Father Stephen P. KelleyWhile explaining basic principles of Christianity to an elderly tribal chieftain, a missionary was stressing the “don’ts” more than the “do’s.” “You mean I must not take my friends’ wives?” clarifies the chieftain. “That’s right!” said the missionary. “And not steal their goats and cattle?” The missionary nodded. “And not kill warring chieftains?” queried the chieftain again. “Yes!” replied the missionary. “In that case,” concluded the chieftain, “I can be a good Christian, because I am too old to do any of those things.”
We often reduce Christianity to a long list of acts that we must or must not do, forgetting that the essence of Christianity is the ‘spirit’ behind them. I remember one of the Catholic authors I was reading saying, “It completely changed my view of the moral law when I realized that God wasn’t just revealing what kind of acts we should or shouldn’t do, but more importantly what kind of people we are being formed to be, how our hearts and lives need to be, to live in the kingdom of heaven.”
It’s often a general impression that the Old Testament had all these oppressive laws, and Jesus came and freed us from all that, making them looser and easier. That’s right and wrong.
It’s wrong in the sense we see in our gospel reading. Jesus transforms the law from not just being a condition of outward behaviors, to actually be a condition of inward disposition. The Jews were instructed not to kill one another. Christians are instructed that to hate one another is to kill one another in our mind, heart, and soul. The Jews were instructed not to commit adultery. Christians are instructed that to look at another person with lust is to commit adultery in our mind, heart, and soul. The Jews were instructed not to take an oath lightly, and carry through with an oath. Christians are instructed that their word is their bond; let our yes mean yes, let our no mean no, and do what we say. In other words, we are as responsible for what we say, as we are for what we do; there must be integrity; because both flow from the single source within us.
The beginning of our gospel reading undermines the mistaken thought that there are two separate laws, one for the Old Testament God and one for the New Testament God. There is one God, and one truth, one goodness, one law.
This of course reminds me, and probably you, too, if you saw it, in the Chosen, when Jesus is in the Nazareth synagogue. The rabbi accuses Jesus of blasphemy for claiming divine prerogatives, and says that Jesus will need to die for what he said, according the law of Moses. And Jesus closes the distance to the rabbi and says, “I AM the law of Moses.”
There are two main differences between the old law and the new law: the old law was centered in the society of Israel; this is how to live justly and rightly in the society of God’s people. The first line of our first reading, from the Old Testament author Sirach, gives the stark conviction that, “If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and they will save you.” But as they found out, it’s virtually impossible to do that. The law couldn’t save them because they couldn’t keep the law; our fallen nature was too distorted, too dark, too selfish and doubting and stubborn to be saved by the commandments of God’s law.
But even in the Old Testament God said through the prophets that in the promised new covenant, he would give his people new hearts and a new law, hearts of flesh in place of their hardened hearts of stone; and the law would not be written in stone, but would be written in the flesh of their new hearts. The new law is centered not among the people, but within the people, in the heart of each person; not just how to live out the law toward others, but how to live in the law from the heart. The second difference between the old law and the new law is that in the new covenant we have grace, we have the power of God’s life within us, his love within us, his power within us, because Jesus united our humanity to his divinity; he wed that unity in his own nature, consummated that unity in his death; elevated that unity to divine glory in his ascension; and empowered us to live out that unity in the Holy Spirit.
The new law is not the replacement of the old law, but the perfection of the law. If you are angry with your brother, you liable to judgment. What is it to be angry with your brother? Anger itself is just an emotion; but when you consent to the anger with your free will, with your mind and heart, you are then liable to judgment. If you say ‘Raqa’ to your brother, you will be answerable to the Sanhedrin. Now your consent, your thought, has broken out from within you, and has entered into the community as your word against your brother, against his dignity; and so the community has laws to govern the consequences. If you say, “You fool!” not just to your brother but out in the open, in the public forum; your anger is now a public act, you have affected, afflicted, society, with the full corruption of the uncharitable, the unholy, thought, word, and deed of your anger, and so you will be liable to fiery Gehenna, the everlasting punishment. Thoughts, which become words, which become deeds. If you had controlled your anger and your response gracefully at the beginning, it would not have taken control over you.
Now let’s take on the fun part. First, “everyone who looks at (anyone) with lust has already committed adultery in his (or her) heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.” As we just got finished saying, we are responsible for our allowing or limiting temptations to be nurtured in our hearts.
I recently read that there are three stages of a temptation: the presentation; the delight; the consent. When Jesus was tempted in the desert, he rejected the temptations as soon as they were presented. If you have temptation toward a sin, that’s the presentation. If you reject it when it first appears, you’ll strengthen your will to resist that temptation, and it will be less of a threat in the future. If you consider the temptation and think, ok, that’s kind of nice, that’s the second stage, the delight in a sin, yellow flags and lights flashing, danger Will Robinson, danger. Because after that you consent to the temptation, and then you’ve made the sin yours, first in thought, which then eventually leaks out into words and then deeds, and then it exerts control and becomes addictive.
