THE LAW OF LIBERTY
(Friday, October 18)
“…For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ said also, ‘Do not kill.’ If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment (κατακαυχᾶται ἔλεος κρίσεως).” (James 2: 10-13)
The word “ἔλεος,” translated into English as “mercy,” means a lot more than just “a withholding of punishment.” It is the overflowing of God’s goodness upon us and the whole world; it’s His way of being and doing in our world, and of sharing Himself with us. Mercy is an un-written “law” of the way God is, in the freedom of His Spirit, which is beyond words, and “above” the written Law of God, in the sense that mercy is its ultimate purpose.
Yes, throughout Salvation History God provides for us the boundaries or the “wineskins” of law(s), because boundaries are the framework within which each of our characters is ordered and protected, so we can mature and develop the unique flavor of our own vocation, like wine in a wineskin, and so we can become nourishing to others and impart God’s goodness, gladness and “mercy” on others. But our “wineskin” is specific to each of us, in the era of the Spirit, the era of the Church, governed not by the letter but by the Spirit. He both contains us, in the ways and at the times we need to be contained (in our wineskin), and extends us to nourish those others that we need to nourish, in His time. This does not mean that we become doormats or irresponsible as parents or in other vocations of authority; it means we are guided to “so speak and so act,” as the Apostle James says, not as those who are judged by merely-human opinions, but “as those to be judged under the law of liberty” of our merciful God.
Today let me be a vessel of God’s mercy in this world, passing it on to others, as my own way of being and doing with others. Lord, have it Your way today, in the small annoyances that might pop up in my day. Lord, have mercy!