Two Law Theories
There are two opposite doctrines about the Law: one is right (i.e., “orthodox”), the other obviously is not. One such “theory” is the attempt to base your righteousness upon your successful completion of the Law — that is, your getting into heaven because you had enough of a “compliance” score.
This theory is the one St Paul is stridently arguing against in the entire Epistle to the Romans. In this Epistle, and also in the Epistle to the Galatians, St Paul proved systematically and in force that you cannot succeed at “righteousness based upon the Law.” You cannot justify yourself, or achieve justification based on your “good” behavior.
This, St Paul said, is exactly what was wrong with the Judaism that rejected their Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The Law — whether the written Jewish Law in the Old Testament, or the unwritten law of the Gentile conscience (Romans 1.18-23) — is the divine calling to humanity to become “like” God, to live like Him, to think and act like Him, ultimately to love like He loves.
The End of the True Law
In other words — and here’s the crucial point — the meaning and purpose, the goal of the Law is the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the Son of God Who became the Son of Man. Jesus has always been for eternity the heart and original design (i.e., “law”) of humanity. When man was created in the Garden of Eden, and God said, “Let us make man in Our image,” that image was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God.
Christ is the Cause, the Meaning, and Goal of humankind. That is why St Paul in Hebrews says that Christ is the Author and Finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12.2). That is why he said, in our Epistle reading today, that “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified” (Romans 10.4).
If the Law’s “beginning and end” is Christ Himself, then it should become immediately clear that there is no possible way to fulfill the Law on your own. The Law that Christ is the end of cannot, then, be a list of legalistic achievements or checkboxes on your moral superiority “to-do” list.
Christ has always been and always will be the purpose of the Law. God’s demands for life as the Law started out in the Old Testament as a kind of progressive education, an anticipation, of the fullness and clarity of the Law in the New Testament. The Ten Commandments were glimmers and gleamings of the Beatitudes that would later come, with the Word of God Himself articulating them with His pastoral voice, the heart of all humanity and creation.
Mount Sinai, where the Law was received on tablets of stone, has been fulfilled and surpassed (not cancelled) by the the Sermon on the Mount.
The Law that is based on the “righteousness of faith” is not a possible and achievable sort of self-achieved smug righteousness. The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee reveals this sort of self-righteousness, as opposed to the justifying faith of the Publican, which was based on the achievement of Christ.
To the contrary, the demands of God for true life and love are now enabled and made not just possible but made certain by the Lawgiver Himself, who has written the Law not on tablets of stone, but — through the Holy Spirit — on their hearts (Jeremiah 31.33; Ezekiel 36.26). We have entered into solidarity with Jesus Christ as we are His Body, and His Holy Spirit nurtures, grows, and perfects into the fulfillment of the Father’s own cherished hope — that we might, being deified, grow into into full communion with Him and all creation (when He is “all in all,” (1 Corinthians 15.28).
Righteousness DIY
But there are those who try to go it alone, who try to base their righteous on their own achievement of the Law. St Paul says this about them: “For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness” (Romans 10.3).
Obviously, this is what was wrong with the Pharisees. St Paul would know this well, as he had been a Pharisee himself. And this willful ignorance of the “righteousness that comes from God” has always been a constant temptation for Christians. It is that legalistic self-justification, even self-satisfaction, from having been more (apparently) successful at the delusion of self-righteousness than others.
Legalism is always obvious when others do it. But we have it in our own Orthodox community as well, especially when asceticism becomes a “righteousness based on law.”
Eschatological Legalism
Legalism is a decadent, apostatized theory of righteousness. It is, actually, a heresy. And it reveals its wickedness most clearly when it is applied to life after death and to the end-times (i.e., eschatology). It comes out in the open as speculations about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. St Paul actually quotes foolish questions that are typical of these theories (in the manner he often uses in his epistles):
‘But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)’ (Romans 10.6-7).
