Lawyers of Love

Appreciating the role of the scribes in Scripture

08/01/2019

Matthew 13:47-53 Jesus said to the disciples: "The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away. Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth." "Do you understand all these things?" They answered, "Yes." And he replied, "Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old." When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.

One year after I was ordained as a priest, the bishop asked me to do something I never dreamed of doing. He sent me to Washington, D.C., to Catholic University of America, to study canon law. That was the last thing I wanted to learn. I would have much rather preferred to study scripture or spirituality. Just like doctors are trained to practice medicine after medical school, but some go on to specialize in surgery or infectious diseases, so all priests practice pastoral care after ordination but some specialize in canon law. Lucky me!

It took me two years to complete my degree and I have been a canon lawyer for 19 years. Over these years, though, I have come to respect and even revere the role of canon lawyers in the Church. They provide a critical service in the overall pastoral care of the people of God. How so? Just like every other ministry, canon law also serves the goal of helping Christians to love like Jesus. So, I really am lucky to be a canon lawyer: we are lawyers of love.

In the gospel of Matthew, when Jesus speaks about scribes, he is actually describing the ancient ancestors of canon lawyers. The scribes were the canon lawyers of their day. Let me share three quick snapshots of scribes and their indispensable ministry in service of the law of love.

First, one of the greatest of all scribes was Ezra, who was both a scribe and a priest, kind of like me. He is the eponymous author of the book of Ezra. He returned with the Jewish people from Babylonian Exile in 536 BC and he discovered that those Jews who stayed behind in Jerusalem had intermarried people of other religions, and as a consequence, lost their faith. Ezra set about annulling those marriages and taught strict observance of the Jewish faith. The vast majority of my ministry as a canon lawyer is helping people who need an annulment for their marriage, and facilitating their desire to return to their faith. Both Ezra, the ancient canon lawyer, and his modern counter-parts, help people to see the law of God as a law of love, especially in their marriages. Scribes were intended to be lawyers of love.

A second critical function of scribes was to copy the ancient texts of scripture so it would be faithfully transcribed and made available to succeeding generations and ultimately to the whole world. When I studied sacred scripture in the seminary, I was flabbergasted to learn that there is no original copy of any of the 73 books of the bible. Did you know that? There is no original book of Genesis, or Isaiah, or 1 Kings or Daniel. There is no original copy of the gospel of Matthew or 1 Corinthians or Revelation. All we have are copies of copies of copies, but not one of the original texts is extant. You would think since we are dealing with the inspired Word of God, someone would hang on to an original copy! But no one did. It is thanks to the tireless work of ancient scribes, the predecessors of modern canon lawyers, that we have the bible we hold at home and proclaim from the pulpit at Mass. Thanks to these ancient canon lawyers, we can read and reflect on the Ten Commandments in Exodus and the eight Beatitudes in Matthew and learn the law of love. The scribes who copied the sacred scriptures were lawyers of love.

The third snapshot of scribes is of the group of Jewish scribe-scholars called “the Masoretes.” Between the 7th and 10th century, they took the Jewish Hebrew bible and provided pronunciation and punctuation marks – called diacritic marks, kind of like the accent marks you see in Spanish – to make the scripture more readable and user-friendly. My favorite bible is the New American Catholic Study Bible. The reason I love it is because it has lots of pictures and explanations of what the bible means and what the ancient authors intended. In a sense, that is what the Masoretes were trying to achieve as well, so that more people would find the bible not only more available, but also more accessible, more reader-friendly. There’s an old adage: a bible in the hand is worth two on the shelf. If you never actually read the bible, you will never learn God’s law of love, and little chance you will practice it. The scribes, like the magnificent Masoretes, were lawyers of love.

Jesus said in the gospel today: “Every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.” Thanks to the scribes, both ancient and modern, we learn God’s law of love from both the Old Testament and the New Testament. We wouldn’t have the bible without the scribes. We owe a deep debt of thanks to Ezra, the copyists, and to the Masoretes, who preserved God’s laws of love, so that we might learn them and live them.

Praised be Jesus Christ!