Article
- Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Midweek Service
There is a tendency for some Christians to contrast the Law of the Old Testament with the Love of the New, ranking the latter over the former but it might be better to think of the Law as our safety net against disaster when love fails.
Think, for example, about our society. How would it be if our state was what some American political theorists advocate, the "night watchman" state which only collects taxes for national defence and the maintenance of domestic order? Do we really think that our individual and collective love would be strong enough to sustain the poor and the weak? We will differ about how much tax should be collected and how much monetary and service benefit should be accorded to the poor and weak, but I imagine few of us would support the "night watchman" state, we are too aware of our obligations and too wise to think that we would meet them, left to ourselves.
We have come to think of our political history as the steady rise of egalitarianism, at least in principle, whereby each generation has enjoyed better living conditions, up until the present time at least, but it might be a surprise to recognise that it was only at the end of the 19th Century that our system came anywhere near to matching the socio-economic structure of the Chosen People set out in the Book of Deuteronomy. Gleaning, which features in our story, was the Jewish equivalent of income tax, it was obligatory and was meant to be generous, not niggardly. Boaz tells his servants to be over-generous in leaving grain behind for Ruth to glean; and what is more, this gleaner whom we see with the women of Boaz is a foreigner, an immigrant, and an asylum seeker yet she is treated as a member of the community entitled to benefit under the law. The Old Testament is occasionally equivocal about Gentiles but the Law itself is not; exiles must be treated well because the Chosen People were once exiled in Egypt. No doubt farmers and merchants were grudging when it came to fulfilling their socio-economic obligations, but the Law was always there to chide them; whereas we, right now, are steadily, officially, weakening our Laws to protect the poor, the weak, the asylum seeker and the immigrant. There may be good reasons for this, or at least coherent arguments, but that should not blind us to the realities of what we are doing. We may need to take all kinds of decisions which are inimical to the least advantaged but at least we should not take them by accident or carelessly. If we are to change the way society functions, then the least we can do is to understand what we are doing and carry the responsibility for it ourselves.
Boaz might have been a special case, a hero, a saint, a man besotted with the beautiful Ruth whom he wanted to marry; but he was also an icon of the Law he was charged by YHWH to obey. It may well appear that it was easy for a rich man like him to do his duty but so often it is the rich who exempt themselves from the law and leave the heavy lifting to those like us who must comply.
The Law, as Boaz saw it, was far more comprehensive than merely dealing with socio-economic justice. This is the only instance I know where a character enforces self-restraint, if that is not a contradiction, on his workers so that they do not sexually molest Ruth. Again, it might be because Boaz had his eye on her, but the combination of an economic legal requirement and an ethic of self-restraint in sexual matters is deeply compelling. We have recently had much debate about whether the questionable conduct of public figures is within the rules. My response is that if people need rules of conduct for their public office they should not be in office. Groucho Marx said that he would not join a club that would let him in, likewise I would not join an organisation where obeying rules was the moral standard, where they were seen as the maximum restraint on personal and business conduct. Rules, as I said, are a safety net against a breakdown in love but that still means that love is the yardstick by which we should judge conduct. There are many ways of understanding love, including, for example, the statement in the Marriage Service that it should be mutual. I think not. The example of Jesus shows that love is unconditional, non-contractual and must be exercised for itself. To this extent you can't make a rule about love because to love governed by rules isn't love, because doing something because the rules say so means that what you are doing might be helpful or beneficial to others, but it isn't love.
It is easy to romanticise the story of Ruth because, as we will see, it all ends happily ever after for the exile and the benefactor but the whole story operates within a framework of encoded moral decision which regulates communal behaviour but relies on more than this; people examine their moral choices within the context of conscience supported by Law. They are not legalistic automatons but people subject to the often opposing forces of communal norms and personal desires; and what makes this more admirable is that, unlike us, their moral view is not complicated by the question of whether moral behaviour is linked to everlasting happiness. These people are doing it for now because there is only now.
What we may learn from this story is that we as Easter People live on this earth with an inestimable advantage over the characters in Ruth but that their conduct might put us to shame, for inasmuch as we have such an advantage our fall from grace is the harder and the heavier. We should expect more of ourselves, individually and collectively, and recognise that the Old Testament is much more than a lengthy overture to the arrival of Jesus. It is the earth in which he flourished and if we want to know how to flourish, we, too, need to be planted in it. There are, of course, reasons why some of what it says is highly specific to its time and unacceptable to us - the treatment of women and slavery being good examples - but, nonetheless, it is an integral part of our flourishing, not least because it shows us that what we think and feel and do is not the natural human paradigm; what we think of as normative is simply a matter of where we are now.