A Reflection for Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
“I ask you,
not as though I were writing a new commandment
but the one we have had from the beginning:
let us love one another.
For this is love, that we walk according to his commandments;
this is the commandment, as you heard from the beginning,
in which you should walk.” (2 Jn 5-9)
Find today’s readings here.
Do you have a rebel heart? If someone asks you to jump, do you ask “how high?” Or do you start looking for an escape hatch? I have been known to skirt a rule or a directive or two in my life. The fundamental reason is that I am woefully prideful.
I will look at a particular “rule” or “law” and either a) give my assent because I have independently reasoned its validity, or b) reject it because I think it errs in this way or another. And if the consequences are not so great for breaking said rule (and my threshold for this is higher than most, both because of my risk tolerance and position of privilege as a white man in America), then I don’t have a problem ignoring the rule.
Take underage drinking in college: I remember that a friend tried to reason with me that I should, as a good Catholic, have respect for a law that said in the state of Illinois, persons should not drink alcohol until they are 21 years old. If I did not have a good and just reason to protest such a law, the moral action is to comply. I never found this line of reasoning convincing. People in other parts of the world could partake at 19 or 20, the age I was. Moreover, people of my age in this part of the world were able to partake just a couple of decades prior. Also, my threshold for “a good and just reason” was much lower than most. If a friend wanted to talk about the big questions of life over a glass of cheap whiskey or a Pabst Blue Ribbon, surely it would be bad and unjust to deny it.
Socrates, we read in Plato’s dialogue “Crito,” is condemned to die for corrupting the youth of Athens. He is offered an escape by his friend. Socrates explains that even if he thinks he is innocent, he has been condemned under the law, a law that he was happy to live under and assent to before it turned on him. It would be inconsistent to not accept its conclusions now. Thus, he drinks the hemlock and dies. Some find this position admirable. I find it insane.
All of that to say: Today’s readings prompted an intense dialogue (defense, argument?) between me and God as soon as I read them. I have never found much purchase in “keeping my commandments” as a blueprint for living out Christianity. In my first, imperfect reading all I hear is: “Following the rules is what makes God love you. That is also how you love other people.”
For many of us, the “following the rules” that we are taught is a list of negative instructions: Don’t do X. Don’t do Y. If all a soccer coach told you to do was “don’t use your hands,” you would never learn how to kick the ball into the goal. Restrictive rules are important for keeping order, but they don’t inspire beauty or excellence.
“How do I love someone?” is sometimes an easy question to answer, but most of the time it is quite difficult to parse. There’s a temptation to look at this reading and reduce it: What is love? Easy—just follow directions.
No Catholic ethic would advocate for blindly following the rules in every situation. In the classic example of a Nazi asking you if there are any Jews hiding in your attic, you are obliged to lie and tell them there are none even if they are just upstairs. The law of love obliges us to even break one of the Ten Commandments.
This does bring us back to our circular problem proposed by today’s reading: The commandment is to love one another, and to love one another is to follow the commandments. What do we do if there is a conflict between love and the commandments?
Rules are important—essential for a moral life and a Christian one. But in the same way that a great artist must learn proficiency in the rules and techniques of a genre before she breaks them in order to create a masterpiece, sometimes you have to break a commandment to show a broader view of what love really is.
Now, most decisions do not involve us creating a masterpiece. I ought to follow more rules, all told. A certain kind of ethicist might say that I should just follow the rules, even the petty, inconsequential ones I disagree with, because it will cultivate a habit of virtue and make it easier to follow the rules in big, difficult situations when my deepest desire is in conflict with a superficial one. If you stay under the speed limit, it will someday make it easier to make a difficult choice of great consequence. I would probably say that my rebel heart breeds a habit of suspicion that will come in handy when the law of love demands that I break a law in conflict with it.
“‘Going beyond the rules’ is a kind of revolutionary change,” Herbert McCabe, O.P., writes in his book “Law, Love and Language.” “It is not justified if it merely provides a convenient exception but only if it provides a new perspective within which all decisions are revised.”
This new perspective should ultimately teach us more about what it means to love. This is hard work. But it is work worth doing: if we better understand love, we shall better understand the God who gives us the commandments not out of control, but out of love, by love, to love.
