RBWords

     Imagine our life as Americans if someone were to get into power and abolish the U. S. Constitution or tried to replace it with another document from a different culture!  We venerate this set of laws by enshrining one of the original copies in a special case in a museum along with the Declaration of Independence.  We especially venerate the first ten amendments and we have a Supreme Court to which we give the power of interpret the meaning of the constitution.  Our whole system of government with its separation of powers and all our "rights" as citizens is contained in the expressions we have put down in words on paper!  

     The Gospel of Matthew is anxious to reassure its community of believers of Jewish background that Jesus did not come to do away with their way of life but to show them that all the promises made by God in "the law and the prophets" had been kept and that he is the culmination of all of it.  At the same time, there would be more than one way to respond to Jesus.  Those believers who did not come from a Jewish background had their own cultural expressions as well and St. Paul represented them as not obliged by the same code of behavior as those of Jewish background.  The non-Jewish approach eventually became the majority approach.  

     We Catholics do tend to have our own cultural Catholic "bubbles" that we live within.  I experience this in the various parishes where I preach parish missions.  A small parish in "Cajun" territory in South Louisiana is not the same as a parish in North Louisiana.  A predominately Hispanic Catholic community in San Antonio is very different from a predominantly Anglo parish in the same city!  Customs and devotions take on the character of a "law" or way of life.  Woe betide the pastor who tries to change any of them!  

     Yet, it is the one and same Jesus Christ who is the fulfillment of all our faith and any ways that we have developed to express it.  If we lose sight of Christ in our efforts to preserve some particular religious expression, we lose sight of the whole purpose of our expressions!  In Lent we could profit from a serious look at all the ways we express our faith.  In this "Year of Faith," I think  all of us need to be sure we haven't lost sight of Jesus!   AMEN