St Paul is saying that those who try to “base their righteousness” on their fantasy of succeeding at the Law get mired in endless questions of who is going to heaven, and who is going to hell. Or how few will be in heaven, and how many will be in hell. Or constructing intermediate stages of purgation and examination (like Purgatory, or a literal series of “tollhouses”), as if there were some tug-of-war between Jesus and the devil over a poor soul.
These legalistic speculations are Pharisaical and toxic. They fly in the face of St Paul’s soul-stirring words of Romans 8.39-39:
“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
St Paul suggests, shockingly, that these speculations are, in effect, bringing Christ down from heaven and up from hell, thereby denying what Jesus has achieved.
In other words, if you redefine or reduce the Law into a self-elevation into Heaven, then you’ve ultimately ignored what Christ has done in achieving salvation. If you’ve reduced the Law into a judgement tool by which you have sentenced people to everlasting perdition, then you, too, have ignored Christ’s salvation, since you’ve denied that He has destroyed the power of hell.
This legalist “righteousness based on the law” thinks of salvation as a future event, as an event when a person is sent to either heaven or hell.
This is a “salvation” that is deferred until the future, until the point of death.
Against this, Jesus said “I am come that ye may have life, and life more abundantly” (John 10.10). Like right now.
Salvation in the Here and Now
Real salvation — the salvation that is “the righteousness that comes from God,” which is “justification by faith” in “Christ Who is the end of the Law” — this salvation is not far away at all. It is not deferred to the eschaton or delayed into the future. It is in the here and now.
As St Paul says in Romans 10.9, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Salvation in the here and now means that we are no longer in the condition of “wrath,” which is not active divine punishment or perdition. The teaching that God actively inflicts suffering and pain is precisely what the Pharisees taught, and it flows from the defective doctrine of “righteousness based on the law.”
Rather, the “wrath of God” is the soul’s experience of rejecting God’s righteousness, which is His Love, His communion in the Spirit and solidarity with His Son. If someone turns away from the infinite presence of Love, then he torments himself even in the here and now. He rejects his own essence. He turns his back on his own nature. His whole existence darkens.
This is what Jesus called “the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8.12; 22.13; 25.30).
Prayer vs the Gnashing Teeth
Salvation is the spiritual Paradise that begins even now when we repent and are rescued (i.e., saved) from the outer darkness, as the Good Shepherd has found us — we who are the lost lamb for whom He left the ninety-nine behind.
Jesus goes out into the darkness, the dark storm of existential hell that is, tragically, present in the here and now. And He saves His lambs. Indeed: “we are His people and the sheep of His pasture” (Psalm 99.3 LXX).
Instead of weeping, there is joy. Instead of gnashing of teeth, there is the “peace that passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4.7).
There is — in that very Christological and Pneumatological Peace — the highest joyful work and privilege of Prayer. Prayer is the very height and essence of True Righteousness.
Prayer is the opposite of “gnashing of teeth.” The gnashing of teeth is the seething grieving soul that has turned against itself by rejecting Love. It can only be aware of itself in an egotistical hell (i.e., Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”).
But Prayer is liberation. Prayer is life. Prayer is the pouring out of one’s self for the sake of the other. Prayer is what the Trinity does in being the Trinity. Prayer is the First Movement of Love, and the Only Movement.
The Righteousness of God is based and rooted only on this eternal Prayer of Love. On the other hand, the “righteousness based on the law,” the self-righteousness of legalism, cannot pray and fights against true prayer.
The very worst thing about legalism is that it smothers prayer. But the “righteousness from God,” Christ Who is the end of the true Law, is inseparable from prayer for anyone and everyone, especially in this suffering world.
This Spiritual Paradise of Prayer in the here and now will become, additionally, a Physical Paradise at the Resurrection. It will be Eden Again, where the Righteousness of God’s primordial peace, beauty, and goodness will become total reality.
That is what we are gifted in the here and now with the first glimmers of that ultimate transfiguration occurring in sacraments all around us, that same universal transfiguration worked by the Spirit and the Bride, starting in our hearts.
That, nothing less, is real righteousness.
“The word is near you, on your lips, and in your heart.” Amen.