Day 73

"All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Matthew 22:40

When Rob read all those weird laws on Sunday, it got me to thinking about the comparative simplicity of the Ten Commandments. In fact, in the beginning, it was even simpler. God gave us just two laws:

1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
2) Love your neighbor as yourself.

That's it. What a gift to memorizers! But we couldn't handle two laws. That was too simple. Too vague. We like our laws to be more precise. Besides, we kept breaking those. So God gave us some help. He broke it down into the ten very basic rules that we're spending 91 days studying. Surely we could deal with those. We might even still be able to memorize them. (We might forget "covet" from time to time, but that's not as important as the rest anyway.)

But we weren't content with that either. We had to improve on what God gave us. Thus we got the dozens of laws that the Pharisees heaped on the Jews of their day. Little nits about what to tithe, how far to walk on the Sabbath, what to wash and when, ad nauseum.

Thank God we're more sophisticated than that today! Oops. I'd estimate that those rules now number in the thousands, unwritten prohibitions ranging from dancing and card-playing to R-rated movies and voting for Democrats. You can probably think of a few more.

This is our modern Talmud. By these rules we can be assured of living holy lives, pleasing God, and not being judged by the fellow in the next pew. How did we get here? From two simple laws, we've developed a convoluted web of restrictions and requirements that only serve to frustrate followers and scare off seekers.

It all goes to prove the words of G. K. Chesterton. "When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." And you get lots of 'em. Such as not giving Cubans to your Shih Tzu in Zion, CA.

Is it too late to go back to basics? Can we recapture the Eden of the two Big Laws? If so, we can be assured that the Ten Commandments (and even a lot of the little laws) will come naturally.

But your Bassett hound will be on his own for his smokes. . .

Prayer: Dear God who is Love, it wasn't supposed to be like this. You created us to be free. Free to love you and to love one another. But the Grand Inquisitor in all of us is afraid of freedom. We asked for a king and we got one. As a result, we are enslaved once more. In Jesus, you gave us a new Exodus. Freedom from sin. Freedom from the law. Freedom to love you and one another. Let us accept this gift and cherish it by not "improving" it. Amen.