Wednesday in the Third Week of Lent, March 6, 2024

Matthew 5, 17-19

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven. But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”

The Pharisees saw no valid approach to the Law than theirs.  The Pharisaic movement had begun when certain Jews, zealous for the Law during a time in which their Greek rulers tried to forcefully Hellenize them, outlawing circumcision, for instance.  These zealous Jews banded together and studied the Law in order to understand how they were to live by it.  Without the priests to help them in this, they came to decide that they should adopt for themselves the rules that pertained to the priests working in the Temple as though the world itself were God’s Temple.  All well and good, but with the end of Greek rule they began to think that their way constituted the only way for all the Jews, and they began to teach and to enforce this among their brethren.  For an equivalent we might think of Trappist monks leaving their monasteries and insisting that a Christian had to live by their religious rule, including maintaining periods of silence during the day, and abstention from eating meat.  

When the Lord came, he refused to abide by the peculiar ideas of the Pharisees regarding such things as the almost constant daily ritual washings and their own ideas about the Sabbath.  For this reason the Pharisees told the people that Jesus wanted to “abolish” the Law.  The truth was quite the reverse: he had come to complete or “fulfill” the Law.  We might think of an artist painting a portrait.  Before the artist begins to paint, he outlines the figure before him.  When the artist is satisfied with the outline, he paints, and a skilled artist can produce a wonderful semblance of the model.  The Law, for all its detail, amounted to an outline of how God wanted his people to live.  He gives them only an outline because this is the time before grace.  The precepts of the Law were in accord with those of natural law, such as that against murder, which anyone could obey even without grace.  God gave the Israelites this Law in order to prepare them for Law under grace which would lead to salvation.

Jesus came to fulfill the old Law, to complete the painting.  For example, he takes the commandment against murder and completes it so that the Law now prohibits rage and unbridled anger against one’s neighbor.  Only with grace can we obey this fulfilled — “filled out” — commandment.  Likewise, the commandment against adultery is fulfilled by revealing it as an injunction against lust, which, again, can only be obeyed with the help of God’s grace.

The Lord Jesus declares that, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.”  He means to say that his Passion, Death, and Resurrection will send grace gushing down on us from heaven, accessible to those are washed in the waters of Baptism.  He also means that besides the fulfillment of the moral law, the laws regarding sacrifices will be fulfilled at that time, with the end of the sacrifice of animals, the sign of his own Sacrifice for the redemption of the world.