Cursing, Michelangelo, Love Rules

Deuteronomy 24-27

Ok, it finally got to me.  Laws, laws, laws, laws and more laws.   What finally pushed me over the edge was the cursing from the mountaintop followed by the echoing amen’s!  I give up.

Sometimes when making sculpture you work on a piece and it just never comes.  No matter what you do, the work cannot be realized.  In the picture below you see the last piece that Michelangelo was working on before he died.  It’s a despairing piece in comparison to his glorious David and his 
St. Peter's Pieta.  It was also to be a Pieta.  If you look closely there’s even an extra arm.  Legend says that Michelangelo beat this stone until there was nothing left to beat.

That’s how the law confronts us.  We can work at it until we’re blue in the face, but we will never keep the law perfectly.  Even though this morning's reading of the law pushed me over the preverbal edge, it did so only in this morning's reading.  We have now been freed from the law.  Jesus freed us.  In Matthew 5:17, Jesus tells us He came to “fulfill” the law.  Christ made me the sculpture that I could never make myself.  This morning's curses reminded me of how much I needed to be free and how grateful I am.  In Christ we are all freed from the law except one, the Law of Love, Romans 13:10.

Curse the curses.  Love rules!!!  Happy loving.