Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 15, 15-20; 1 Cor. 2, 6-10; Matt. 5, 17-37.
Faithfulness, like obedience, is always double-edged. If it is faithfulness to laws alien to our deepest desires, then it immediately smacks of imposition and it will be hard to keep. But faithfulness to things longed for and desired, gives peace of heart and makes one true to oneself. This, strictly speaking, is what religion is about. This is the novelty Jesus brought about in his time and still promises to whoever lets him in.
Simone Weil wrote: “If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire”. These great words of wisdom are today echoed to us both in the first reading from Ecclesiasticus and in what Jesus in the gospel is proposing to those who seek authenticity.
“If you wish”, we read in Ecclesiasticus, “you can keep the commandments”. But Jesus demands that our virtue goes deeper than that demanded of an exterior religious practice which may leave us untouched and unchanged. In Adult Faith, Diarmuid O’Murchu writes: “Every religion believes in a God of unconditional love. Yet that is not what first springs to mind when people think about faith or religion.”
Formal religion very often robs people of their more adult insight into how the divine works in our midst. It is virtue and character that should be the main concern of Christian living, not law enforcement. Yet the type of submission still endorsed by formal religion can hardly be seen as conducive to adult empowerment.
Today’s gospel is the continuation of the Sermon on the Mount and the gist of it all. It lays down the new direction Jesus is giving to a community of disciples being invited to venture beyond an older tradition that was its very source. If we look at the way we perpetuate our religion, and particularly the way we continue to perceive Christian living, it seems we have hardly noticed, two thousand years later, that there has been a rupture from the decalogue tradition to that of the Beatitudes.
We continue to uphold the Mosaic law for all ends and purposes as the focus of our relationship with the divine. So we still remain bound to enforcing the law rather than to discern the authority of the Scriptures in our lives that can bring healing and growth. Between the old Judaic tradition and the one inaugurated by Jesus, there is an oceanic difference.
Jesus himself clarifies that he is not abolishing the law but going further and beyond, digging deep inside us to help us connect with our true selves and with our deepest desires. Bringing the law to perfection, as Jesus says, does not mean making religion more legalistic.
Maturity and adulthood point beyond the law, not in the sense of ignoring it, but not to render life a mere lip service to the written word. Loving others wholeheartedly and worshipping God as creator can never be a duty. That can only flow from an abundant spirit in one’s heart.
It is an adoring heart that creates a true liturgy. Otherwise, our liturgies continue to be exterior practice, exhibitionistic and self-indulgent rather than God-oriented.
Jesus’ vision is radical. He calls for authenticity, which is what, at the end of the day, enhances our humanity. Jesus’ expectations may look greater than those of the decalogue. But it is his vision that mostly suits the depth of the human heart. Jesus, after all, was addressing people in his time who were content with surface worship that breeds only hypocrisy.
Jesus is taking to task the orderly rituals that can leave us wholly untouched by God’s love and proposing instead a religion of the heart which gravitates around an authentic relationship with God and with others. It is authenticity that makes of the heart a true temple of God. This subverts the order of things as we have always imagined them to be.
Jesus is dislocating true religion from where it was rooted and from being mainly focussed on temple practice to relocate it in a heart-to-heart talk that makes us all more capable of containing the divine in us, and hence of discerning more of God’s loving presence wherever it is perceived as an absence.