Ordinary Days #9: Ordinary Laws.

Open my eyes, that I may behold,

   wondrous things out of Thy Torah. (Psalm 119:18)

One does not naturally behold the beauty of Torah. It requires help from the Lord. Psalm 119 praises God’s Law (torah) every which way and in all its forms: precepts, statutes, ordinances, etc. The Psalmist believes, with the help of the Lord, we can see the wonders of even these ordinary “precepts and statutes”. Maybe it is because Sarah and Anna are visiting the Supreme Court today that I’m prompted to ponder with the Psalmist “wondrous things out of Thy Law.”

After the giving of  the Ten Commandants given on the mountain, when Moses went up and the rescued people of God stood below at the foot of the mountain and heard God’s Ten Words—words to be written in stone and housed in the Ark of the Covenant; there follows all sorts of ordinary laws. The Ten written on stone tablets will always need some “But ifs.” We might call these ordinary, everyday, getting along laws.

For example, one of the ten, “Thou shalt not murder” (Ex 20:13); is followed in the next chapter with: “But if one murders with intent—if it is premeditated murder, then the murderer is to be killed; but if, there was no intent to kill, something of an accident, then the guilty party is not to be executed, but rather he is free to flee to a place of refuge”—something like Cain. Or again, what if one gets in a fight with another, and the other is wounded but not killed, what then? Well, “then the one who caused the injury must pay for the loss of time and provide for his complete recovery” (Ex 21:18-19). I’m not sure God got tangled up in all these ordinary laws. They are not placed in the Ark of the Covenant like the stone tablets. Luther suggests Moses and God worked them out along the way. These are laws for people who mess-up, like us. They are meant to keep a fallen community together—to keep us civilized.

These ordinary laws extend to those different from us, even our enemies: “When you come upon your enemy's ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free” (Ex 23:4-5). Maybe something like this was on Jesus’ mind when he tells us to “love our enemies.”