Completing the Law

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

“Rules are meant to be broken” – according to the first law of the “Teenage Creed.” One would imagine that as one approaches adulthood, such a creed would be cast aside and supplanted with a less libertine laced outlook. Yet, reality reveals otherwise. If there is any change, it is this, we have upped the ante.  “We break small rules when we are young. Now that we are older, we break bigger rules.” The rampant flouting of laws, ranging from traffic offenses to copyright infringements, avoidance of legitimate taxes to widespread corruption, seem to reinforce rather than refute the point that “rules are meant to be broken,” and that we, especially Malaysians, take special pleasure in breaking rules.

If you buy into this principle that rules are meant to be broken, I’m going to take equal pleasure in bursting your bubble. Today, Our Lord does it on my behalf: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish them but complete them.” To paraphrase, “Contrary to what people say about me, I’ve come not to break the rules but to keep them to the very last clause.” What does He mean by this?

When Jesus refers to “the Law or the Prophets,” it’s a kind of shorthand for the entire Old Testament. But the more problematic word is “complete.” What does Jesus mean when He tells us that He has come to “complete” the Law? The Greek word “complete” or in some translations ‘fulfil’ (pleromai) means to fill-up or to expand, to cause to reach fullness or perfection. It’s an unusual word to use when speaking of the law because you would most likely see it in the context of fulfilment of prophecy. But here it refers to the Law. We can speak of fulfilling the law in two ways: by doing everything that is asked or by completing that which is missing. Jesus does the latter. He completes that which was missing and raises it to another level. Jesus, the New Law, brings the Old Law to its perfection, to its fullness and completion – to the end for which it was promulgated by God in the first place.

Jesus reveals the original divine purpose of the Law through a series of what scholars call "six antitheses." He speaks with all authority, as One not only fit to comment on the Law, but as the only divinely inspired interpreter, the only One capable of explaining the meaning intended by God. A simple principle of interpretation is that the legislator is the best interpreter of the Law. Here, Christ is none other than that Divine Legislator.

Using a solemn formula: “You have learnt how it was said to our ancestors …” Jesus examines key moral codes of the old Law - those regarding murder, adultery, divorce, oath swearing, retaliation and love of neighbour. In each area, He reveals the values and motives hidden in the Law, values that make the Law even more radically demanding upon the whole person. Again, He does not abolish the Law but brings it to its natural fulfilment. In this, He reveals that the new Law transcends the old Law. No longer is the Law of God’s people to be a simple prescription for external behaviour. It is now an interior law, to be written in the hearts of believers. The secret of keeping the Law is this inner dynamism of freedom.

On freedom, the great Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, writes, “A person is free when he belongs to himself; a slave, on the contrary, belongs to his master. In the same way, he acts freely, he who acts spontaneously, while he who receives his impulse from another does not act freely… Now it is precisely this that the Holy Spirit brings about, for he perfects our spirit interiorly, giving it a new dynamism, and thus, the person refrains from evil out of love, as if the divine law commanded it of him. He is free, therefore, not in the sense that the divine law no longer holds for him, but in the sense that his interior dynamism moves him to do what the divine law prescribes.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly articulates the relation of the Old Law to the New Law (§1968): “The Law of the Gospel fulfills the commandments of the Law. The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, far from abolishing or devaluing the moral prescriptions of the Old Law, releases their hidden potential and has new demands arise from them: it reveals their entire divine and human truth. It does not add new external precepts, but proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure, where faith, hope and charity are formed, and with them, the other virtues. The Gospel thus brings the Law to its fullness through imitation of the perfection of the heavenly Father, through forgiveness of enemies and prayer for persecutors, in emulation of the divine generosity.”

Thus, the Lord fulfils the law by bringing out its fullest and complete meaning. He fulfils it by radicalising the law’s demands by going to its heart and centre, which is, that we love God above all, and our neighbours as ourselves. Jesus says, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

So, it’s time to debunk the myth that Jesus broke rules because He was simply against the law. What He really opposed was legalistic minimalism. Minimalism, as the name suggests, is basically just doing the bare minimum required by the law, which means that in most cases we would not really have to give a care about others. Minimalism has nothing to do with love. In fact, it is proof that we have little love whenever we try to either find a loophole to circumvent the Law or pay lip service to it by doing the bare minimum. As opposed to minimalism of the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus is clearly a maximalist. If the former were contented with keeping the Law, Jesus challenges us to go beyond the Law, to aim for the higher ideal of sacrificial love which demands so much more from us than the law. In a world, where the catchphrase is “why do more when you can do less?” Jesus counters with His version, “Why do less when you can do so much more?”

