Mass readings for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Sirach 15.15-20 Psalm 119.1-2, 4-5, 17-18, 33-34 1 Corinthians 2.6-10 Matthew 5.17-37
The law is necessary. It orders things. At the universal level, God’s law makes creation, life, possible. At the level of human life, it makes society possible, the society of family, local community and nation — the law is a “good” that we benefit from. So, Jesus says of the law that “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the Law” because without it, heaven and earth would indeed pass away. And here, in his words today, he makes it clear what the unchanging, universal law of immediate importance for us is the moral law. And to be frank, it is a law that condemns us. Yet, in Christ, we have the means of escaping condemnation, and the death that is the consequence of our sin. We must trust in God’s mercy, and we can only really do that, through our absolute commitment in faith to Christ.
We know Jesus is talking about the moral law because of the examples he cites: murder, adultery, and the sanctity of promises, vows made to God. He could surely go on in this vein talking about theft, false witness, failure to honour and care for our parents and our elders, and so on.
He ends this teaching with a strong admonition: Let your word be ‘yes,’, if ‘yes,’ or ‘no,’ if ‘no’; anything more than this comes from the evil one. And here he is reminding us of our accountability to that law, and ultimately to God. When we stand before the judgment seat, there will be no time for excuses, just a review of facts. Did you do this? Did you fail to do this? Yes or No.
And while we see in our culture today a whole genre of excuse making, of dissembling speech, of evasive answering, particularly among our leaders, what in some instances is described as “word salads” – that’s not going to work with God even if it sadly works with us.
And yet that has been the intellectual effort of modernity, to escape judgment – thinking that the judgment found in religion is merely human and we’re just dealing with social opinion; when it really is a divine judgment that we are concerned with. I know I speak a lot about modernity and its two great ideological streams of thought: liberalism and Marxism, but we as Catholics have to recognize just how much the ideas spawned by these two political philosophies have corrupted our understanding of sin and its consequences. Indeed, from a theological perspective, each is a kind of heresy. They take select elements of the gospel, but strip away so much that their messages of, well freedom in liberalism, and justice in Marxism, are not balanced by the moral imperatives of Christ’s teaching.
And it’s from that lack of balance that the excuses come. They come in pastoral encounters I have with people who want me, other priests, to understand that their circumstances made the sin unavoidable, even necessary: they sinned in order to be free of a heavy burden – after all, doesn’t God want us to be happy? More commonly today, it is a matter of how unfair life has been to us because of group identity — arbitrary injustice because of immutable characteristics such as race and gender — these injustices of the past shaping a world in which some have no choice but to sin. That’s an argument employed in the courts, it’s the basis for changes made in sentencing guidelines, in the law itself in many western jurisdictions. Legal progressives argue that the law must be altered for certain groups, owing to their social and economic disadvantages – but in this they abrogate the idea of the individual responsibility (a dangerous thing to do!). Not only can this make an individual person irresponsible and so set upon a life of chaos and so, misery; it has consequences for us all of deepening social division through two-tiered justice, and aggravating the evils already being suffered instead of remedying them because this does not address the causes of our social ills.
However, it is fair and reasonable to say that social and political and economic circumstances have their effect on people. The French writer, Victor Hugo, in his famous novel, Les Miserables, makes that case. It became a Broadway musical and later a major motion picture. I think most of us have a sense of what it’s about. The plot involves a chain of events set into motion by a poor man named Jean Valjean who steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. For the rest of the story, he is relentlessly pursued by Inspector Javert, in the midst of another revolution in France, this time in the late 1840s that stemmed in large part from widespread urban poverty and economic disparity in the midst of France’s drive to industrialize.
And so, the author confronts us with an apparent irreconcilable dilemma: the need for law to maintain a moral society, but that the law is often, ironically, immoral in the sense that it seeks to punish an essentially good person while allowing a whole society to descend into evil.
However, Hugo gives us a fictional story. He stacks the deck through an artificial situation when reality is often a lot muddier. Yet the question remains, how can we (how can Jesus) insist on the law when enforcing it might inadvertently lead to injustice? How can a minor sin (in my opinion) be counted against me at life’s end when I’ve lived an otherwise decent, if not particularly saintly life? Shouldn’t God let it go?
What is forgotten, and indeed now missing from our secular world is the idea of mercy. Instead, like modern day Pharisees, we just keep multiplying the laws. We see this at the societal level with ever greater attempts to fine tune laws in order to remedy injustices.
Law, and more law, as Jesus is at pains to teach us, does not guide us into righteousness. Rather, it is the Holy Spirit, it is our right relationship with God. But yes, for those of us who live apart from God, the rules must suffice to keep us all from harm.
A few years ago, the state of California, the richest state in the American union, came to realize that for all the money it spent on the problem of poverty and crime in its cities, billions, they could not remedy the situation. They passed law after law against drugs, guns, gangs, etc. to no avail. There was an epidemic of petty crime, and a lot of people were going jail. It was noticed that most of these were racial minorities, and so, there was the sense that the law was somehow racist. So, they passed yet another law, or rather a regulation concerning the law: no one would be charged for theft under $200.
If you followed the story then, the consequences were immediate. Theft soared. Major retail chains, the kind that open grocery store locations in poorer areas, closed up because they could not sustain the losses. So, access to fresh food, groceries, and other services like an in-store pharmacy disappeared for the most economically disadvantaged. Smaller, mom & pop stores came to be under siege – store owners had to treat anyone coming in as potential thieves and not as welcome customers. Things were only made very much worse. The law has its purposes, though we may lose sight of these out of empathy.
This does not make an argument for hard, unyielding application of law either, that the consequences for a person’s abuse of their freedoms must be severe enough to deter others from the same mistakes.
What it tells us is how far a society can fall away from God; how communities dissolve as the Holy Spirit vacates a place, and with it, the sense of God’s judgment that would treat an offender as an individual and judge him as would be best for both him, and for the community. And that’s not something that can be set down with any precision in a legal code, but instead must rely upon righteous men and women who understand the necessity of law, but also the prerogatives of mercy, the absolute value of justice, and the healing nature of reconciliation.
As I’ve said before, the ills of this world come of spiritual corruption, and as we ready ourselves for Lent, it will be our responsibility to mend our souls and make of ourselves as individuals and as a community a good example for a world so badly in need of God’s law, a law of justice, mercy and love. Amen