Jesus Broke the Law
“Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.” ~Methodist saying
When doing good means breaking the law
Wrong is done in the absence of love.
Good is done out of an abundance of love.
God is love and to know love is to know God. [1 John 4]
Perforce, doing good in the world… to love and work for the good of others is to be a reflection of the image of God.
We create systems of law to protect the good in societies. Laws are necessary for society to function. However, humanity and the societies we create are flawed, and all too often not entirely humane. Injustice is inherent and may be codified into mankind’s laws. And, laws that should render good in society may still be corrupted by our human interpretations. When the law is used to impose harm, it becomes our responsibility to change the law — it is incumbent upon us all to discern what is good from what is harmful.
Most of the time, humanity is confusing doing wrong with breaking the law — laws which we see repeatedly demonstrated in reality to not always be good and which may be actively harmful. Doing wrong is not merely breaking the law. But, obeying a harmful law is supporting wrong just because it’s the law — and that cannot be good.
An example
Think of a desperately poor father with children. Imagine this father, bound by economic inequity designed to keep him poor… to break him body and soul… to chain him to some corrupt platitude of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” even as it deprives him of bootstraps — letting his landlord jack up the rent beyond anything he could afford and even taking away his SNAP benefits because a homeless camp isn’t an address. Now, the children huddle with him in some ignored alleyway because the law razed the homeless camp where they’d sheltered before. The children didn’t eat today because the law has made it impossible for the church — the only place he felt safe to take his children — cannot operate the soup kitchen any longer. His children are starving and he has no money to buy food, so he steals to feed them.
The analogy of that father had him choose to break the law to do the good of not letting his children starve. He could have given his children up, handed them over to child services — would that have been doing good for his children? Wrong would have been to let them starve. Abandoning them to an uncaring institution would not likely have done good, as we’ve so often seen. Yet, he did break the law. Was the law doing good, though? Or, is the wrong in the system which leaves a father with no options but to abandon his children or to steal to feed his children — there is deeply harmful wrong in that dichotomy.
We all struggle to discern what is wrong and what is good in the world. Humanity makes laws to take away some of that struggle. But then, we abrogate our responsibility to assure our laws do no harm. Humanity is flawed and writes flawed laws; we do harm and often codify that harm into our laws. But, the law is the law… right?
The law is the law…right?
Is the law unchallengeably right? Chattel slavery was the law of the land for 300 hundred of years — it was even codified into our Constitution with the three-fifths compromise. Counting a Black slave as three fifths of a person was a foundational the law of the United States of America. Outlawing interracial marriage and criminalizing same-sex relationships were laws of the land for thousands of years. Segregation reinforced institutionalized racism in law. The law once considered women nothing more than chattel — long before the existence of chattel slavery; a woman’s physical person and all her worldly goods were the possession of her father and then her husband — she had no other standing in the law. The world has always been full of laws and ideals that do harm. Breaking those harmful laws to do good cannot be wrong. Breaking such laws usually begins the first steps on the path of changing them. That is the evolution of society.
In this historical moment, wrong is what rightwing conservatives support and do as they strip away our rights and undermine our Constitution with the law because they think they are achieving good by banning and criminalizing abortion healthcare to preserve a potentiality in fertilized ovum. These are the same rightwing conservatives raping the world of its wealth and resources, driving the climate crisis, while letting that analogous father’s family languish in such desperate poverty that he must steal to feed reality’s living, breathing children.
Humanity seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to do wrong and to do good in the world. The meanings have never been black and white. Just because it’s the law doesn’t mean it is doing good. Breaking the law is not always doing wrong. Breaking the law and doing wrong are not necessarily the same things.
Jesus repeatedly broke the law to do good.
Religious laws in Israel, were prosecutable laws in that time. Many of the sentences if convicted ended with execution, by stoning, for example. What laws did Jesus break, you may ask.
Jesus broke the laws of the Sabbath repeatedly. Some of His miracles were performed on the Sabbath and condemned for that reason by the pharisees and sadducees. He obstructed the law by preventing the stoning of the adulterous woman. He broke the ceremonial law of cleanliness by touching the leper when He healed him. He also led his disciples through the grain fields and letting them gather grain to eat on the Sabbath. He drove the money changers out of the temple grounds. He was tried and convicted by the Sanhedrin for blasphemy. He was brought to Pilate for breaking the Roman laws of misleading the people, opposing taxes to Caesar, and claiming He is a king (the Messiah) — the third of which He affirmed when Pilate asked Him.
Doing wrong is causing harm.
To do wrong is to do harm. The analogous father did not steal to do harm; he did it to alleviate harm. Jesus did not break the law to do wrong. Neither did Jesus support wrong to keep the law. Jesus broke the law to do good for others. Jesus broke the law because the law did harm.
No one is suggesting to go out and break laws just because we don’t like them. That way leads only to anarchy. But, it is incumbent upon us all to discern what is good from what is harmful. If the law is harmful, it must change. And, change, as history demonstrates time and time again, begins with challenging and even breaking laws corrupted to inflict harm… corruption brought about through flawed and wrong human interpretations of law.
As always, “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” And, may I always strive to live my life as a reflection of the image of my God who is love.
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