Today's Daily Office comes from Romans chapter 10 verses 1 through 4:
10:1 Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. 2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. 4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
The Law is good, Paul tells us. But the Law is only a tutor, a teacher of the pupil for a certain time before the pupil is ready to think and act for herself. The Law has its purpose and the purpose is good. But there is an end to the Law. The Law is not our God. We do not worship the Law. We are not enslaved to it. And we should not demand that others be enslaved to it either. The Law is not the LORD.
Getting this is the most difficult thing for religious people -- people who want very much to be good and know who all else is good and who else is bad. Obedience to the Law is the line which demarcating good from bad, us from them.
As part of a class on Dissenters this semester, I read the trial of Anne Hutchinson, the 17th century troublemaker who caused the great tempest in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony by allegedly being willing to teach a man about the Bible. Though she knew more Bible than any man I've ever known, it was the Law of that Bible that a woman was not to teach a man, and for that apparent trespass she was brought to trial. The transcript is at once a lesson on the Bible and repartee.
Asking, shrewdly, why because she was not fit to teach a man in her home, why it was fitting to teach the all-male court, Anne Hutchinson showed that she would not back down. A strong spirit she was. But she showed herself best not as a lawyer but as a Bible scholar and theologian when she reflected on Scripture. Paul said he suffered not a woman to teach him; but, she noted, Paul also said, "the letter killeth; yet the spirit giveth life". It is not only the Old Testament Law whose letter can kill, Hutchinson said. New Testament laws like Paul's about women can kill also. Not only the Jewish Commandments, but even the Christian Gospel can be made into Law when we take hold of its letter and miss its spirit, she said. That is when even the Gospel's letter can kill and its spirit fail to give life.
"We are not under Law," Paul said, "but under grace."
When we get this we will stop demanding impossible things of ourselves and others, and start receiving the truth that women and others like Anne Hutchinson -- once excluded -- have to speak.
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