So there is absolutely no inconsistency between the Jesus of Love and the Jesus of the Law. For too long, we have been deceived into believing that there is an irreconcilable dichotomy between those who follow the law and those called to love. We were told that to follow the law is to be under a burden, to be compelled or to be constrained. To love, on the other hand, is to embrace the capacity to choose, to be creative and to be liberated. It is this way of thinking that has wrought catastrophic damage in the life of the Church. What happens when you take away the law or choose to ignore it? You would most likely find anarchy rather than love!

It’s good to remember the constant plea of Pope Francis to proclaim the gospel of salvation and not the gospel of small-minded rules. The Pope certainly did not wish to say that law and mercy were antithetical. What he wanted to stress is this - that we must never lose sight of the object of that law; that laws must not be ends in themselves. The end must always be Love, and to love is to desire the salvation of souls, which is the mission of Christ and His Church. Yes, we must avoid “legalism.” A smug sense of superiority and spiritual self-sufficiency will cause a person to be lost eternally. But salvation can also be lost by flagrantly choosing to ignore God’s laws. We must stake our lives upon the grace of God, to desire always our sanctification and our salvation, to love Him above all else. But to profess that we love Him, we must be ever ready to obey His commands.

Bathing in beauty we become part of it

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time (Feast of St Scholastica)

We have come to the last day of our pilgrimage and we would be departing for home in a few hours. Some of you are excited at the prospect of returning home to savour your favourite Malaysian cuisine and the comfort of your homes. Others may be feeling sad, wanting to prolong the experience of this pilgrimage. I’m reminded of a commonly told story about St Scholastica near the end of her life. According to this story, St Scholastica paid an annual visit her brother, St Benedict, at a place near his abbey, and they would spend the day worshiping together and discussing sacred texts and issues. On this last visit, after a conversation over supper, St Benedict indicated it was time for him to leave. Perhaps sensing the time of her death was drawing near, Scholastica asked him to stay with her for the evening so they could continue their discussions. Not wishing to break his own Rule, Benedict refused, insisting that he needed to return to his cell. He can’t be caught out at night, even if it happens to be his own sister.

At that point, Scholastica closed her hands in prayer, and after a moment, a wild storm started outside of the guest house in which they were housed. Benedict, alarmed by the sudden squall, asked, “What have you done?” to which she replied, “I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen.” Due to the heavy rains and strong winds, Benedict was unable to return to his monastery, and they spent the night in discussion. Three days later, Scholastica died. Benedict had her body brought to his monastery, where he caused it to be laid in the tomb which he had prepared for himself. The point of me telling the story is simply this: please don’t pray too hard for this trip NOT to end. Some of us want to go home and the Filipinos would not appreciate a typhoon or Hurricane Edna blowing this way just because a few Malaysian pilgrims do not wish to leave the Philippines. St Scholastica, spare us, we pray.

Today’s gospel passage makes a little geographical note that sounds illogical to anyone who understands the local terrain. Jesus was going from Tyre in the north to Galilee in the south; and he went by way of Sidon. That is to say, he started going due south by going due north! It’s like going from Kuala Lumpur to Johor Bahru by way of Penang. You have to ask Fr Simon Yong how this is done, because it all makes perfect sense to him – something about sectors and Enrich miles. But I guess it also makes sense to all us who are on this pilgrimage too – we had to come to the Philippines, to learn how to be at home as Catholics in Malaysia.

When Jesus did arrive back in the regions of Galilee, he came into the district of the Decapolis, and there they brought to him a man who was deaf and who had an impediment in his speech. I often have to tell hearing people that it is physiologically and factually inaccurate to describe Deaf persons as deaf and dumb. They are certainly not dumb as in stupid just because they do not communicate as we do. They also resent the politically correct term of “hearing impaired.” They would be quick to point out that most people who can hear are equally “signing impaired.” Neither are they mute. Most deaf persons can make sounds, and they can be exceptionally loud and noisy as they are not aware of the volume of their own voices. The scriptural note that put these two impediments together is logical, however. It was the man’s inability to hear which made his speech so imperfect.

Perhaps there is no other miracle which so beautifully shows Jesus’ respectful way of treating persons. Truly, we witness here the true ramifications of the Incarnation – the inculturation of the gospel. He took the man aside from the crowd, all by himself. Here in the tenderest considerateness, the Lord takes this deaf man away from the scrutinising and prying eyes of an insensitive crowd and spared him the embarrassment which he must already be suffering as a deaf person living among the hearing. Throughout the whole miracle, and deaf people love this part, Jesus actually begins to sign to him. He put his hands in the man’s ears and touched his tongue with spittle. Jesus communicates to this deaf man through the senses which were available to him – his sight, his taste, his touch, his smell. And then Jesus looked up to heaven as a sign of prayer to show that it was from God that help was to come. Then he spoke the Word and the man was healed, recalling the act of creation in the Book of Genesis.

