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Legality vs. Ambiguity

March 23, 2024

Ezekiel 37:21-28 | John 11:45-53 | Psalm 85:1-7

Today’s readings bring home to me that magnificent but sometimes scary difference between obeying a law and being guided by the ambiguity of God’s grace.

First, we find Ezekiel’s sure-thing Old Testament promise that God will reward those nomadic and once-enslaved Jews for their perfect obedience to His law:

I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land… They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes… Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

(Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I forgot to write this blog until the Friday after this week’s Wednesday Lenten adult-formation Zoom discussion about Javert in Les Miserables. That smart yet fearful man so lives by the law that he kills himself when he simply can’t understand his enemy Valjean’s forgiving him.)

Then John’s New Testament gospel tells us how God deftly used Caiaphas, the high priest who counsels his fellow Rome-fearing Jews worried about Jesus’s growing popularity:

“You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God… So from that day on they planned to put him to death.

Years ago, I so needed a mother when mine died suddenly in New York two weeks before our first child was born in July of 1964 while we were graduate students in Illinois. Then the following February, my Dad fell in love with and married a nice long-single lady who lovingly adopted my ‘retarded’ then-16-year-old brother Bill. Surely, life would now be “normal.” It wasn’t.

Flash forward: Years later I learned that—her own Dad having died when she was two, and she having later become her mother’s loving caretaker—Amy honestly considered me and my sister, as well as our young families, “grown and gone.” No wonder she sent me home the day before my Dad died, and later thanked God he hadn’t lived to see one of our teenagers place her baby for adoption. (Our Margot’s to be married next June; I and her adoptive Dad both have new knees so that I can dance at her wedding, and he can walk her down the aisle.)

Back to the old days: In September of 1965, John got a job teaching at P.C. in RI and—since we both wanted a big family, but I didn’t want to spend my whole life doing so—we were soon blessed with and co-nurtured five beautiful babies. Dad and Amy had their hands full but, with the guidance of John’s big Boston-area family, I as well as our children eventually grew up.

Thank God I did so. Years later—after my Dad died in 1986 and I convinced Amy and Bill to move to RI in 2000—I learned to be that dear if somewhat demented lady’s mother. Teaching part-time, I visited her daily in a nearby nursing home (how wisely she had told me “Just because I did it [cared for her mother at home] doesn’t make it right.”). Every week Bill and I visited from his group home for lunch until he died in 2007 having given so many smiles to “My Mah-wee.” Just before Amy died in 2012, she squeezed my hand; then we both fell asleep but only I woke up.

Sometimes—if only we can forgive ourselves (“My ways are not your ways”), practice somewhat faithfully Christ’s courageous patience, and let God’s grace transform our lives—our seemingly illegal mistakes turn out to be the best things we’ve ever done.

Marie Hennedy