Dionysus on a Bike

Deuteronomy 5:22-33 – 5/12/2026

What is the purpose of the command of God? Here in Deuteronomy the purpose of the command, the purpose of the law, is “so that you may life and that it may go well with you.” God’s law does not lay out what God wants for human beings simply because of the arbitrariness of God’s will or because God has particular standards of moral purity. God’s law is given to God’s people because God wants it to go well for us. The commandments are designed to ensure our well-being. Failing to follow the commandments is not letting God down. Rather it is failing to live the best life one can, the way of living that leads to life.

With this in mind, we have to relinquish the idea of a God who makes decrees that are impossible to keep and then looks upon us failing to keep those decrees as worthiness of wrath and punishment. No, the purpose of these rules is to provide guideposts that when followed enable overflowing abundant life in mutually beneficial relationships with one’s neighbors. Far from commanding us to negate or devalue our human instincts and life drives, we are to channel those drives into healthy and life-giving directions.

Because the actual content of God’s law was given thousands of years ago in a completely different environmental, societal, and cultural context, if we are to adhere to the spirit of the law in its affirmation of the conditions for human flourishing, then we cannot simply accept the law literally as written in the Hebrew Scriptures. The conditions for living well and excellently are going to vary depending on the historical cultural situation. Our times are quite different from those of Moses, so we can expect that what the law demands, ie what is best for our flourishing as people in community with one anther made in God’s image, will change to reflect the realities of the current situation.

The law is for our own good to rightly relate in order to live well. For the Lutheran, we, caught in a fallen world, are unable to follow the law of our own accord, by our own effort. If the law is for our own good in affirmation of life, then this means that we, by own effort and ability, are not able to live in full affirmation of life in community without help. For the Christian, that is where the life, teachings, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus comes in. The most common picture of what Jesus accomplished is that his death paid the penalty of punishment for our sins, appeasing an angry God by taking the punishment we deserved. Looking at failure to follow the law as our inability to fully flourish in community with others on our own, Christ’s work becomes more of healing broken relationships and providing the possibility of living together in love instead of self-centered ways that lead to violence and harm.

Jesus’s wounds and triumph over death are not proxy sites for the wrath of God. They are the way of healing, showing us the Spirit of the law in care for and loving service to others. The command is to see the image and beauty of the creator in the other, the self, and in all living things and because of this to love them. When we fail this command to live well, Jesus restores a creation and a humankind that are meant to affirm life in joy.

Further research: Eastern Christianity conceptualizes sin as sickness as opposed to sin as offence against God, which one gets in Western theology. Christ is seen more as a healer than as a substitutionary sacrifice. I want to think more about what the Eastern conception of sin might mean from a Lutheran perspective.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.