Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
What is the difference between law and ethics? Does being lawful mean the same thing as being ethical? Can someone be lawful but unethical? Reversely, can one break the law for ethical reasons? These are important questions as reflect on today’s scripture.
Law and Ethics
Law and ethics are related but define different realities. Even though they overlap they serve different purposes and come from different sources. Laws act as a baseline or provide the minimum standard for keeping a society functional. Being lawful means complying with rules set by legitimate authority in a city, state, or nation. Besides civil law there are religious laws. Catholicism, for example, has Canon Law. These laws lay out the governing principles for Church discipline and administration.
The source of ethics, on the other hand, is religious, philosophical, or personal principles of good and evil, right and wrong. Being ethical means living life and making moral decision based on certain standards of right and wrong—such as honesty, fairness, respect, compassion, goodness, justice and mercy. Ethics acts as a higher principle, which guides one’s course of action beyond the law.
For example, in last Sunday’s gospel, the question some religious leaders asked Jesus in order to trap him was, “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?" (Mt 22:17). The question was about legality. But Jesus’ answer was from the perspective of ethics. He said, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." He was aware that his questioners were trying to trap him. Their question may have been about legality, but their motive was unethical. But by asking them to “Give to God what belongs to God,” Jesus’ was pointing to a deeper ethical issue. While the religious leaders emphasized adherence to Mosaic law, they lacked the humanity, the compassion and mercy on which the Mosaic law was based. Jesus’ answer led them to the underlying ethics beyond the law.
Jesus, Law, and Ethics
We have yet another example of legality and ethics in today’s gospel. The question the scholar of the law asked Jesus was a legal question: “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” However, Jesus’ response centered around ethics. Refusing to propose a single law as above the rest, he said, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He continued, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." Jesus took the lawyers question out of the realm of legality and focused on the ethics behind and beyond the law.
We see this conflict between being lawful and ethical throughout the gospels. In fact, the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders centered primarily on the question of law and ethics. For instance, the religious leaders often accused Jesus of breaking the Sabbath law. Jesus, on the other hand, focused on ethics when he said, the “Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.” Similarly, Jesus was accused of breaking purity laws by not washing his hands before eating and eating with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. In all these situations, Jesus went beyond the law. When it came to caring for people, healing them, and making God accessible to those on the peripheries, Jesus followed the very ethics of he proposed to the scholar of the law - “Love God with all your heart,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus was not a lawbreaker, but his life was guided by a higher ethical principle – the ethical principle of the love of God and the love of neighbor.
The Christian Ethic
Today’s first reading brings us the legality and ethics of a very contentious issue in our own time. Mosaic law states, “You shall not molest and oppress an alien.” That was the law. Similarly, the law prohibited doing wrong to widows and orphans, and extorting money from the poor.” Behind the law lay its ethic. God says, “If they cry out to me, I will hear them; for I am compassionate.” In other words, God’s wrath would be ignited not merely because the oppressors break the law by oppressing the aliens, widows, orphans, and the poor but because they lacked the ethics behind the law – the ethic of compassion.
Let me bring two contemporary issues that call to reflect on being lawful and ethical. First, as in ancient Israel, there are aliens, migrants, and refugees also in our midst. Many people, including some Catholics, refer to them as “illegals.” Calling the migrants “illegal,” putting them in detention centers, separating them from their families and deporting may be termed legal. But is it ethical? Does our faith and our humanity justify us treating the poor in our midst merely legally and ignore the ethical demands of our faith?
Similarly, the ethics of capital punishment is at the forefront these days. The botched execution of Christa Pike as she was administered the deadly cocktail and then rushed to the emergency was shocking. Within minutes the executioners were trying to save a woman they had just tried to execute her not once, but twice. As if that was not enough, there was the proposal to live stream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan by a firing squad. The question is this: the death penalty might be legal in the country, but is it ethical?
Equally troubling is the issue of AI. Sensible people are warning us that AI needs an ethic to guide its future growth. Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is one such effort. But who is listening?
Jesus established the principle of love of God and love of neighbor as the basis of Christian ethics. He was categorical about is when he said, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” May we always be guided by the ethics Jesus established for us.
- Fr. Satish Joseph