Our short pilgrimage to our neighbour, the Philippines, though confined to Metro Manila, has truly been a similar experience of discovery through the opening of our senses. Our vision, our hearing, our sense of touch, taste and smell has been overhauled by a glimpse of God’s Truth, Beauty and Goodness. This experience has been for me and I believe for many of you, an Ephphata moment. As we visit the shrines and churches, and even when we encounter the poor, we are swept up into a sacred, beautiful, true, and most in-touch-with-reality point of view. In our participation we ask for the “eyes of faith” to put in sharp focus and vivid colour what God is bringing about in the world. We have become too over familiar and comfortable with our own iconoclastic and white-washed churches. We have become blind and deaf to the means by which God wishes to communicate to us.

Just like Our Lord looks up at the very final moment before the deaf man is healed, our common mundane everyday human situation is elevated into the presence of God in these moments. Beauty, justice, love, and mercy are no longer external to us but now we participate intimately with their source in the triune God. Heaven and earth overlap, time collapses. This what St. John Chrysostom attempted to describe when speaking of the poetry of the Psalms, “The sacred writer leaned out over the infinite abyss of God’s wisdom and was seized with giddiness.”

What this pilgrimage has done is to reawaken what some theologians would call the Catholic or sacramental imagination of the person. When speaking of the concept “imagination” used here is not in the sense of something fanciful or fictitious. Rather, it is used in the sense of how we image reality and so interpret the reality of God and the world. One may call it our Catholic vision of reality. American priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley is credited for popularising the concept in his book of the same name. He writes, “Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”

What does it really mean to be Catholic? Well, the answer is simple. Catholics believe in Jesus’s promise to make himself really present to us. This is what sacramentality is all about. The Catholic Church dares to take seriously Christ’s Incarnation. Therefore, it would not be stretching it to say that Catholicism takes the world, and the things of the world, far more seriously than those who like to think of themselves as worldly. The ordinary stuff of the world, like salt, oil, water, light, buildings, is the material God uses to bring us into communion with the truly extraordinary – with God Himself. Indeed, in the sacraments and through our Sacramental imagination, heaven and earth “overlap and interlock.” We see more clearly how intimately connected they really are. C.S. Lewis, describes it this way, “We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

In the Incarnation, the ideas of life, reality, purpose, goodness, beauty, justice, and truth, are no longer external to us. In Jesus Christ we receive and “become part of” that goodness, beauty, justice, and truth. Rather than some form of escapism of flights of fancy, the sacraments puts us in touch with the reality of God Incarnate.

Life and reality viewed through the sacraments put our most basic assumptions on trial. God is not somewhere else, too busy, or unconcerned with the created order. Instead, all of creation is “charged” with the goodness of God and every inch of it participates in the life of God sacramentally. In this way, the sacraments and sacramentals serve as a revelation of sorts, a window into what is most real, and helps us wonder more truly about what God is doing in the world. They help us to see sacredness even in the midst of human depravity, wealth in the midst of poverty, and redemption in the midst of human fallenness.

So let us earnestly pray, as St Scholastica did, to prolong the experience of this pilgrimage, not in the manner of blowing up a hurricane but in a way that when we return to our mundane everyday seemingly ordinary existence, we may continue to be “united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

Persistence is the language of love

Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

“Is that your final answer?” is a question that has become familiar to all of us who have watched the television show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” The host gives the contestants one last shot at changing their answers in order to win the cash prize. The story from Mark talks about a woman who in essence asks Jesus that very same question, challenging him on his original answer to her request.

In this scene, Our Lord is trying to move through this foreign territory unnoticed. However, his reputation had spread to the point where it was difficult to go anywhere without attention being drawn to him. As he was trying to leave, this pagan foreign woman who had heard about him, literally threw herself at his feet and blocked his exit. She had a daughter who was possessed by a demon. She intuitively knew that this man was the answer to her problem and she was not about to let him go. Jesus first response to her was a bit “off-putting” with the response that his role in essence was to Israel and that there would be “leftovers” for the Gentiles. Without missing a beat, she with wit and faith, let Jesus know that even the “dogs under the table could eat the crumbs.” She was not asking for a full feast because she knew that even the crumbs would be enough for her. That did the trick - her persistence, her assertiveness, her faith got the attention of Jesus and her child was healed. As St Chrysostom puts it, she presses Christ prudently, convincingly, and yet modestly by His own words; and by her humble faith and reasoning conquers Him willing to be conquered by her prayer.

