On the Orderliness of Love

 

A Brian Hicks Watercolour

 

Romans 13:8 -  Pay everything you owe. But you can never pay back all the love you owe each other. Those who love others have done everything the law requires. (NirV)

Matthew 5:17 - Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. (NIV)

It’s pretty much a cliché by now that the expression, Ordnung muss sein, (there must be order) typifies German culture. This implies, of course, that establishing and maintaining order in society is obsessively/compulsively held to be foundational to Germans in any and every situation, that it somehow explains a penchant for meticulous record keeping, for the establishment of rules and enforcing them without exception and for seeing the world as too fiercely binary, where every action is either right or wrong.

It has become a stereotype, of course, and like any stereotype, hides as much as it illuminates.

As Christians, we’ve known for hundreds of years now what Jesus and Paul and Peter and the rest had to say about law and grace, judgment and mercy and how the book of Leviticus seems to define the necessary “good order” among God’s people as the establishment of detailed rules along with prescribed punishments. And then Jesus informs his hearers that all previous rules and laws, all prophetic pronouncements all pointed to the same goal, namely, that people should come to love God and their neighbours. It’s not the abandonment of a cooperative order based on detailed rule books, but it is an order birthed in the determination to love the creator and his creation, and to practice the same loving relationships with people that you hope for for yourself.

As a teacher, the question of the right level of order for productive classroom functioning was always central to my planning and my behaviour as the leader in the room. The near-panic at the thought of class anarchy assailed me as an Anabaptist believer for whom the idea of enforcing conformity was anathema. Meanwhile I was in a large institution and knew full well how Levitical some teachers had become to maintain order, how others were losing control of their classes by being too liberal in comparison to general expectations of order prevailing in the school generally. I could go into a long discussion of this dilemma but won’t. Talk to a current teacher about the subject of school order today, though. Suffice it to say that if you didn’t love your students, and they didn’t come to love you, the police-state option is pretty much the go-to alternative.

But these principles function dynamically all over the place, not least in our national and international politic. In a society where love of neighbour and love of God and creation are universal, there wouldn’t need to be gun laws, abortion laws, theft and assault and slander and murder laws. Where the general public is committed to common goals and defends them with the common good in mind, there “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat.” (Isaiah 11:6)

Is it naïve to think this way? Will our future be an endless struggle over what laws should exist at what level of severity and with what consequences? Will we always see our freedom being stolen or guaranteed by authorities’ decrees or will loving communities allow us to rest in safety, will goodwill surround us?

Seems to me we need to live by two truths in the gospels as antidotes to our despair over a world seemingly going mad. The one truth is that a little light banishes darkness; the other, a little salt brightens the flavour of the whole. (Matthew 5:13; 14-16) Let’s at least work toward the orderliness of love in our homes, our congregation, our schools, our communities.

The rest is not up to us.