Word to the Wise
Tuesday, August 1, 2023 - Tuesday in the 17th Week in Ordinary Time
[Exod 33:7-11; 34:5b-9, 28 and Matt 13:36-43]The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another......So Moses stayed there with the Lord forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water, and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. [Exodus]
AUGUST 1 ST. ALPHONSUS LIGOURI cssr
The "forty days and forty nights," complete with fasting from food and drink, in intimate conversation with God, followed by writing down the covenantal ten commandments, rings a bell in my mind. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus went into the desert, fasted forty days and forty nights, and upon returning ascended a mountain, sat down like a teacher and delivered his "new law." "You have heard that it was said.....but I say to you!"
In the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus is indeed portrayed like a "new Moses," establishing a covenant that emphasizes the two greatest precepts of the Mosaic Law: love of God and love of neighbor. But the "Torah," (the first five books of the Old Testament, a/k/a the Pentateuch) contains 631 "precepts" and not just ten commandments. Those precepts weren't handed down on Mt. Sinai. They represented the efforts of the Chosen People to carry out and live with the Ten Commandments. Those precepts became a problem later on when Gentile converts began accepting Christianity, and created separation between Jewish and Christian faiths.
I realize this is a broad narrative on my part, but I cannot help but think of our human tendency to formalize and complicate very simple and charismatic things so that a "lawyer class" has to develop to interpret everything. In Jesus' time, those were the scribes and Pharisees. In our time, canon lawyers and liturgists are often the folks who inherit this difficult task. I recognize their importance and service, but one can only wonder how and why we humans create such complexity in our efforts to be faithful to Jesus' teachings. St. Paul's warnings about the Mosaic Law might apply to ours as well. It's something to think about. The writings on the tablets were much shorter than the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. AMEN
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