By Jeremy Miller, O.P.

I am going to begin with a blanket statement, whose purpose is not to grab your attention but at the same time I suspect it will. The measure of a mature person is to know when to break laws. I trust the lawyers and law enforcement officials who read this will bear with me as I flesh out this skeletal statement.

People cannot live without laws or we would live in an oppressive society of chaos. But laws can only capture the general run of things. They can never give wise direction or just expression to every imaginable individual and unique situation, and if we were to have a laws to cover everything, which in fact is impossible of course, it would be an intolerable burden under which to live. It has always struck me that the “wise judge” is not the one who simply knows all the laws, but the one who senses the demands of justice in some unique set of circumstances, even when confronted with a “lawbreaker.” If I were to develop the idea of jurisprudence, it would be in this direction.

A parent, for example, has to exercise “jurisprudence.” Households live by certain laws as it were, by certain agreed upon ways of acting and certain legitimate expectations of each other in the house. But is each and every infraction to be punished, or even deserving of punishment? Is this our healthy experience? Do we not always bump up against “extenuating circumstances?” Do not certain expectations become obsolete before they are even decided upon in the house to be obsolete? Looking at this from the other side, from the so-called lawbreaker’s perspective, are there not times when the just and wise purpose of some law would in fact be overturned by fulfilling the law? A simple example is the law of the red traffic light. Its purpose is to preserve from injury or death. Now if you were rushing someone to a hospital to preserve a life, would you be a breaker of the law to proceed cautiously through a red light? A more complicated instance follows but with no suggestion of civil disobedience. Many persons, myself included, feel that the current legal restrictions on tax support of private elementary education, while attempting to maintain free exercise of religion and the integrity of the state, in fact discourage free exercise and do not clearly insure state integrity.

I promised that these meditations would not be out of thin air but would have a gentle anchoring in the Sunday readings. How so for this Sunday? We will hear the Ten Commandments, the laws toward God and neighbor from the Covenant Moses proclaimed. In the Gospel we will hear of Jesus’ attack on the Temple which in the Fourth Gospel becomes the sign that Jesus through the mystery of his death on the Cross will replace worship in the Temple. Worship there will be torn down.

So we come face to face with two issues of law. We have the law of God announced through Moses, laws and demands which no Jew or Christian would wish to infract. We have with Jesus probably the strongest incident in the Gospels by which he became known a “law breaker” and with which he was later charged, leading to his execution as a breaker of the law. First, place yourselves in the mind of the Jewish religious leaders. All devout Jews must honor God (the First Commandment). It was further decreed by God that He was to be worshipped in the Temple with appropriate sacrifices. The upstart from Gailee broke so many religious laws. He ate with sinners, he worked on the Sabbath, and he challenged the integrity and lasting meaning of the Temple. They began to plot against this lawbreaker.

Now place yourself in the mind of Jesus. God was to be worshipped with the whole heart and soul (the First Commandment). But the Temple, whose purpose formerly enabled this, no longer did. It stood as an obstacle. “I desire mercy, not sacrifices.” “Circumcise your hearts, not your foreskins.” Jesus, to fulfill the law, broke through its encrusted expressions. The price the “malefactor” paid was the Cross, but in Jesus’ mind the demands of being faithful to the Covenant led to the Cross. We come once again in these meditations to the intimate connection of Covenant with Cross.

Now place yourself back in your own mind, into your own unique situation. You live with spouse, with children, with parents, with single friends. In your various “covenants” you are bonded together by laws, laws in that more humane sense of expectations and responsibilities. Their purpose is to make vital and enriching the “covenants” between you. With what flexibility do you express your own responsibilities and look to your expectations from others? With what maturity will you “break a law” out of love or receive in tender kindness of a broken expectation from another? In neither case can a real loving covenant between people grow without the pain of broken expectations or flexed responsibilities.