todays reading with a Republican slant

"For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, because the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have had consciousness of sins?" (Heb. 10:1-2)

There is a lot of verbiage these days about the 'new-that-is-old' Roman church with its insistence on obedience and doctrinal purity.  Reading this passage from Hebrews hits home against these things even more strongly than it may first appear.  Paul refers to the law as the shadow and not the form of things, alluding to an allegory which most of his readers would have known - Plato's Cave.

The Law is not the form, not the reality of Salvation, it is the shadow which is cast upon the wall which is, at best, the verisimilitude of Salvation.  Once we have been freed from the cave and can see the reality that is God and Salvation through Christ, how can we return to arguing about an iota of difference or mouth vs. hand? How can you demand obedience to a shadow from one who has experienced the light?

"Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn't they kill him?" (Plato, Republic, 517a)

Of course they wouldn't, Socrates. The Jews had the Romans kill Christ, because the shadows say they can't kill their own.