The Church's readings for this Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time can easily lead to an unhelpful moralism. Sadly, as explicated in homilies, they very often do. Keeping the commandments will, indeed, save you. In making this assertionyou must keep two things in mind. First, you have not kept God's commandments. As Saint Paul states it in his Letter to the Romans: "all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). This ought to alert you to the fact that you cannot save yourself.
Keeping God's commandments, as Jesus demonstrates in today's Gospel reading, is not simply a matter of doing this and not doing that. No! What motivates your doing or not doing matters as much, or perhaps more than what you do or do not. Stated simply, it is always a matter of your heart. Why? is the most human of all questions. When it comes to following Jesus, why always matters more than what.
It is important to be clear: God's commandments are not ends in themselves but means to the end of loving God with all your being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. At least on my reading, this seems to be the fundamental point of dispute between Jesus and his interlocutors most of the time. I think this is particularly true in Matthew's Gospel.
In his insightful book, Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community, Anthony Saldarini insists that "Matthew presents Jesus as an observant Jew who teaches others by word and example to observe faithfully the will and law of God" (177). What I think is important about Saldarini's statement is that God's will is not necessarily intuitively found in God's law. In other words, it's pretty easy to do the right thing for the wrong reason(s).
It is in his first (of five) major discourse- the so-called "Sermon on the Mount"- that Jesus both "affirms (5:17-19) and reinterprets (5:21-6:18) the law" (Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community, 177). Our Gospel today contains both the Lord's affirmation of the law and a significant portion of his reinterpretation of it. Part of his reinterpretation consists of what are called the "theses and antitheses." The thesis is "You have heard that it was said..." The antithesis is "But I say to you..." It's pretty noticeable that far from watering down the law, Jesus significantly ramps it up by pulling in the why, thus making it a matter of the heart, an interior disposition.
By Marc Chagall
About the matter of divorce, under the law it was permissible for a man to divorce his wife. Depending on which school of Jewish jurisprudence one adhered to it was easier or more difficult to do this. In anticipation of what he will teach later on concerning divorce (see Matthew 19:1-12), in this part of his first major discourse, Jesus teaches that divorce, at least by-and-large, is not permissible. An example of an "unlawful" marriage would be one that violates the degrees of consanguinity or affinity (i.e., one could not marry someone who was married to a close relative. An example of unlawful marriage can be found in Matthew: Herod the tetrarch's marriage to Herodias, who had been married to his brother Philip (see Matthew 14:3-5).
In each of these instances, Jesus considerably ups the ante, as it were.
The second thing to keep in mind- this is the good news- Jesus Christ is the one who has kept all of God's commandments, the blessed one who follows the law of the Lord. Hence, he is the one who can save you. He is the one in whom you can place your trust and live. Presumably, it is to place your trust in Jesus, who is true God of true God, that you go to Mass and receive communion. It is the grace so imparted that strengthens you to follow God's law, to love others as the Father has loved you by sending his Son.
It is Jesus, by his passion, death, and resurrection, who overcomes evil and death (Sir 15:17). Therefore, trust in God by choosing Christ and live.
"In this is love," the Sacred Scriptures tell us: "not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins" (1 John 1:10). While striving to observe God's law in your less-than-perfect way cannot save you, seeking to love your neighbor as you love yourself out of gratitude for the love the Father lavishes on you through his Son by the power of their Spirit is what it means to be converted by love into one who loves.
As Saint Paul insists, what God has prepared for those who love him is beyond human imagining.
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