloss over: if there is a greatest commandment, and a second greatest, it implies that there are a bunch of medium commandments and somewhere a least commandment. In other words, the commandments and the law itself have a hierarchy. Some laws are not as important as others.
That’s a fairly radical notion. But keep in mind that the expert in the law, who spent much time studying this, agreed with Jesus; there is a hierarchy of laws, a greatest and least.
Jesus Applying the Law
Now that we’ve established that there is such a hierarchy of commandments, we can reframe Jesus’ behavior. Simply put, where it looks like he was not following the law, he was instead following the greater law rather than the lesser.
Harvesting grain on the Sabbath is the greater trumping the lesser. It’s an act of love to feed the hungry, and that trumps resting and keeping the Sabbath holy. The same goes for Jesus healing the man born blind in John that, and the man with the withered hand. According to Jesus, then, healing trumps the Sabbath too.
Jesus at the temple can be re-framed as the command to love God trumping the one to obey your parents. On the other hand, one would need to be careful there, because your parents are your neighbors too. Thus, we wouldn’t want to love God at the expense of our parents. In fact, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of that elsewhere. At twelve, Jesus managed to disobey his parents without shaming them. That’s important. He did not neglect loving his parents when was busy loving the Lord our God.
Going back to the woman caught in adultery, how does this hierarchy of commandments apply? How does Jesus apply this hierarchy? Well, Jesus applies love your neighbor in preference to “the adulteress must be put to death.” Or, to put it another way, the greater commandment trumps the lesser one, so love your neighbor trumps punishment for sins.
How Shall We Then Live?
I don’t recall ever hearing or reading of this concept anywhere else. When I finally noticed this, after many years of studying the Gospels, I began to see it other places too. Imagine that, Jesus acting consistently. Who would have thought?
The truth here is that Jesus uses the precedence of these two laws throughout the gospels. He does it when healing lepers, talking to Zaccheaus, and to the Woman at the Well. He challenges social stigmas. He ignores sin and loves the person. He refuses to judge or punish sinners. He does not exact payment for sin. In fact, it seems like he often forgave people before any sign of repentance. For Jesus, love trumped justice.
What about us? Do we demand repentance before we forgive? Do we get angry about sin and demand justice? And perhaps most of all do we use the Law to justify our actions? If we do any of those things, then love isn’t paramount for us. We are not putting love your neighbor above all the laws except loving God.
When Jesus says that not one word of the law will pass away, he knows that Love God is the greatest commandment, and Love Your Neighbor is second, and that applying these two laws in precedence over others is how he wants us to behave.
For us faithful, forgiven sinners, when choosing our own actions, not committing adultery is important. If nothing else, it’s breaking a promise, breaking faith. However, when we encounter someone who has committed adultery, or some other sin we find vile and disgusting, our call is to love our neighbor, regardless of the sin. Based on the woman caught in adultery, forgiving them and forgoing the punishment is likely the most loving thing we can do.
In conclusion, for Jesus, love trumped justice and punishment for sin. How often do we follow His example?
Photo by Matthew Henry