Who makes the rules in your life? Who makes the rules in our world? I have found myself asking that question a lot this week. It seems our country might be saying we make the rules because we have the military superiority and power. Therefore, we make the rules over who is a despot and who can stay in power and who can’t. Do smart bombs make the rules. Or is there a deeper truth about how nations interact?

And who made the rules that say to young women and men – you’re not beautiful unless you smell right, cover your face with creams and base and powder; unless you curl your hair the right way, style yourself, primp yourself into someone else’s vision of beauty. Or, is there a deeper beauty that exists outside of those rules?

And who made the rules in Jesus’ time that said you had to purchase ‘ritually clean’ animals, and use coins that did not have the inscription of the Caesar’s on it? Who set up the temple worship in such a way that the business of the temple was 30% of the Jerusalem economy? And why was there a need for this worship anyway? Is God really pleased by the offering of animals? Or is there a deeper truth that we are invited to know?

Who makes the rules? It is a legitimate question in our day. Especially as we hear this top ten list of rules – the rules by which Israel marked their faithfulness. For there is a purpose to rules, isn’t there? Don’t ‘rules’ serve as guideposts to help us do things right? The Ten Commandments, which came to be in Israel’s wondering in the desert, allowed them to survive as a people. The rules existed as the glue that bound them together and kept a social cohesion without which the community would dissolve.

Yet, always the goal of rules is the relationship, not the rules… The goal is the love, not the obeying. Obeying perhaps is the minimal way to show the love. But, we need to move beyond the rules into relationship; beyond ritual and cult into connection. Ritual, rules, and practices – are great so long as we come out of the other side in relationship.

It is interesting that although all four gospels record this story of Jesus, John has this story at the beginning of his gospel. Matthew, Mark and Luke place it near the end, as a proximate cause for the leaders to put Jesus to death. For John, this episode takes on a different meaning. In overthrowing the money changers and those who sold animals for sacrifice, Jesus pulls the rug out of the two prime ways that humans have tried to control their relation to God – sacrifice and ritual. If we offer the ‘correct sacrifice’, be it in the animals or monetary offering, and if we pray to God with the correct ritual, then we will control the relationship. But then it is no longer a mutual relationship. And the rules would never lead to connection.

In cleansing the temple, Jesus in effect says: “You can’t come to my Father in that way. There will be no control in this relationship. You will either live it in faith or you will not live it at all.” So the life of faith becomes a life of falling into God’s being moment by moment. A life of receiving what God offers at each moment, not of grasping and controlling and defining.

You know this in the first stages of a relationship – when you are trying to put a title to it. If you are “dating” – you know what that means. If you are just friends – you know what is expected of you as well. But when the relationship is undefined, it is so difficult to know how to behave. So we set ‘rules’ for dating and friendship – so we know how to behave and what to expect. However, there comes a time when the rules get in the way. It is what mature relationships come to know and experience – that living a relationship out of law and rules and roles will only carry you so far – and then you have to fall into the relationship. You have to fall into the love that is there.
But it is so hard to live by that. How do we know that we are doing it right? How do we know that we are on the right path? With rules and laws, I can comparatively define and judge my behaviors, label my sinfulness and know what I have to do. But the trap is that this way of living/thinking keeps me from surrender. It keeps the relationship focused on me and what I do, and not what the other is asking/calling me to. It keeps me from falling into the other’s love. And that is the deepest truth about rules – is that they can either facilitate our falling into love or they can block it.

So, what are the ‘rules’ that mark your relationship with God, with the world, with your spouse, your sisters and brothers these days? And who made them? And perhaps, most importantly, do they help you fall deeper and deeper into love with your beloved?