PaddlingPadre

What is the proper way to approach the law? This is the question that lurks in the background of today’s gospel, as Jesus challenges his hearers to not only obey the commandments, but to go to the heart of the commandments – to not only not kill, but to not even give in to anger, to not only not commit adultery, but to not even look at a woman with lust, to not only not take a false oath, but to be so genuine that one’s simple “yes” and one’s simple “no” are sufficient.

Now, as this question as to the proper approach to law lurks in the background, so too do various responses. One approach, for example, that of the Pharisees, sought to ensure obedience to the law by creating additional norms around the law itself, such that one would never even come close to violating one of the commandments. This approach, as much as it might rightly be criticized, does proceed from an attitude of reverence, and reflects, in a very understandable way, an awareness of that truth which we encountered in our first reading from Sirach: If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you.

 Nevertheless, this Pharisaic approach to the law, beyond creating heavy burdens that God did not intend when he made his covenant with Moses, tends also to what you could almost call a kind of idolatry, strange as it may seem, since this legalism threatens to treat the law as if it were an end in itself, which law never is. The purpose of a speed limit, for example, is not to ensure that everyone stays under a specific speed for the mere sake of it, but is rather to help ensure that, by driving slower, people thereby also drive more safely. And this is a general truth about laws: they are always for the sake of some further end. In other words, every law, if it is a good law, will aim at some further good for the sake of which the law exists.

What this means for the law of Moses, and what Jesus is trying to get his hearers to recognize, is that the law points beyond itself to something deeper, to something more fundamental. And so you can follow the law to the letter, you can even build a fence around it to make sure that you never even come close to violating it, but if all you do is obey the law, if all you do is fulfill the commandments, without arriving at that deeper reality, then the commandments will not save you, since the power of the commandments to save only ever derived from their ability to help you reach that deeper reality. Because what God wants from us is not, properly speaking, our obedience, but rather he desires our hearts, he desires a filial relationship with us. And mere obedience, especially if combined with pride and self-righteousness (as it often was in the case of the scribes and Pharisees), will prove useless in the end, for it will proceed from a heart that is yet unconverted, that is yet a stranger to these deeper realities.

 And so the law, of itself, does not save a person, but the law may not for that reason simply be discarded. For that would be to commit an error and opposite to that of the Pharisees. We are, after all, creatures of flesh and blood, and so we cannot rise to spiritual things save by lasting effort and striving. This is not to deny the role of grace, for it is grace that ultimately enables our striving for holiness, but this striving, this effort, is not optional for us. We cannot force ourselves by an act of the will to become holy in a moment – holiness is rather the work of a lifetime.

And in that work, rules and laws have an important part to play, for they help to direct our striving in the appropriate direction. Last weekend, for instance, I talked briefly about the five precepts of the Church: Sunday mass attendance, yearly confession, yearly reception of Holy Communion, fasting and abstinence, and providing for the material needs of the Church. Our salvation, true enough, does not consist in doing these things, but with what difficulty would one be saved without them! For the truth is, without such rules and impositions we are too easily given to our own self will, too readily do we incline to basically do what we want when we want, such that God fades into the background of our consciousness while the faith slowly withers and dies, choked from life by our own laxity. This is why there could hardly be an attitude as dangerous as that which you sometimes encounter in certain of our Protestant brethren (and lamentably in some marginal Catholics as well), that one doesn’t really need religion so long as one has a personal relationship with Jesus. But how will one have a personal relationship with Jesus without the helps of discipline which religion imposes! ^{(to say nothing of the fact that Christ has willed the Church as his chief place of encounter with individuals).}

This, then, is the proper approach to law, which, for us in our concrete circumstance, living as we do in the new covenant inaugurated by Christ, freed from the ceremonial dictates of the law of Moses, is to be understood as the proper way in which we should approach the rules and precepts of the Church, namely: that we obey what the Church asks of us (the Church being a divinely willed institution that rightly commands our loyalty and obedience), but that we obey without any hint of magical thinking, recognizing that is not obedience in itself that matters, but rather that it is the righteousness and love of God towards which this obedience leads us that really counts. Righteousness, charity, and union with God are our goal, and to these the rules of Catholicism are an aid, an indispensable aid, surely, but an aid nevertheless.

All of this is especially important for us to remember during Lent, which begins in only three days. Because while the Church does give us rules that govern us throughout the entire year, it is doubtless during Lent, with its requirements of fasting and abstinence, when we feel these rules most acutely. And so as you prepare for Lent, do not fall into the trap of blowing off the various Lenten disciplines as being unimportant, for they are quite important! But also, do not think that obedience to such disciplines is in itself the mark of being a good Catholic. Rather, the mark of a good Catholic is a heart on fire with the love of God, a fire which the discipline of the Church, our Mother, will help to kindle.