Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law (Mark 2:23-3:6)

Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law

You should follow the law and live a law abiding lifestyle – the vast majority of the time. I don’t intend to build toward some Thomas Jefferson-esque argument that we should only follow just laws and break unjust ones. That may indeed be necessary in the course of human events, but I want to talk about breaking perfectly just, reasonable, and important laws that exist to protect people’s life, liberty, and property. You cannot legally trespass onto other person’s property. US law takes such a strong stance against trespassing, that the Castle Doctrine allows you to shoot trespassers in some states under some circumstance. Now, let’s imagine that on the other side of a high fence, with a posted “no trespassing” sign, lays a wounded person, bleeding, and shouting for help. The ban on trespassing presents no inherent injustice, yet morally, you should render aid and, in doing so, break the law. Probably, the odds are that no cop or District Attorney would prosecute you for this crime because you did it to save a life. Also, the property owner, who you committed trespass against, would not press charges in this specific instance. Still, you broke the law.

Now, imagine that you can’t get an ambulance to carry the bleeding person to the hospital. Instead, you load them into your car. The wounds pose a mortal danger to the person. You don’t have much time. Speed limits exist to keep people safe. 2,000lbs objects, particularly ones going faster than the other 2,000lbs objects around them present real risks. Still, to save a life, you speed. You break the law.

A similar logic pervades Christ’s actions in Mark 2-3. Humans adore absolutes. Is it black, or is white? We approach law, human and divine, with this absolutist approach, but Jesus didn’t. God’s Law, as laid out in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and as interpreted through the Talmud over the millennia gives concreteness to our calls to love God and love neighbor. You can show your love for God by keeping the Sabbath, by approaching God in specific reverent ways, and by keeping yourself clean and healthy. You can show love to your neighbor by not killing them, by not robbing them, and by providing for them in times of need. Any teacher, parent, or policy maker will tell you that humans need specific instructions, and the Law gives us something that we need by turning the principles of loving God and loving neighbor into explicit and theoretically followable instructions. And, the vast majority of the time, this works great. You keep the Sabbath. You don’t kill. You provide for those in need. You uphold the Law.

At issue here is what to do, when they bash into each other, when a call to care and provide means going against one of the primary ways to show love to God. In contravening the Sabbath rules, Jesus breaks a big one. Keeping the Sabbath remains one of the major ways that Jewish people live out their love of God. They keep God’s day as a day for study, worship, family, and rest giving their every week a holy rhythm. I live in a historically Jewish neighborhood, and on my way back from the bakery on a Saturday morning (or very early afternoon), I see the conservative and Orthodox Jewish communities walking their way back home after services. Operating a machine, such as a car, constitutes work, so even in the Houston heat, where a moment outdoors would melt the will of anyone, they go on foot. In the Jewish Quarter of the Jerusalem, they program the elevators to automatically stop on every floor during the Sabbath because pushing a button to activate a machine constitutes work. This may sound absurdly detail orientated to the Protestant Christian ear, but, actually, this all demonstrates a form of worship so profound as to upend your way of living – every week – connecting you to God, to your faith community, and to the hundreds of generations of Sabbath following Jews that came before you.

Jesus breaks the Sabbath, to feed his traveling band and to heal a man. He reminds his rule obsessed interlocutors that law breaking for the sake of others has historic precedent.

And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ (Mark 2:25-26 NRSV)

In that story, David, fleeing Saul, seeks the assistance of a priest, and the priest gives him the only bread available, the holy bread dedicated to God. When presented with the question of feed a man on the run and unjustly persecuted or maintain absolute holiness, the priest chose to help. Jesus gives an additional punchy retort, “Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;” (Mark 2:27 NRSV) We have the sabbath, and other holiness rules, as a tool to help us connect with God. They exist for us. We exist to connect with God – not simply to follow rules. If the rules get in the way of our ability to connect with God, by helping another or promoting our basic survival, the rules, even a profoundly important one like Sabbath, go out the window.

This is how the 20th Century theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ended up involved in the Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer writes about the decision in his unfinished opus, Ethics. The Decalogue orders us to not kill. Not murdering your neighbor certainly helps demonstrate your love for them. However, what do you do when that person is Hitler? He ran a regime that, at his orders, created an industrial murder machine – the death camps, which weren’t really camps but factories to churn out death, as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. Hitler had such an absolute hold on power that your only hope of ending the industrial scale killing of innocents was to kill Hitler. To love others, to stop their senseless killing, Bonhoeffer sought to break the law against taking a life.

When faced with the conflict between arbitrarily following a law and showing love, Christ, the incarnation of the Word of God, chose love. It lands us in more grey space than we like. We have to actually discern, right and wrong, loving and unloving, what might matter most to God in any particular moment. We love a simple set of rules, but the complexities of the real world seldom afford us those options. Instead, a life of faith means navigating uncertainty with God as our North Star. We will get it wrong sometimes, and for that, we have God’s grace. God might be leading you to break the law, though, and it might just save somebody.