Sunday, November 3, 2024 | Trey Comstock
When making human laws, one often expends a ton of effort trying to prevent bad actors from manipulating the law as written for their own (often counter) purposes. Let’s consider a purely hypothetical scenario. Imagine a world, where the richest man on the planet has some sort of generic, white boy, boomer name, that starts with a “J.” We will call this purely theoretical man, Jack. Jack became rich owning a global collection of warehouses full of workers that robots cannot replace – yet. Hypothetical Jack drives his theoretical warehouse workers so hard that they don’t have an opportunity to use the restroom. These definitely nonexistent works have taken to urinating in bottles because Jack’s warehouse algorithm doesn’t accommodate human biological functions. Jack longs for robots and space missions, after all. The needs of the flesh get in the way of the bottom line. The cat litter, romance novels, knock off Chinese electronics, and Funko Pops must flow!
Now, let’s say that you see this as one of the most profound injustices of our time – that a centi-billionaire cannot afford living, breathing, children of God the dignity of a restroom break in the year of our Lord 2024. You want to write a law to mandate bathroom breaks for all warehouse workers, including Jack’s, and, magically, you end up in Congress with the ability to do so. You sit up, late into the night, with your aids and other Congress people to draft a law. “All employees in warehouses get 5 bathroom breaks per eight hour shift.” Jack responds, “Great! We will allow 3 minutes per bathroom break, and our facilities will have one bathroom per 100 workers!” You, your aids, and your Congress friends crunch the numbers and realize that you have accomplished nothing. You can mandate breaks all day long, but if the facilities don’t have enough toilets, the workers will still need the disused water bottles.
Your law making wonder friends make more coffee, order more pizza, and take on an even more disheveled appearance. After a sleepless night, you present your opus. “All employees in warehouses get 5, 10 minute, bathroom breaks per eight hour shift with a minimum of 1 toilet per 15 workers.” Jack appears before Congress full of excitement, “Fantastic! We have no employees in our warehouses. Every person there is an independent contractor doing gig work via our app platform. If we had employees, we would gladly extend them every right under the law!”
You and your Congressional Justice League might want order A LOT more pizza.
Humans rapidly turn law into a game of self-advantage and loopholes. A certain branch of the legal profession exists to do nothing more than find ways for bad actors to do the least good possible. However, having grown up adjacent to purity culture, I have heard some truly arcane arguments about loopholes as to what “counts” as sex and what doesn’t. When we reached these legalistic heights, my friend, Patrick, would inevitability pipe up and state that, perhaps, we missed the point. We play these same games as hypothetical Jack with God’s law finding the exact amount to care, love, and follow to meet the letter of the law – but no further. We keep the Sabbath holy but live wholly different lives the rest of the week. We seek to buy our forgiveness without bothering to change. We give a little to charity while despising those who suffer.
Jesus reduces down the complexity of the Law. Love God. Love neighbor. The whole Biblical legal tradition boils down to these two tenets. Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets serve as examples, from a specific time and place, as to how one can love God and love neighbor. With so little specificity at its core, this should be rife for loophole exploitation, but, in reality, it closes them all. Christ’s summation of the Law challenges us to love – to have real concern, affection, and empathy – not to act in a way that legally appears similar to loving. God doesn’t desire of forced simulacrum of love but the genuine article.
Inherently, we know how to do this for the people closest to us. We comfort our injured children, prepare a special surprise for our spouse, or buy our best friend an inconveniently large piece of vintage electronics because we truly want to spark happiness within them. Most people go out of their way for a sick family member or an aging parent, stay up late into the night for a truly asinine elementary school project, or play taxi service for a decade of children’s activities. We know genuine, non-legalistic, devotion.
The leap in faith comes from applying that same level of care to our relationship with God and our relationship with God’s world. To love God means carving out time and energy for that relationship – worship, study, and treating ourselves as temples for the Lord. To love neighbor means caring for all that we encounter with the same concern as we would have for our own families. Jesus roots these not in checklist but in an emotional connection. He calls us to feel and empathize. To try and loophole one’s way out indicates a lack of that feeling.
Someone should probably have that for their warehouse workers.