My Dear People, 

Many people thought that since Jesus was kind and generous, especially in the way he dealt with people, that he was going to relax the law. Conversely, Jesus did not come to relax the law but to make it stricter, and he included the interior disposition which the Mosaic law did not contain. For example, Moses allowed people to be divorced. Jesus says that if one divorces his wife he causes her to commit adultery, pure and simple. In another passage where it says you shall not kill, Jesus goes further and says whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.  Jesus goes as far as saying whoever calls his brother “you fool” is liable to the fires of Gehenna. This shows that Jesus came to make clear what the commandments say and their intent. 

Yes, Jesus taught us the law of love and the beatitudes which are positive. This means we must have a humble heart, and a clean heart. We must be willing to do what God wants from us, not to the least, but to the most. 

In order to accomplish the law the way Jesus wants, it must be with the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is given not to excuse us from the law or give us a license to sin but rather to empower us to fulfill God’s law perfectly, not merely externally but also internally. Jesus’ teaching in this passage tends, after all, to direct our attention to the interior disposition (like anger) that are the root of external actions (like murder). 

Jesus’s moral standards are much more demanding than those of the Pharisees. The Pharisees tended to be concerned only with the exterior performance of the law, and they became expert in developing contorted and convoluted legal chains of reasoning in order to circumvent the demands of divine law. In particular, they permitted divorce and remarriage for any number of reasons, with some rabbis saying that any cause at all sufficed for a divorce, even the mere fact that a man found a younger, more attractive woman. 

Jesus was radically opposed to this effort to extrapolate legal reasoning in order to get around the clear demands of morality and divine law. He warns his followers: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” It must exceed their righteousness because their righteousness was largely external and relied on exterior actions in accord with the traditional interpretations of the old law. It was not a righteousness motivated by love. It was a righteousness that said, “What is the least I have to do and the most I can get away with and still not formally break the divine command?” Jesus’s attitude, like the attitude of the psalmist, is rather, “What is most pleasing to God? That is the only thing I desire to do.”

It is not easy to follow Jesus’s laws—in fact, it is impossible unless we share his Spirit. Then, we can rejoice with St. Paul that “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” 

We receive the Holy Spirit at Baptism and Confirmation. Let us pray that the Eucharist will replenish the Holy Spirit’s love in our hearts, that we may love and not resent the law of God and see it for what it truly is: the way of peace and communion with the Lord. 

Yours in Christ, 

Fr. Vincent Clemente

Some of this passage is from “the “Word of the Lord”  by Dr. John Bergsma