Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Some, or maybe many of you, have heard that I have applied to become the chaplain of the Flint Post of the Michigan State Police. I’m almost done with the process and will know by the middle of March whether I have been approved or not. In the mean time, hoping that I am approved, and trying to get to know the troopers, I have been doing ride-alongs with them. Many people who have experiences with law enforcement have negative experiences with them, because they have been caught doing something wrong. But in my ride-alongs, I have been extremely impressed with the mercy of the troopers, and how often people get only a warning. In fact, on one ride-along, a trooper asked me (and he said, “Be honest,”), “Do you think I should be doing anything differently?” I told him that, if I were in his shoes, I probably would have given out more tickets and given fewer warnings. He chuckled.
Besides what I see as a generally antagonistic culture when it comes to law enforcement (i.e., the cops are always wrong, they use way too much force all the time, they’re all racist, they’re horrible human beings, etc.), we are also in a culture that does not value the law. Many people, if not we ourselves, feel like the rules were made to be broken, and that rules get in the way, rather than help us.
So Jesus’ words today might be hard to swallow. After all, Jesus, so we hear, wasn’t about laws and rules! That’s why he was so tough on the Pharisees and the scribes! But what did Jesus say today? “‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law.’” It would be hard to argue the whole “spirit of the law” theory while quoting these words.
But Jesus was a spirit of the law guy. Now, the spirit of the law does not mean undoing the law. So often that’s what we want it to mean: the spirit of the law means we don’t have to follow the real law. But as Jesus goes beyond the letter of the law (Thou shalt not kill…, thou shalt not commit adultery…, whoever divorces his wife…, do not take a false oath…), He seems to make things stricter, not looser.
As a confessor, I’m not sure I have ever had someone say, “Yeah, I killed somebody.” But I do often hear anger and hatred and vengeance of the heart. But Jesus goes beyond simply doing bodily harm. He goes to the heart of the issue, which is, pardon the earlier pun, the heart.
The letter of the law says that I cannot take an innocent life. If we consider how many people are on earth, and how many of them ever actually murder someone (murder being the word we use for the taking of an innocent life), that percentage is probably pretty low. But how many of us have wanted to do someone serious harm because they wronged us? How many of us have held something against another person in hatred and vengeance? That’s probably a much larger percentage. But Jesus, the new Moses, the new Lawgiver, tells us that our offering here at Mass is only acceptable if we have been reconciled with those with whom we have issues. If there is a large separation between us and another person, or us and God, we should go to confession, receive forgiveness of sins, and only then present ourselves for Holy Communion.
The letter of the law says that we can’t have marital relations with a person who is not our spouse or who is married to another. Jesus reminds us that the infidelity or unchastity does not begin with the exterior parts of our body, but begins in our hearts and in our minds.
The teaching on divorce might seem very difficult. After all, Jesus makes it very clear that we cannot divorce and remarry without committing adultery, unless the marriage is unlawful. This is the passage that the Church points to in what is commonly referred to as the annulment process. The Church examines the validity, or lawfulness, of the marriage. But until the Church declares that bond unlawful, each spouse is bound to live a life free of sexual relations with someone other than their spouse.
Whenever Jesus gives us a law, it is meant to guide us to lead happy lives. And in my ride-alongs with the Michigan State Police, I can tell you that, outside traffic stops, the difficult situations into which the troopers are called began earlier than when 911 was called: with anger or lust in the heart; with distrust; or with any other issue. The calls we responded to were simply the outer manifestations of interior problems that had been festering for some time.
Today we are invited to listen to the words of Jesus. To paraphrase our first reading from Sirach, if we follow the words of Jesus, we will be happy and be in a right relationship with God. Before us are the choices between good and evil, life and death. Choose the life-giving words of Jesus.
