Love is Demanding

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

Recently, I was just reflecting over two broad categories which we priests are often lumped into. Some priests are labelled as “strict”, while others are known as “humble.” You may find this dichotomy strange because the opposite of strictness is not humility, they are not antonyms by any measure, but it would appear that these are the only two categories we priests are associated with - it’s either one or the other. As I tried to wrap my head around these concepts, it occurred to me that both strictness and humility have been redefined beyond their traditional and conventional meanings. A strict priest is one who follows the rules and is slavishly consistent with regards to his policies, whereas the humble priest is radically flexible, and is ever willing to bend or break the rules when it is convenient to do so.

More than 1700 years ago St. Anthony the Great, whose feast we celebrated last month, envisioned a day “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’” That day has arrived. There has been a tectonic shift that has upended how we view reality. It may have started with tiny indiscernible tremors but with hardly any resistance, this has morphed into full blown inversion of values. First you are made to tolerate the abnormal or the immoral, then you are asked to celebrate, and finally, you are forced to participate. Refusal to do so would result in the modern equivalent of excommunication - “cancellation.” In this almost alternate multi-verse-like reality, those who break the laws are canonised while those who keep the laws are vilified.

The Catholic Church, unfortunately, has not been spared. In The First Apology, Justin Martyr taught, “Let those who are not found living as He taught, be understood to be no Christians, even though they profess with the lip the precepts of Christ.” This has been the consistent teaching of the Church for centuries. Yet, today, the “view” of St Justin Martyr would be considered “strict,” “rigid”, overly restrictive and even un-Christian, where cohabitation, sodomy and abortion have become normalised. All of this suggests that the Church has been influenced more by the culture than has the culture by the Church.

If this is how modern folks, including many Catholics, view “reality” then we can begin to understand how our Lord’s teachings today will not sit well with many. A most frequent complaint against the Church these days is that we seem to be more a Church of Laws rather than a Church of Love. The statement suggests that there is an opposition between laws and love. But the reality is that the nominal rejection of legalism often reveals a new form of legalism – when you break a law, you end up making another. Man cannot live in a vacuum devoid of rules and norms. We either have to live under a law which applies to everyone without exception or favour, the Rule of Law, or we make up laws as and when it is convenient to do so, often favouring ourselves or our friends, which is called Rule by Law.

Today, we have a passage from the gospel that puts things in their proper perspective. St Matthew the Evangelist records Jesus as saying this, “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish them but to complete them. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.” But Jesus does not stop here. He proceeds to issue this warning, “Therefore, the man who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven; but the man who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven.” Doesn’t this make Jesus sound overly “strict,” legalistically rigid?

Most critics of the Church’s penchant for laws and rubrics would rather portray Jesus as an exemplary and “humble” rebel, an anti-establishment instigator, a prophetic witness of libertinism, who came to undo the law, condemn the legalism of the Pharisees and set up a new relationship with God that was solely based on grace and freedom. For them, Jesus must always be a Jesus of Love, the fount of mercy, the anti-thesis of the strict laws. It’s not hard to see how this ideological framework fits into today’s society with its suspicion of law and authority. Yes, it is an attractive image but a false one as our gospel demonstrates today.

What these critics fail to realise is that there is no inconsistency between the Jesus of Love and the Jesus of the Law. Our Lord is both the Incarnation of Love and the perfection of the Law. He came to show us what it means to love and this comes with not just keeping the bare minimum of the Law but perfecting it through Love. With love, keeping the Law is no longer done grudgingly as if it were a burden but willingly and wholeheartedly as an expression of true freedom. Breaking the law doesn’t make you more loving, nor does keeping the Law make you any less. The Church’s law merely follows the theological reality of things. For example, it isn’t canon law that forbids divorce, Jesus does. Canon law merely translates what the Lord has revealed to us into juridical language. So, what happens when you take away the law or choose to ignore it? You would most likely find anarchy rather than love!

If the modern Church is to effectively deal with the social and moral issues of the day, it must do so NOT by lowering the moral bar nor by making things easier and lighter. The problem with Christians today is not rigidity but laxity. For unless the Church, by its living witness, takes seriously the teachings of Jesus, the world won’t either. G.K. Chesterton was right when he said, “I don’t need a church to tell me I’m wrong where I already know that I’m wrong; I need a Church to tell me I’m wrong where I think I’m right.” For whenever the Church fails to address how Church teaching applies to a moral issue in the culture or ignores the conduct of a member unbecoming of a follower of Christ, it is a signal that the church: is uncertain about her teachings, doesn’t take her own teachings seriously, or is satisfied with the “good enough” Christians, and whose moral failings remain, for the most part, private.

The mission of the Church is not to make things easier, but to form solid and committed disciples of the Lord who can meet the challenge of the day. This requires strict discipline done out of love. It is the lack of love which seeks to make things easier, because the desire for popular appeal is not the product of love but of cowardly self-preservation. To those who complain that the teachings of the Lord are too demanding, the Church must meet these demands with steadfastness and clarity of her teachings. She must remember that it is never a loving thing when she bends to the pressures of culture by allowing false teaching, weak teaching, and the lack of church discipline to endanger the spiritual health of her flock.