Ye Are Not Under The Law

There’s something rather remarkable in today’s Epistle from St. Paul to the Galatians.  He tells them that they are not under the law, they can do whatever they want to do.  There is of course one condition to this extraordinary liberty he claims they have.  That one condition is that they must be first “led by the Spirit.”  In other words, once they have accepted that their lives will be led only by what is accordance with that Spirit—the Holy Spirit, God—then and only then are they at liberty to do what they want and be completely free from all the restraints of the law.  All those Ten Commandments, the laws of the land, the rules of life and common sense—all these laws would become totally irrelevant.  And what goes for the Galatians goes for us too.  Do you want to be free to do whatever you want?  Sure you do, who doesn’t!  And you can.  But first you must adhere to the Will of God and to the fruits of the Holy Ghost—“love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance…”  Against these, says St. Paul “there is no law.”  Once we’re totally committed to doing God’s will, we’ll set aside our own will, submitting it to God’s.  In other words, we won’t even want to do anything that would offend him.  All those sinful desires, temptation to follow our lower appetites, they would all disappear in the twinkling of an eye and we would be all be saints!

It’s a simple concept to which we are called.  But how many of us are able to abide by this single condition of following God’s will in all things?  The spirit, our spirit, is willing, but the flesh is weak.  And that, my friends, is why we must have laws, laws that forbid us to follow the desires of that flesh.  St. Paul lists some of them: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like” (meaning there are a few more he isn’t mentioning!).  It’s a good idea to go through these when you make your examination of conscience—we’re all guilty at some time or other of committing a good number of these sins.  And we should not forget to thank God for providing us with the laws that stop us from committing them.

Thank God?  Why should we thank God?  Because the existence of a law presupposes the existence of a punishment for breaking it.  If we have a traffic law that makes us stop at a red light, we know that if we blithely ignore it and don’t stop we risk hearing the sirens of our ever-vigilant police force who are ready to protect the good people we’re endangering by our bad driving.  We’ll get a ticket, maybe lose our license, or even go to jail.  We will, in short, be punished for breaking the law.  God’s laws also have a punishment, one too terrible to even contemplate, and sometimes it’s only the thought of the eternal fires of hell that hold us back from committing a sin.  For some people, most people perhaps, whose love for God is tepid and not fervent enough to defeat temptation out of love for him, for these folks the loss of heaven and the pains of hell might still keep them out of trouble.  So yes, thank God for that!

A final point I need to make…  Beware the sin of pride.  Be very careful of this most grievous of faults because it can lead us into a mistaken notion that we know better than the lawgiver.  With pride, we might start to imagine that a particular law does not apply to us.  We might think that by giving a superficial glance at the law we can find loopholes by which to dispense ourselves from following it.  Beware this temptation—we end up defying the laws of God and his Church.

Through the sin of pride the Devil will succeed in leading us us to a place where we scorn the judgment of everyone but ourselves, where we no longer fear the fires of hell because we are so sure we don’t deserve them, that everything we are doing is “okay.”  Pride can so easily thwart our horror of a sin by turning it into something virtuous.  It happens more often than I’m sure we imagine, but be aware of it and recognize it when it happens.  Take note also that this danger has become so prevalent these days that the Devil now rejoices openly and no longer tries to hide it.  “Pride” is now deliberately embraced as a virtue in itself, and the open approval of Pride Parades in our cities bears witness to the extent of the degradation of our society.

Let’s not look for loopholes in the Law.  Let’s cherish the Law.  The Law is there to protect us.  First, it protects us from others who would break it.  We are safer and more secure because of laws that would punish someone for attacking us or robbing us.  The Rule of Law stops out society from falling into anarchy.  And even more importantly, it protects us as individuals.  The Law keeps us on the straight and narrow, by reminding us of the unpleasant consequences of breaking it.

This then is why we should be thankful to God for all the moral laws he imposes through both the Church and the State.  But let’s also keep in mind though that there’s a higher virtue than simple obedience to the Law, that great ideal of which St. Paul reminds us, that, if only everyone would be led by the Spirit, if only we would all love God with our whole heart and mind and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves, then we wouldn’t need the Law and we could indeed do whatever we want.