Guilty Or Not

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." (Matthew 22:34-40)

I read in the New Yorker Magazine (by Rivka Galchen July 6, 2022): (begin) In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” we hear about Rule Number 42.  “The King says Rule #42 indicates all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice counters that she isn’t a mile high. And, anyway, it isn’t a proper rule, because the King just made it up, then and there. “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” the King counters. But, when Alice points out that if the rule was so old, then it ought to have been rule No. 1, the King shuts the notebook he was reading the rules from (and writing them into) and shuffles away in the face of her argument. It’s a rare moment in “Alice in Wonderland” when reasoning is hardly consequential. (end)

Rules are made to be broken is a familiar saying.  But, certainly not the rules we call the first and second commandments that should not the 42nd.  They are Rule(s) #1. They are the oldest rules in the King’s book. 

Christ our King never shuts his notebook from which he reads his rules.  He never shuffles away although many of us do.  The rules are hard, so we are inclined to shuffle out and leave his “court.”  This is the court in which we must never hear Jesus’ verdict on our behavior: “Guilty.”

Deacon David Pierce