If your eyes happen upon a sight that stirs up sinful lust, squash that lust immediately. That’s your responsibility. Your “response-ability.” You are responsible for the effect within you of your temptations, your internal movements and desires. At the same time, you should be aware, and have a responsibility, to not intend—to not desire—to provoke sinful temptations in others.
Every morning I shave off the hair from the top of my head, and put on all this padding around my midsection, because naturally when I wake up in the morning, I look like a Greek god. But in my love for others around me, I don’t want to stir up temptation and lust, so I need to be conscience about how I dress and how I present myself; not wearing skin revealing or form revealing clothes—not as a person created in God’s image with God-given dignity, not as a Christian called to holiness, and especially not gathered in Church where we are called to reverence and worship. Not because it would be my fault if someone responded sinfully, and not because of shaming, but because of my dignity, and because of my love for others, I don’t want them to be sinful, I want them to be holy, I want to be surrounded by holiness. So, I want to be mindful of not intending to present an occasion of sin. I know you’re still trying to imagine me resembling a Greek god, and I just said, I don’t want to be a temptation, so stop that.
And lastly, divorce. In the original Old Testament law, divorce was not an option. But men would then have their wives killed, and so to protect wives, as Jesus says, Moses allowed divorce because of their hardness of heart. But it was not so in the beginning. It’s now how we were made and created to live. We’re made for love: for stable, profound, free, total, faithful, fruitful love, by which we unite ourselves body and spirit until death do us part. There are other kinds of love than nuptial love, that get confused for nuptial love, and those loves can also be powerful, beautiful experiences of profound love. The Greeks had four different words for love. But here we’re focusing on nuptial love, man and woman in the marital embrace, as an icon of unconditional, persevering divine love. This is written into our very nature by our Creator, and attested to in natural forms since our beginning, and elevated to a sacrament by Christ in the scriptures and in the Church.
And so as Christ teaches the Church in our Gospel, as we were saying, divorce was not part of the original law. That’s actually in Matthew 19, we’re still back at Matthew 5. It says here, “whoever divorces his wife, unless the marriage is unlawful, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” So first of all, what we have here as the word “unlawful” is the very confusing Greek word “pornea,” which is the source of our English word, “pornography.” It’s a widely variant, hard to strictly translate bucket for all sorts of sexual impurity and sin, and the best way to translate it changes depending on the context and situation. You’ll see widely different interpretations of this verse. But that’s not what’s the most interesting. What’s the most interesting is that even after a bill of divorce, the implication is that a divorce is not the termination of the marriage. The scriptures here make it clear that if a man and woman come together after a divorce, it is still adultery. Because marriage is immutable, it is an irrevocable, solemn vow. And if lawfully made, it is binding upon one’s whole life. Our modern definition of the word divorce specifically means an end of a marriage. But to Jesus, God incarnate, not so much. You can be separated—and the Church clearly teaches that marriages can enter a time where separation is necessary, but that’s not divorce.
But it is this exception in Matthew—”unless it is unlawful”—by which the Church exercises her authority of declaring a marriage to have been made lacking something necessary in law. This is called an annulment, or technically a declaration of nullity, ruling that a marriage is not sacramentally valid. A divorce (in modern terms) says a marriage existed and then ceased existing. An annulment says the marriage never sacramentally existed. I’ve had people in invalid second marriages that swear up and down that they were absolutely in the right to divorce their first spouse and get remarried, and what does all this now mean for them? Well, it means their first marriage has to be declared null, and that their second marriage has to be made sacramentally valid, and they might be absolutely correct that their first marriage was a trainwreck and their second a dream, but they’re still bound by their first vow of marriage unless it is declared unlawful, or null. And that doesn’t mean any children born of that first marriage are illegitimate. A sacramentally invalid marriage is still a civilly legal marriage, and so it doesn’t affect the legitimacy of children.
So… last things same as the first things. It’s not just about the outward action; it’s about the inward reality. Jesus didn’t liberalize and relax the law, he made it harder, he made it not just about our actions, but dependent on the purity of the heart’s desires and intentions. But then, he also gave us his heart, his wellspring of divine love, to unite our hearts with his, that we may have a richer share in his life, a more just and loving relationship with one another, and a deeper relationship with God our Father.
(Father Kelley is the pastor of St. Patrick Parish in York and Sacre Heart of Jesus Parish in Spring Grove.)
By Father Stephen P. Kelley, Special to The Witness
