Friends
Peace be with you.
Back when I was in grade school, my older brothers had a Lenten tradition that I would occasionally get to participate in. Some of you may have had a similar tradition. During Lent, my mom was a little more stringent than the church and would make us fast, not only from meat, but also from eating between meals. The church only mandates that we do that on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Nonetheless, my brothers would wait until 11:37 on Friday night and call the local pizza place to order a sausage pizza that would be delivered to our house a little after midnight. We had fulfilled the law...barely. We were like the kid who’s asked to take his laundry to his room who puts in on the floor right inside his bedroom door or the kid that’s asked to pick up her toys who simply pushes them all to the corner of the room. It’s all about doing enough to make sure that you don’t get into trouble.
When Christianity was being formed, there was a debate within the church as to the role the Old Testament law would play. If you simply read St. Paul, you could get the impression that we should view the Old Testament as a museum: something that used to be important that is no longer. Yet, to balance this out, we have today’s rather lengthy gospel. Jesus begins by saying that the law hasn’t passed away. In fact, Jesus hasn’t come to abolish the law but to bring it to perfection by fulfilling it. He then shows what that fulfillment looks like by using a total of six examples, of which we hear four. First, don’t just avoid killing people, avoid becoming angry with your neighbor and do what you can to reconcile with him. Secondly, don’t just avoid committing adultery, don’t look with lust at someone, especially someone who isn’t your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse. Thirdly, don’t divorce despite the fact that Moses allowed for it. Lastly, don’t just avoid swearing false oaths. Don’t swear oaths at all. Instead, just live your life in such a way that you fulfill the agreements that you make so that you don’t need to make oaths. Each of these examples takes a law that was already on the books and ratchets up the expectations. It definitely challenges the people who think that Jesus wasn’t about rules or laws but only cared that we be nice to one another. Jesus wasn’t a hippie pacifist. He expected that his followers obey the law and that they do so to a degree that others in the world didn’t.
Nonetheless, as I said before, there is a tension in scripture that is very much still present in the church today. Paul says that the law is unimportant, Jesus says that he is the fulfillment of the law and that his followers will follow every letter and then some. The way we feel the tension is, often, in certain hot-button moral issues. For example with the issue of homosexuality; Church leadership says that scripture and tradition are clear that, while gay people are to be loved and not unjustly discriminated against, homosexual acts are not morally good. Some theologians and many gay rights activists will quote Jesus saying, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” as though it means Jesus was a relativist, that almost nothing is immoral. So, the church advocates maintaining the law as it is and gets criticized for being judgemental and mired in the law,
To use another example, one of the demands that both the Old Testament and New demands is that we provide for the alien, or people we would today call undocumented immigrants. We are supposed to give them food and water, clothing, and even a place to stay if they need it. Still, often times the same people with whom we agree on the issues of gay marriage and abortion make laws seeking to inhibit catholic charities ability to reach out to fulfill this precept of the law. We are simply trying to recognize the dignity of human life present in immigrants and strangers just as much as it is in the unborn.
In the end, the law was meant to define minimums for us; the least that we have to do to be okay in the eyes of God. Both Paul and Jesus agree that the problem with the law is that we shouldn’t make it the goal of our our lives to seek what’s the least we have to do to get into heaven. We should be constantly seeking to grow deeper in holiness through the acts of our lives and not rely on the minimums to decide how we treat other people.
Let me give an example that I hear about quite frequently. I think of what happens when farmers notice a friend or neighbor who becomes sick or injured to the point they won’t be able to harvest their crop. There is nothing that says you have to fire up your combine, use your own time and fuel, and help that person harvest his crop. And, when you think about it, it would be advantageous for that neighbor to let the crop sit in the field and rot so there’s less corn or beans out there and their crop may be worth more. But that’s not the point. Someone is hurting and you can help so you do.
If the goal of the scribes and pharisees was to define their holiness by the law in such a way that they always made sure it worked best for them, then if our holiness is going to be greater, we can’t be focused on what’s best for us. Our law must be to always do what’s best for the other.
