Lenten Reflection: Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent

Both of today’s readings (Deut. 4:1, 5-9; Mt 5:17-19) bring up the topic of law.Not, obviously, just any law but God’s law, the commandments of God.These readings, then, afford us the opportunity to look a bit into our relationship with ‘law’.I mean, it gives us the chance to reflect on how we feel and think about law.

I would bet that most of us look at law as a necessary evil.After all, there are deviants in the human community, and to somehow keep these folks from causing irreparable harm to the community, we need law.And as long as the notion of law stays there, applied the folks who somehow need to be restrained by it, we can continue to look at as just a necessary evil.

But when it comes to God’s law, the commandments, we know we can’t just keep it there.Somehow, we know, God’s commands apply to us as much as to anyone else.And this is what I think we need to really reflect on.How do I see those commands of God?What sort of ‘stance’ do I take to the laws of God?

Here again, I think many of us are rather ambivalent to God’s law.We are, for the most part, because generally within us as modern persons there exist a sort of deep seated resistance to anything imposed upon us from the outside.What most of us treasure above all, if we really reflected on it, is our autonomy.We simply like to have absolute control over our own selves, what we do and think, what we might choose to not do or not think.There is a natural wall of defense that goes up very quickly whenever we sense someone insisting that we simply ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ do this or that.Put simply, most of us simply do not want to be told how we should live!

How different is the perspective on law that is found in Sacred Scripture.Notice what Moses says about it in that first reading.“Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you to observe, that you may live” (v. 1).Law is the way, it is the door to life!Hear what Jesus says, “But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven” (v. 19).To be receptive and obedient is to open oneself to true greatness!This same attitude is contained in today’s psalm.“God has proclaimed his word to Jacob, his statutes and his ordinances to Israel.He has not done thus for any other nation; his ordinances he has not made known to them” (147:19-20).The greatness of Israel is that the have the law, their true splendor rests in being a people of God’s law!Here law is looked upon as the way to true life, true greatness, true respectability.

And why not, if one shares their perspective.If God is in fact the creator of all that is—which of course is just what we claim to believe, modern autonomous person or not—then why would it not be an incredible gift to have him speak to us and tell us precisely what life is all about anyway.Ah, there it is.That is the heart of God’s law.It unveils for us the truth of our existence.The truth of what it is to be fully alive, to be fully free in our relationships.The law is not, as so often experienced, about obligation but about liberation!To know and follow the law of God is to know and live in the truth of a fully alive humanity!

In St. Thomas Aquinas’ great Summa Theologica, he deals in Book I with the truth about God in himself and then God coming to us.In Book II he describes the human person’s return to God.It is the book of virtues.By fashioning, in grace, a life of virtue, we make our return to God.The end of this return is what Thomas would describe as beatitude—absolute, unmitigated joy in the presence of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Law and virtue are about just this beatitude.

There is an Irish Dominican (had to have some reference to the Irish on this feast of St. Patrick) who teaches here at the Angelicum in Rome.He was, one day, speaking of Thomas’ vision of the law and virtue as our human way to beatitude.At one point, just as he mentioned that for Thomas the moral life was all about beatitude, he looked up and said to us, “Ah, if only the moral theologians over the last 400 years might have mentioned the fact that morality was about happiness we would not be in the shape we are in today.”