Wednesday in the Tenth Week of Ordinary Time, June 9, 2021

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.”

From the Lord’s words, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill”, we can see that a constant accusation he faced was that he was preaching against the Law.  The Pharisees who taught their interpretation of the Law as the only way to understand it despised the preaching of Jesus both because he convincingly countered them and because they sensed that he was right.  We know this from the number of occasions on which he silenced them in debate.  

The Lord fulfilled the Law in that the Mosaic Law was itself a sign of the reality.  St. Paul, in the Letter to the Hebrews, calls it a “shadow”.  Thus, the Lord explains that the commandment against murder pertained to anger and hatred of another person, and that the commandment against adultery forbade even lustful thoughts.  Most of all, though, the fulfillment of the Law meant a new and eternal covenant to succeed the one inaugurated by God through Moses which had been broken by the Israelites.  God spoke of this through his Prophet Jeremiah: “Behold the days shall come, says the Lord, and I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, the covenant which they made void, and I had dominion over them, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 31, 31-32).  The Lord would seal this new covenant on the Cross with his Blood.

“Not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.”  Practices of the Law such as circumcision are no longer mandated, and were deemed by the Apostles not to be necessary for their Gentile converts, but they were also fulfilled by the Lord.  Circumcision, which made a boy a Jew, a member of the chosen people, is fulfilled by baptism, by which a person is reborn in Christ and made a member of the elect.  And the holy days such as the Passover are revealed in their true meaning by the Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus.  

“Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”  We who believe and belong to Jesus know the fullness of the Law and so are in a position to teach it to others who have no knowledge of it as well as those who have lapsed in its practice.  We do this in formal ways such as by helping with CCD and convert classes. We also do this informally through the example of our obeying in our daily lives the Law that Christ gives us.  The Christian is always teaching.