A few years ago i had a case for some people in Germany, so I got to take a business trip to Cologne to meet my German clients and their German lawyers. I always had heard that the Germans have a different view of rules from that of us Americans, but one evening i saw that difference demonstrated very clearly. I had gone to dinner with my German lawyer colleagues at a brew pub a few blocks from the hotel at which I was staying, which was right across the square from Cologne's fantastic cathedral. We were all walking back to my hotel, and it was about 10pm on a Tuesday night. The city was pretty quiet and the roads were empty. At one point we came to an intersection. There were no cars anywhere, but we had a red light, so we weren't supposed to cross the street. I was about to step off the curb and cross-- after all, there wasn't a car to be seen for as far as we could see-- when I glanced over at my German hosts. Not one of them was making a move to cross. They were all patiently waiting for the light to change, even though there was no reason at all to wait. As an American I was thinking that the point of the rule about not crossing on a red light was to make sure that everyone was safe and that traffic moved without accidents. Since there was absolutely no traffic, the rule could safely be ignored, in my view. The Germans had a completely different perspective. There were rules, and they were to be followed. If you start making exceptions because you think the rule is silly or irrelevant or unnecessary in the particular circumstances in which you find yourself, then pretty soon there are no rules-- it is all chaos. So, we waited for the green light-- being in Germany, after all. Jesus today (Mt 5: 17-19) says He came to fulfill the law and the prophets, not to abolish it. He makes it clear that not "even the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law" until "heaven and earth pass away." So does that mean that we must observe each and every part of the Jewish law? Since the debates in the early Church about circumcision, Christians have believed that the answer to that question is "no." How do we reconcile that belief with what Jesus says? Maybe the answer is in the difference in understanding of the role of law, that difference between the German view and the American view that I observed in Cologne. Jesus, I think, was more of an American. He knew the law, but He was also aware of why the law exists, and that mattered to Him. The Sabbath exists for humans, not the other way around, He points out when explaining why some things that look like work can still be done on that day. The "why" behind what you are doing matters. Maybe that is part of how Jesus fulfills the law, helping us to understand that there is more to a moral calculation than saying "a rule is a rule." Taken to the extreme does that lead to "chaos"-- to a free-for-all in which everyone does whatever they want? I suppose at the extreme it does. That's why God gave us a conscience, after all. That's what Jesus followed-- and when we follow it, we're following the law.