Often enough, when preaching on this Gospel, preachers will say something incredibly foolish like, “This Gentile woman taught Jesus that he wasn’t sent only to the house of Israel, but to all people.” In other words, it would take a foreigner, a woman at that, to open up the narrow minded conservative world view of Jesus. What more, when Jesus sounds like an ancient version of Donald Trump in today’s passage. To paraphrase him, “One has to keep Israel for Israelites in order to make Israel great.” But it is really quite absurd to think that Jesus was taught anything by anyone, with the exception the Blessed Mother and St Joseph in the “Holy Family” school of Nazareth.  How much more absurd it is to think that our Lord would not know his own mission, that he is the universal mediator of salvation for all peoples! This all-too-common spin on the Gospel passage (according to which Jesus is taught by the woman) is that it misses the essential thrust of the event: It is not that our Lord is learning from the woman, rather the good Saviour is teaching her (and us) how to pray.

One of the seminal lessons in the passage from St. Mark is the indomitable persistence of this mother. Her daughter’s soul is at stake. The power of evil has made her captive. Imagine this frantic mother – faced with the impending and painful loss of her child. Nothing can stop her in her quest to snatch her offspring from the destructive power of the prince of darkness. It was that single-mindedness, that exclusive focus that drove her to seek out the Jewish rabbi. He, perhaps, was her last and only chance. What does this mean for us? Most likely we don’t always get it right when we pray; thus Jesus’ instruction to be persistent in praying—keep asking, don’t stop searching, continue with your knocking. In fact, ultimately what is most important for us is not necessarily that we receive what we ask for or find what we search for or walk through the door we’re knocking on. No. Rather, what is ultimately most important is that we, like the frantic mother, discover an intimacy with the Lord by persisting in our prayer.

At the heart of prayer is persistence. And persistence is the characteristic mark of devotion. Our pilgrimage has allowed us to encounter the devotional faith of the Filipinos, a faith that may often appear unsophisticated to the Western world and may even be described as superstitious. There may be some truth in the over-exaggerated expressions of devotion. But these aberrations are exceptions rather than the rule. True devotion, on the other hand, leads us to a greater love and reverence for God, rather than act as a distraction or some form of idolatry. While the liturgy is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows,” it is not possible for us to fill up all of our day with participation in the liturgy. The spiritual life is not limited solely to participation in the liturgy, and yet St Paul reminds us that the Christian must pray without ceasing. The Benedictines, we heard yesterday from Bro Camillo, express this through the maxim of ‘ora et labor’ – prayer is work and work is prayer. But popular devotional practices also play a crucial role in helping to foster this ceaseless prayer. Devotional prayer is a means of permeating everyday life with prayer to God.

Thus, devotion and any other form of prayer can never to be dissected and analysed under a microscope using the tools of mathematical or scientific logic. Rather, it proceeds by way of a very different form of logic – the logic of love. If theology, as St Anselm would argue, is faith seeking understanding, then prayer must be love seeking understanding. This is why the Syro-Phoenician woman of our story did not take offence to the “insult” of Jesus. If she had just considered the matter through the lenses of rational logic, she would and she should. But she perceived the whole exchange through the lenses of faith and love, she would have just protested by walking away. No reasonable person would tolerate such insult and stay around to beg for more verbal abuse. But using the lenses of love, what seemed to be a rebuke to others becomes an invitation to a deeper faith and a more profound love. Likewise, popular devotion is not the product of an unhinged mind but the expression of love that moves beyond seemingly logical limitations. This leads us to the heart of the matter. Prayer is being known by and knowing that one is loved by a God who is the embodiment of Love itself. 

The story of this woman teaches us to pray with great humility. She accepts the stereotype that Jews would give to her kind. She is willing to be a “dog” if that is what it takes to get her prayers answered. Presumptuous familiarity and an inflated sense of entitlement were absent in the heart of this woman. She understood that she was undeserving of any crumbs which the Lord was willing to throw her way. But she had great confidence in the Lord. This was enough for the Lord. It was an implicit act of faith – a faith that promised to be salvific for her and her daughter.

So as we draw to the close of our pilgrimage here in Manila, with our own multitude of prayerful requests, some acute, others less important, we learn this simple but important lesson – we must persist. God is never deaf. God does not ignore his children. God would not be intimidated by our challenge, “Is that your final answer?” God answers us in His wisdom and gives us what we need, not always what we want. It is God who throws us the greater challenge, “Will you persevere in praying? Will you persevere in believing and hoping?” The important thing is that we should never give up or become discouraged. Remember the parable of the Syro-Phoenician woman – her persistence brought her into intimate union with the Christ of God. We too would be rewarded for our perseverance and persistence.