In any honest reading of the Gospels, it’s hard to miss that Jesus wasn’t terribly hung up on rules. Any attentive reader would also notice that he seemed to have a pretty big problem with people who were all about keeping and enforcing the rules. He really took issue with those who worried about what other people were doing vis-à-vis the rules.
Even today, those to whom we refer as “Hasidic” Jews seek to observe 613 mitzvot. Mizvot means word, or rule. The 613 mitzvot are prescriptions and proscriptions- dos and donts- derived from the Law and handed on via the Mishnah, the Talmud, as well as through practice. As Catholics, we are in no position to criticize because we have plenty of rules of our own!
Rules are often hard to keep. I think all of us, once in a while, feel like breaking a rule or two just because there are rules. This impulse is not necessarily a bad one. Rules are also hard to enforce. Anyone who is a parent, a teacher, a supervisor, a police officer, etc. knows this. It's safe to say that rules are a pain in the neck for everyone!
If you paid attention to today’s readings, especially our first reading from Deuteronomy and our Gospel, you might be experiencing a bit of whiplash. In our first reading, we heard Moses telling the Israelites about the importance of scrupulously preserving, handing on, and keeping the whole Law. In our Gospel, Jesus doesn’t seem nearly as concerned with such scrupulosity. This tells us something important: Jesus not a new Moses!
Saint Paul insisted that the Law was given in order to demonstrate our inability to keep it. In his Letter to the Galatians he asks, “Why, then, the law?”1 He answers by saying that all it did was add transgressions “until the descendant came to whom the promise had been made.”2 This descendant, the only one who kept the Law in letter and in spirit is Jesus. Paul notes that “if a law had been given that could bring life, then righteousness would in reality come from the law.”3 But righteousness comes from and through Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God!
Now, Jesus doesn’t say that we shouldn’t have rules. What he rejects- he is not the only ancient Jewish teacher to do so- are rules that are observed with little or no thought as to why one observes them. He also grasps, as any truly observant Jewish person does, that not all rules are of equal importance.
What Jesus wants to focus attention on is the reason for the Law and the rules that flow from it. He tells us elsewhere that the roots of the entire Law are the two great commandments: loving God with all your whole being and loving your neighbor as you love yourself.4 God’s Law has no other purpose than how to realize these.
Let’s face it, most of the time, it’s easier to keep a list of rules than to love another person as you love yourself. This is especially true if it’s someone you might not like or, even harder, when it comes to someone who doesn’t like you!
In our Gospel, Jesus is insistent that our motivation to keep rules, ideally, should come from within and not have to be imposed on us from without. And so, he challenges us to examine our hearts. This means thinking about how my behavior affects others, whether what I do is for the common good or if I only consider what I think is good for me. Thinking about others is how Christians should always think about everything because this is what it means to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
The Act of Contrition, which we say in confession, begins with these words: “My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against you, whom I should love above all things.” What is sin but my failure to love God with my whole heart and/or to love my neighbor as I love myself? Put another way, what is sinning except loving myself more than God and other people?
In God’s kingdom, there will be no need to make or enforce rules because those who dwell there, by God’s merciful forgiveness of their many failures to love and by their striving to follow Jesus, will be perfected in love.
For someone who has experienced the love of God given to her through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, her deepest desire is to love God and to love others the way God loves them in Jesus. This desire is the work of the Holy Spirit. Among the gifts of the Holy Spirit are patience, kindness, gentleness, and love.
There are means and ends. Means are the ways you achieve your ends. Ends are goals, those things you want to happen. The difference between a goal and a wish is that you do things to realize a goal, whereas wishes remain wishes because you don't do anything to make them come true. To become like Jesus is the main goal of every true Christian.
So, if you want to love God and love other people like Christ loves them, what you do and what you say matters. It also matters how you do what you do and how you say what you say. This is why our second reading from the Letter of James urges us to be doers of the word and not just hearers.
You’ve probably heard someone say or maybe you’ve read online that sitting in church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. This is true. Does that mean going to Mass isn’t important? No! It means that if coming to church doesn’t shape and form you, help convert, that is, change you, then it’s safe to say you’re missing the point.
Mass comes from the Latin word missa. Missa means to be dismissed or, in context, to be sent. An apostle is one who is sent. Being sent forth at the end of Mass is part of what it means for the Church to be apostolic.
At the end of Mass, we are all sent forth with something like these words: Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life. Another way of putting this is, You’ve heard God’s word, now go out and love.
1 Galatians 3:19.↩
2 Galatians 3:19.↩
3 Galatians 3:21.↩
4 Mark 12:30-31.↩
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