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Letters Twenty-Third
Sunday in Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
September 6, 2002Prior to this section, Paul has been instructing the Roman Christians about their obligations to one another and about how they are to relate to civil authority. He has told them that they should obey civil authority because it comes from God, and that they should fulfill the obligations that are enjoined on them, not only taxes of various kinds but also appropriate respect and honor. They should stay fully paid up in all that is required of them.
At the beginning of this Sunday’s reading he summarizes what he has just said and then gives them a general principle that applies to the observance of all law.
They shouldn’t owe anybody anything, Paul tells them. But, if there is to be something that is owed, that something is love. Loving constitutes the complete observance of all law. (There is an implication here that we can never be fully and finally "paid up" in loving. There is always something or someone more to love, so it’s all right to "owe" in this context.)
The fundamental law, he tells them, is the law of love. Basic human concerns like familial relationships, the sanctity of life, and the security of property (and everything else besides) will be taken care of if we love our neighbor. Laws and commandments of whatever kind are merely specifications in greater detail of the command to love. (Note that in this context, "neighbor" does not mean a fellow Christian or even a fellow countryman. The term embraces all human beings. One wonders if Paul was thinking here of Jesus’ parable of the "good Samaritan" [Luke 10.29-37] whose point is precisely that the claim for neighborly behavior is constituted by human need rather than by religious or political relationships.)
In the concluding verse of our reading, Paul says it once more in a slightly different way: love excludes harming the neighbor and excluding harm to the neighbor is the purpose of law. Consequently, loving our neighbor accomplishes the purpose for which laws exist, and therefore loving constitutes the fullness of all our legal obligations.
The obligation of love for our neighbor is an important element in Paul’s teaching because it is an important element in the teaching of Jesus (cf., for example, Mt. 22.34-40). If we are to grasp the full import of the teaching, we have to be clear about what love is. In the context of this universal moral precept, love means wanting and doing what is beneficial for the other person, willing and doing good for our neighbor (i.e., for everyone). Love is not a matter of the heart, but of the will. Whether or not we feel affection for the person we love is secondary. What’s important is what we want for the neighbor, not how we feel about the neighbor.
The reason why love constitutes the observance of all law is that all law is supposed to be aimed toward the common good, toward the well-being of those for whom the law is made. This is obviously true of basic law like the Ten Commandments, given to us by God in order to help us to live in accord with what God make us to be. But it is also true of all other just laws, even the most trite and ordinary ones. If you don’t stop at a red light, somebody is going to get hurt. If you don’t pay your taxes, certain needs of the country will not be attended to and the country’s citizenry will suffer. All law has good for its purpose, and loving means wanting and bringing about good for the other.
To look on law as a specification for loving doesn’t make observing the law easier. In fact, trying to respond to the purposes for which laws are provided (by God, Church, or civil society) can be much more demanding that merely observing the letter of what is asked of us. Making our whole life an exercise in wanting and doing good for ourselves and for those around us necessarily excludes formalism (just going through the motions), minimalism (doing as little as possible while still complying), and legalism (careful calculation of technical demands so that we don’t go beyond what the law intends and demands).
Loving also plays an important part in determining how we relate to the women and men around us. Wanting and doing good for the other is not something we owe just to those who are near and dear to us. It’s something we owe to everybody: to relatives and friends, to strangers and foreigners, to political colleagues and political opponents, to the Nobel Prize laureate and the criminal on death row. We are called to love them all, to want and to do good for them all not because of what they have done for us but because of what God wants us to do for them.
We are bound by all kinds of laws from many different sources. Some are of absolutely fundamental importance, while others don’t seem to amount to very much at all. Yet, if they are just laws, they call for our response. And the response owed by the Christian believer is the response of loving, of wanting and doing good for all those whom law is intended to benefit.
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Conversation Questions.
Why/how do I observe laws?
Whom do I love and why?
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