[From Part I Chapter III.A,
"Love is
the Fulfilling of the Law"]
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love
is the fulfilling of the law.
~Romans 13:10, ESV
“Christian love… is sheer action…. It never becomes engrossed in anything beforehand and never gives a promise in place of action. It never draws satisfaction from imagining that it has finished. It never loiters delighting in itself; it never sits idly marveling at itself. It is not that secret, private, mysterious feeling behind the lattice of the inexplicable, which the poet wants to lure to the window, not a soul-mood which fondly knows no laws, wants to know none, or wants to have its own law and harkens only to singing—it is pure action and its every deed is holy, for it is the fulfilling of the law.”[1]
We do not tend to think
of love and law together. Evangelical and Secular society each have their own
reason for this—in Evangelical culture, the law represents cold, rigid expectations,
dead religiosity which runs counter to Gospel. In Secular ethics, placing
requirements or expectations on another person’s behavior or character is perhaps
the worst of the cardinal sins. And yet Paul tells us that love is the
fulfillment of the law. After all, don’t the Law of Moses and the Grace of
Jesus Christ issue from the same God? How do we reconcile the requirements of
the law with Christian Love? How can we say that love fulfills the law?
For Kierkegaard the answer
is in the person of Jesus Christ. He continues,
“[Christ] was love, and his love was the fulfilling of the law. ‘No one could convict him of any sin,’ not even the law, which knows everything in the conscience. [H]was one with the Father, one with every single demand of the law, so that fulfilling it was a need, his only life-necessity.—Love in him was pure action.”[2]
Christ is the only human
being to have lived his life according to the law. See, our view of the law is
skewed by the fact that we are all breakers of the law. We can’t understand
what the law is for. But in Christ we can see the law lived out in history. For
Kierkegaard, this observation is key:
“Christ was the fulfilling of the law. From him we should learn how to understand this thought, for he was the explanation. Only when the explanation is what it explains, when the one who explains is that which is explained, when the explanation is the transfiguration, only then is there the right relationship.”[3]
God gave us the law to
teach us to live in love. And yet the law is not sufficient for this purpose,
because no number of laws can compel a person to love others. I can follow every
law to the letter and still have no love in my life. No matter how many laws
God gives us, we can never understand love simply by adding up the laws.
Kierkegaard writes,
“You will see it is useless labor, because the concept of the law is inexhaustible, endless, and unlimited in its provisions; every provision brings forth a still more exact explication of itself, and then again by reference and relation to the new provision a still more exacting provision, and so on ad infinitum. The relation of love to the law is like the relation of understanding to faith. The understanding reckons and reckons, calculates and calculates, but it never attains the certainty which faith has. So it is with the law: it defines and defines, but never reaches the sum, which is love.”
Christ came because the
law was insufficient. By looking at the life Christ lived we can see what love
is really supposed to look at—what the law was meant to teach us the entire
time. This is how love fulfills the law: because the purpose of the law was to
show us what loving actions look like. To actually show love for its own sake,
and not for the sake of the law, is a higher calling. When we see Christ we
understand that it is not enough to follow the requirements of the law; rather,
we must live out the demands of love.
What is the point of all
this reflection? Simply this: that Christian love is not easier than the law.
Christ did not lower the requirement placed on us. In fact, he increased them. This
is why Christ said that anger is as bad as murder, and lust as bad as adultery—he
was showing us that love has a higher standard even than the law. It is a
higher calling, not a lower calling. The law was always trying to point up,
toward this higher standard. When Christ lived his life according to that
higher standard, he left us each without excuse. To live by love is not to do
less than the law, but to do more.
Dear God,
I confess that I like
the law. I like to have a specific set of requirements that I can check off, so
that when I’m done I know where I stand. I also like having grace, when that
means that I don’t have to worry about checking anything off the list. And yet
neither of these is what you offer. You offer me grace that forgives all of my
transgressions, but you offer that grace so that I may pick myself up and live
from now on according to your love. I confess that I often do not want to live
that way. Please, convict me of that feeling. Push me on, give me a desire for
your sanctification. Make me discontent with anything less than a life of love,
and give me your power to strive for that high standard.
In the name of your Son,
the one who lived such a life of love and died so that I may have it to,
Amen.
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