Friends
Peace be with you.
A couple of years ago, I was engaging with someone on social media about a contentious issue surrounding Pope Francis. I was told by the person that Pope Francis had changed the Ten Commandments and this was why we shouldn’t trust him. Relatively quickly, I did a Google search for “Pope Francis changed 10 commandments'' and found two stories. The first was a story about the Pope putting forth the Ten Commandments of Environmentalism. The other was a satirical story from a fake news web site that cynically alleged the Pope had changed the rules around adultery. It appeared the second followed the first because some people felt the Pope was trying to modify the original 10 Commandments as listed in Exodus and Deuteronomy by putting forth the 10 commandments for Environmentalism. In truth, the Pope was simply preaching about what it means to be a good steward of creation as it talks about in Genesis chapters one and two. But, some more liberal websites listed it as the Ten Commandments of Climate Change, despite the fact that the Pope didn’t use the phrase, and as a response, this more conservative, satirical website published what it did about the Pope. Makes what St. Paul said in the second reading for today, “we speak a wisdom to the mature that is not of this age nor of the ruler of this age” even that much more prescient.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if this is somewhat the way the people at the Sermon on the Mount reacted to the three statements we just heard in the gospel. Jesus changed the Ten Commandments. The irony of this is that he begins by saying that he doesn’t intend to change the law and the prophets. In fact, he challenges his apostles to be holier than the scribes and Pharisees, the ones who are in charge of the law and who not only should be teaching people how to apply it to their lives but should be practicing what they preach. “Be better than the professionals” is more or less what Jesus says, and he has no intention of fixing the rules so his followers can do that. Right after making that declaration, he then sort of changes the rules.
The thing is that, unlike the fake story about what Pope Francis said about the Ten Commandments, Jesus makes them harder. He actually shows how we, his followers, are going to be holier than the scribes and Pharisees. “You shall not kill” becomes “you shall not be angry with your brother”. “You shall not committ adultery” becomes “you shall not look at a woman with lust”. “You shall not take a false oath” becomes “you shall not swear at all, just let your ‘yes’ mean ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ mean ‘no’”. Each of these statements takes one of the Ten Commandments or, in the case of false oath and outgrowth of one of the Ten Commandments, namely you shall not lie, and ratchets it up a little.
Part of what Jesus is saying to us is that living a life of holiness is more than just about following a series of commandments. It’s about realizing, as the first reading from Sirach said, we are the only members of God’s creation that have the capacity of freely making choices that we know God wants us to do. A cheetah doesn’t stop running and ask if God would want it to kill and eat a gazelle. It just does it. A pack of hyenas doesn’t ask if they’ve over hunted all the birds in a particular area so there won’t be any for the next generations. We humans can ask these types of questions.
So, we shouldn’t believe we are living a holy life if we lay in bed at night and imagine ourselves slowly driving a steam roller over our obnoxious coworker as long s don’t actually do it. And, we shouldn’t committ to doing things if we really don’t intend to do them. I love the fact that Jesus just gave all of us permission to say no. Did you hear it? I need to hear this message as much as anyone here. It’s okay to admit that something is important and good but we just can’t do it. That’s holier than swearing you’ll do something but never ever getting around to it.
This is the balance of being truly free but having an all knowing God. God doesn’t force us to do something. He lays out what a full life is going to look like and invites us to chose it. As we creep closer to Lent, just a little over a week away now, what’s the one thing you think God is calling you to do to surpass the professional holy crowd and how, when God asks you, can you tell him yes and mean it?
