“You can decide whether you’ll be loyal to God or not.” Sirach 15: 15-20
“You have heard it said to your ancestors: ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you: ‘Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement…’” Matthew 5: 17-37
Today’s three readings are all related directly or indirectly to the topic of law and serve as an invitation to us to reflect on the place of wisdom and moral rectitude in our everyday lives. As entry into reflection, we might look at the way in which we approach the civil law that applies to our daily activities. Sometimes we might catch ourselves treating the laws that guide our use of public roads as though they are piecrust. – made to be broken! The obverse of that is our obeying a law of the road to avoid a fine or punishment. The motivation for that is self-interest. When the risk of being caught diminishes, so too does the motivation for observing the law. So, those who frame road-use laws, for instance, make sure that disobeying them is more costly than complying with them.
Today’s readings relate to God’s law rather than to our society’s penal law. Even though the first reading from Sirach presents a somewhat negative picture of God’s watching every single thing we do, the point underlying it is that abiding by God’s law will guarantee us a life of genuine quality, full of blessing and free from anxiety.
The point that Paul makes to his community in Corinth is that, once they come to realise that opening themselves up to a relationship with Jesus will lead them into the embrace of God and the inspiration of God’s Spirit, they will have no need to rely on the kind of guidance that philosophers can offer.
In the gospel-reading, we hear Jesus urging his disciples to avoid the kind of rigid, lock-step approach to law practiced by the scribes and Pharisees. Living peacefully with and respecting everyone will lay the foundation for a life faithful to God simply because living that way reflects God’s love for humanity. Jesus deliberately made reference to the story of Cain and Abel, pointing our that jealousy and the demeaning of a sister or brother are behaviours that can lead to the violence of murder. He underlined that message by stressing that presuming to make any offering to God would be meaningless if we had not first made peace with those around us. It was in the context of Abel and Cain making offerings to God that Cain’s jealousy and anger got the better of him and led him to murder his younger brother (Genesis 4: 1- 16)
Building on the truth that we are all created by a loving God for love, Jesus elaborated on several aspects of the Mosaic Law articulated in the Book of Deuteronomy. He pointed out that if God’s people couldn’t bring themselves to settle disputes and make peace with one another, they would resort to dragging one another to court and end up imprisoning themselves by an unrestrained thirst for retribution. In speaking about respect for women, he observed that a man’s viewing of women as objects for sexual pleasure corrupted his heart with endless lust. Moreover, on the topic of divorce, he stated that putting a spouse under oppressive and debilitating pressure made one responsible for the destruction of a marriage that ended in divorce. In our current world in which domestic violence is on the rise, our society needs to heed Jesus’ words and put them into practice, ensuring that women are always treated with respect and reverence and have no need to live in fear of the prospect of emotional and physical abuse.
One of the misconceptions that developed in the minds of many of the people of Israel was that God’s Law consisted of a set of clearly expressed commandments to which they were expected to comply. Many of them, who had an intimate knowledge of the Law God had given to Moses and which was spelt out in detail in the Book of Deuteronomy, had somehow failed to grasp God’s word to them as it was conveyed by Moses: “For this Law that I enjoin on you today is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, so that you need to wonder ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and bring it down to us so that we may hear it and keep it…No, the Word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart for your observance’”. (Deuteronomy 30: 11-14) Jesus, in today’s gospel-reading was intent on explaining to his disciples that it is only when they ( and we) integrate God’s Law into our lives and interiorise it, that they (and we) will live it in such a way that it will motivate and inspire their/our decisions and actions. The law of love planted in our hearts is intended to find expression in the manner in which we relate to everyone we encounter. A rigid, inflexible list of “shalts” and “shalt nots” will end up imprisoning us in fear.
Anyone who has read Mao’s Last Dancer, the inspirational autobiography of Chinese male, ballet dancer Li Cunxin will probably remember his reference to what he saw as one of the greatest challenges to be achieved by a truly accomplished dancer: absorbing and expressing the rhythm of the composer’s music so that it enlivens the performer. That is a very fitting metaphor for us who would live God’s Law of love. The challenge for us is to capture those we encounter as we dance to the music of God’s Law on the stage of our lives.
To engage with today’s readings as participants rather than observers, we may well need to make some adjustments to the way in which we give expression to the law of love. The aim of our lives as disciples of Jesus has less to do with trying to accumulate God’s grace and ensuring that we stay in God’s good-book than it does with our doing what we can to enrich the various communities to which we belong, making sure to breathe life and love into everyone we encounter and to be big enough to reconcile with everyone we happen to distance.