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
Obeying the Law vs. Breaking the Law
Anger vs. Killing
Lust vs. Adultery
Marriage vs. Divorce
Right after the stunningly beautiful message of the Beatitudes in which Jesus urges each of us to recognize how blessed are the “poor in spirit,” the “gentle,” the “merciful,” the “pure in heart,” and the “peacemakers,” today’s Gospel passage from Matthew takes a whole different tone.
It appears to move from encouragement and inspiration to demands and the hard truths of “the Law.”
So, first, before we go on, a little history of today’s Gospel is necessary to help us more fully appreciate what Jesus is saying.
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 mentioned in today’s Gospel – people like Isaiah and Micah and Jeremiah and a host of others – were those incredibly courageous people who spoke out again and again trying to remind the people, and their leaders, how far they had wandered from the original covenant they had 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 from the Babylonians.
Second, to aid generation after generation to enter into a unique relationship with God and their neighbor.
This combination of the Law and the prophets, this “covenant” is what separated the Jews from the Gentiles.
So, what Jesus is teaching in the Beatitudes is not trying to get the Jewish people to stop following the Law and the prophets. Quite the contrary. Instead, he is urging 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, horrifying evil. Jesus’ 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 deep down inside ourselves to the place where lust first suggests itself, where it first begins to beckon us, where it first starts 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 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 detests slavery.
God’s whole desire is to call us out of the Egypt and Babylonia we’ve created in our own lives. God’s 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 damage and render us broken and sad and empty.
“Let my people go!”
God spoke those commanding words a long, long time ago.
What Jesus teaches in today’s gospel, what Jesus reminds us today is that God is still speaking those very same words to that place inside each of us that can become ensnared in those demeaning behaviors that diminish and debase us.
“Let my people go!”
May those words go deep.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
NOTE: To continue with the words of Cardinal McElroy in his recent publication, “One avenue for lifting up and healing the patterns and structures of marginalization in our church and our world is to systematically bring the peripheries into the center of life in the church. This means attending to the marginalization of African Americans and Native Americans, victims of clergy sexual abuse, the undocumented and the poor, the homeless and the imprisoned, not as a secondary element of mission in every church community, but as a primary goal.
Bringing the peripheries to the center means constantly endeavoring to support the disempowered as protagonists in the life of the church. It means giving a privileged place in the priorities and budgets and energies of every ecclesial community to those who are most victimized and ignored. It means advocating forcefully against racism and economic exploitation.”
May these words also “go deep.”
