Word to the Wise
Wednesday, March 6, 2024 - 3rd Week of Lent - Wed
[Deut 4:1, 5-9 and Matt 5:17-19]"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, until all things have taken place." [Matthew]
The evangelist Matthew composed his gospel for a Jewish Christian community that was finding itself at serious odds with the broader Jewish community, especially with people like the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus' attitude about the Mosaic Law seemed to them to be lax or downright opposed. Matthew presents a much broader context for the law in which Jesus' life, death and resurrection represent the whole point of the Mosaic Law to begin with! Jesus is the center point of God's plan of salvation! The two greatest commandments of the law, the love of God and of neighbor, are the prism through which all the rest of the law was to be read and understood. Jesus is the personification of those two commandments.
What happened to the Mosaic Law is that it created a juridical way of thinking because situations not explicitly mentioned in the text would arise and require interpretation. The interpretations would then become like law themselves. When these interpretations act as if history and human development are irrelevant and only the law matters, the values and goals of the law to begin with are frustrated. Jesus showed his frustration with that attitude. He was not "above the law" so much as he was - and is - the whole point of the law and therefore, its "fulfillment."
In our own Catholic tradition, we are experiencing that same tension. Debates about continuity and discontinuity in regard to the Second Vatican Council have been raging ever since that council ended. Is the medieval synthesis, represented in the Council of Trent and eventually codified in the Code of Canon Law, the final word about Jesus and the church? Or are the teachings and vision of the Second Vatican Council a fresh development built on something broader reaching back beyond the Council of Trent? Jesus and his teachings are the center point of it all and any attempt at human efforts to codify them will inevitably face history and human development. AMEN