Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Mt. 5:17

Some of you may remember the early 1960’s when the comedian Mel Brooks, along with Carl Reiner, put together a TV comedy routine called the “2000 Year Old Man.”

In a series of skits under this heading, Mel Brooks played the role of the oldest man in the world. Carl Reiner was his interviewer. One of the routines featured the 2000 Year Old Man being asked to explain the origin of God:

“When did people first start believing in God?”, he is asked.

The 2000 Year Old Man answers by admitting that the earliest humans actually first adored “a guy in our village named Phil, and for a long time we worshiped him. Phil was a big, mean guy who could break you in two with his bare hands! But one day a thunderstorm came up, and a lightning bolt hit Phil. Together we gathered around him and saw to our amazement that he was dead. And after a while – one by one – we began to say to each other: ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!’”

Today’s gospel suggests that there’s not just something, but Someone a lot “bigger than Phil.”

The Jewish people strongly believed that their understanding of God, their experience of God, throughout their history was superior to that of any other people around them. They were certain that no other people had so refined and so mature an understanding of who the Ultimate Mystery in life is and what that Mystery expects of us humans.

In fact, that was the whole purpose of the Law and the prophets – to make sure that the Jewish people kept that belief and lived it out.

The prophets the gospel mentions – people like Isaiah and Micah and Jeremiah and a host of others – were those unbelievably courageous people who spoke out again and again to try to remind the people, and their leaders, how far they had wandered from the original covenant they entered into with God – the pact agreed upon by both parties in which God promised: “I will be your God; you will be my people.”

Again, the purpose of combining the Law and the prophets was two-fold:

First, to remind the Jewish people who their God is, namely, the One who saved them from slavery to the Egyptians and later the Babylonians.

Second, to aid generation after generation in entering into a particular, unique relationship with God and their neighbor.

This combination of the Law and the prophets, this covenant is what separated them from the Gentiles – those people, in the mind of the Jews, whose god was something not a whole lot “bigger than Phil.”

What Jesus is doing in today’s gospel, then, is not trying to get the Jewish people to stop following the Law and the prophets. Quite the contrary. Instead, he is trying to urge them – and each of us – to go to another level, to go deep.

For example, Jesus uses the issue of murder. We all know murder is a terrible evil. His question to each of us is: Why not go deep and attack its roots? Why not dig down to the source of murder and get to the place where it begins – in anger, rage, fury, revenge?

Jesus then brings up the example of lust. Again, we all know adultery is wrong. We all know the harm it does to a marriage, to children, to the community. So, to best avoid it ever happening, why not go deep?

Why not look way down inside ourselves to the place where lust first suggests itself, where it first starts to beckon to us, where it first starts to develop a kind of drum roll in our guts?

Or, how about the same with drugs, or food, or anything else that can end up enslaving us and holding us hostage?

Jesus is calling us to go deep – deep within our conscience, deep within our sense of right and wrong.

The Jewish people had it right. God hates slavery. God’s whole purpose is to call us out of the Egypt and the Babylonia we’ve created in our own lives. His whole desire is for us to be free – free of all the demons that pull us back into enslavement – free of all the pursuits that cause damage and render us broken and sad and empty.

“Let my people go!”

God spoke those commanding words a long time ago. What Jesus is doing in today’s gospel is reminding us that God is still saying them.

“Let my people go!”

Let those words go deep.

Let them go to that sacred place within us where they will discover a God who is much, much “bigger than Phil.”

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.

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2/9/17