Grace for the Weak

Law is about control, and the mind set on law is a mind set on control—control of self and control of others, in some combination.  It’s possible to be a faithful keeper of the law and not be a legalist, if your focus is not on the law but through the law; thus we have the psalmist and others in the Old Testament who speak of the law of Moses with great love and joy, because their minds were set not on the law, but on God.  For them, the law was not an end in itself, but a way to see and know God.  They were using the law as God desired it to be used.  But when we collapse law into law—or when we collapse anything else into law—so that our focus is on the law itself and keeping the law rather than on the reality behind the law, then we betray what we claim to serve.

This is easy to see in the “weak” party in Rome, who were insisting on keeping the purity laws and the Jewish religious calendar; they were clearly making the kingdom of God about eating and drinking.  Less obvious is the fact that the “strong” were doing the exact same thing.  We miss that because we think of religious law as telling us not to do worldly stuff (and commanding us to do churchy stuff), but you can be just as legalistic, arrogant, and self-righteous about notkeeping that sort of law as about keeping it.  All you’ve done then is replace “thou shalt not eat meat and drink wine” with “thou shalt eat meat and drink wine.”  Either way, you’re making it all about your dinner, rather than about the Lord, and that’s not what God is on about.

Unfortunately, legalism is hostile to listening and learning, because it breeds the conviction that I’m right and I already know what I need to know; learning, after all, must begin at least with the admission, “I don’t know,” and usually with the willingness to say, “I’m wrong.”  It’s also hostile to compromise, because it turns winning the argument into a moral imperative.  As such, neither side in this dispute is willing to back down.

Now, as we saw last week, Paul agrees with the theology of the Gentiles here.  You’re absolutely right, he says:  the old categories of ritual purity, of things you can’t touch and foods you can’t eat because they’re unclean, are meaningless in Jesus.  None of that matters anymore.  Given that, you might think he would support the “strong” group—but he doesn’t.  Instead, he tells them they are the ones who need to change.  No, they don’t have to start keeping the law, but they do have to respect those who are weaker in their faith, and be considerate of their scruples.  The strong have been flouting their freedom, breaking the Mosaic law right in front of their Jewish brothers and sisters, and pushing them to do the same; Paul commands them to knock it off.

Why?  Because they were the ones with the stronger sense of Christian freedom.  It was their responsibility to compromise because they were the ones who were free to do so.  For the weak to compromise their behavior for the sake of the strong, they would have to compromise their beliefs, to break their faith, by breaking what they believed to be a moral obligation.  For the strong to compromise their behavior for the sake of the weak, all they would have to do is voluntarily restrict themselves—to use their Christian freedom to not act as they would prefer in certain circumstances out of respect for the beliefs of others in the church.  They didn’t have to compromise their beliefs, betray their morals, or give up their Christian freedom; all they had to do was honor others above themselves and put the good of their neighbor ahead of their own desires, just as Paul had already told them to do.  Doing whatever we want is never a moral obligation.

It’s easy to imagine how the “strong” party in the church in Rome would have howled at this, but Paul has three arguments for them.  One, they are causing others pain by their insistence on getting their own way; that’s not loving, and so it isn’t an appropriate exercise of their freedom in Christ.  If the “weak” party were demanding they do something which was actually sinful, it would be different, but that isn’t the case.  Two, Paul says, their behavior is counterproductive, because pushing the Jews in the church to break the law won’t help them understand that they are truly free in Christ.  In the end, all it will do is harden their conviction that not keeping the law is bad.

And three, the strong need to understand that in pushing their weaker brothers and sisters to break the law, they are in fact driving them to sin.  True, the kosher laws are no longer binding on Christians, and so it isn’t a sin to eat non-kosher meat—but if you believe it’s a sin and you eat it anyway, then for you it’s a sin.  That might seem strange, but think it through.  If you believe an act is sinful and you decide to do it anyway, what do you have to do?  You have to decide to disobey God.  That decision is a sin, regardless of anything else.  If you’re absolutely convinced that God forbids us to step on cracks in the pavement, that doesn’t mean stepping on a crack is a sin—but if you believe you’re defying God, your intent is to sin, and so you are guilty of that intent.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we must be bound by the scruples of others—the mere fact that someone believes something we’re doing is wrong doesn’t mean we have to agree with them.  But we must respect their scruples.  For one, we need to listen to them humbly and respectfully, since they might be right; God might be using them to alert us to sin in our lives that we hadn’t been aware of.  And even if they aren’t, we need to respect their concerns and be careful not to lead them into anything that would be sinful for them, even if it’s not sinful at all for us.

Now, as we say this, we need to remember that there’s another sort of weakness in faith, one common to all of us in one way or another, which we can’t just blithely expect people to grow out of; it’s not exactly what Paul’s talking about, but his argument applies nevertheless.  Let me turn things over for a minute to Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show, who puts it better than I could:  [NB:  start at 9:21; I can’t figure out how to make the embedded clip begin at that point]

Drinking alcohol isn’t a sin for everyone, but for some people it is.  Why?  Because you have to know your own weakness, and be wary of it.  We all have temptations that are particular weaknesses for us; some are just more societally acceptable than alcoholism, and more subtle.  Whatever they may be, we have to respect the danger they pose, and set guards in our souls around them, because even going near them is playing with fire.  To take another example, if sexual temptations are a particular weakness for you, there may be times when even turning on a computer is sinful, because that will be the trigger for temptation; that’s your point of no return.

We all have temptations for which even creating the possibility of being tempted is going too far; they’re like a black hole in our heart—once we cross the event horizon, we’re going to be sucked in.  We have to draw lines around them in our souls, because whatever anyone else might be able to do, we can’t even go toward them safely.  We can’t insist that everyone else has to draw the same lines, though we can certainly tell others why we’ve drawn the lines we have for ourselves; and we have every right to insist that our fellow Christians respect those lines when they’re around us.  By that same token, we have the responsibility to respect the lines others have drawn for themselves, so that we don’t put a stumbling block or a cause of offense—in the Greek, a skandalon—in their way.  Therefore, let us not judge another for their weakness, but let us instead judge our own behavior, so that we do nothing to make our brother or sister fall.