Today, in the United States there is so much controversy about who is an American citizen, and even about who can become an American citizen. It is a painful period in our history. In the time of St. Matthew, the evangelist of today’s gospel, there was tremendous controversy over who can become a Christian—was it only for Jews? What started as an all-Jewish movement of the Spirit after Pentecost quickly began to encounter non-Jews impelled by Jewish Christian preachers (such as Paul) and moved by the same Holy Spirit to become themselves followers of Christ. The Jewish Christians found the idea of eating, praying and associating with non-Jewish Christians repulsive as it was against their traditions to eat and voluntarily associate with the “unclean” gentiles—they still thought of themselves as Jews. This occurred even though all these people, Jews and gentiles alike, were saved by the same Lord Jesus into the Church, which was seen by Jewish Christians as the fulfillment of their Jewish religion. Today’s Gospel touches on what this “fulfillment” meant to Jewish Christians and the first gentile Christians.
All Jews of Christ’s time never associated with gentiles; so how could they now begin to do so at this turning point in their history as some of them became Christians and gentiles wished to join them without embracing Jewish practices, particularly male circumcision. To many Jewish Christians of the time this was no case of “much ado about nothing”: it was a matter of obedience to God and of their Jewish identity: the gentile converts must, in their opinion, embrace Jewish circumcision and the Torah with its 613 positive and negative commandments. They insisted that they become Jews in order to be fully Christians. Gentile converts to Christianity looked upon the Jewish practice of male circumcision as a horrible mutilation of the human body—as did all gentiles. You can see how heated the controversy between the Judaizing Christians and the gentile Christians was in the exasperation of St. Paul, who wanted the gentile converts to be free of the burden of circumcision and the Law of Moses. He wrote to his Galatian gentile converts who were being pressured by Judaizing Christians this egregious remark, “Would that those who are upsetting you might also castrate themselves!” Here he must have taken a deep breath. Paul calms down two verses after this outburst and writes that the “whole law is fulfilled in one statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
In the opening verses of today’s gospel, Jesus seems to hold to the opinion of the radical Judaizers. He says to his disciples (including us) “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. Amen… until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter (a jot) or the smallest part of a letter (a tittle) will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” This passage has proven to be one of the most confusing in the Bible. It seems to put the teaching of Jesus in complete conflict with that of St. Paul about freedom from circumcision and the Law. However. both Jesus and Paul are correct.
Indeed, even as Jesus speaks with the authority of God himself in the Sermon on the Mount, the Law and the Prophets are being fulfilled in the very person, words and deeds of Jesus, the Son of God, the son of David, the Son of man, the Prophet of Prophets. Nothing of Genesis or the history of Israel, with its great prophet Moses and the reception of the Torah or Law, nothing of all the prophets and kings and men of wisdom, is forgotten, nothing; but all of it comes to a magnificent fulfillment that transcends, but does not disregard, the Old Covenant as we now in Jesus move on to the New. We know that salvation is from the Jews, namely, in Jesus Christ, a descendent of King David and Savior of the World. Time and time again leading up to today’s Sermon on the Mount (and throughout the Gospel of Matthew for that matter), the author shows how events in or surrounding the life of Jesus are the fulfillment of passages, prophecies in the Bible pointing towards him as the Messiah and King of the Jews. The gospel begins declaring Jesus to be the longed-for Messiah (in Greek, Christ) as well as the son of David the King and the son of Abraham the father of the Jewish people. A long genealogy roots Jesus in the entire history of Israel. The narrative of the virgin birth of Jesus is, for example, explained as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.” A quote that makes explicit the divinity and humanity of Jesus. This is the pattern Matthew follows throughout to show that Jesus is solidly rooted in the salvation history of the Jews and fulfills it. In the temptation scene, Jesus himself quotes the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” In the very next chapter of Matthew these words of Jesus take on a new and fuller meaning as we hear the word of God from the mouth of Jesus.
After the temptation scene, Jesus selects his first disciples and then goes up the mountain to deliver the famous sermon in which he does indeed modify the jots and tittles and even corrects passages of the Torah or fulfills their meaning. He does so with the authority of God Himself who gave the first Torah to the Jews through Moses. What comes forth from Jesus has the authority of what comes forth from the mouth of God. We are being called in the Sermon on the Mount to live by his every word, but not in a legalistic way as it was understood by the contemporaries of Jesus, but rather in a way that involves personal union with Jesus who is more than someone who gives a new Torah—he gives us a new life in Him. Pope Benedict XVI remarks on this that in the case of Jesus, “It is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself and his Torah. …If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does--universalizing the essential content of the Torah and thus truly ‘fulfilling’ it.” ( Jesus of Nazareth)
In the examples given today we see the way he rewrites the Torah, making it a matter of the heart, not the written law. If the Torah mediated by Moses says DO NOT KILL, that of Jesus says OVERCOME YOUR ANGER WITH RECONCILIATION impelled by the heartfelt beatitudes of meekness and love of justice. Furthermore, he says that reconciliation and true worship go hand in hand: a teaching of Jesus dear to the heart of our father St. Benedict. Where the Torah of Moses says YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, Jesus says OVERCOME YOUR LUST WITH GOD’S GIFT OF PURITY OF HEART. Where the Torah of Moses allows for divorce for even paltry matters, Jesus establishes marriage as a lifelong bond of love and fidelity between husband and wife in which THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. In this Jesus hearkens back to the original Torah teaching about marriage as found in the Book of Genesis. It is not a male dominated institution in which the wife can be sent away like a servant fired for burning the roast. Again, it is through the purity of heart, the humility and love that are the gifts of the Holy Spirit of the Risen Jesus that marriages can succeed. Where the Torah of Moses says MAKE GOOD TO THE LORD ALL THAT YOU VOW, Jesus says DO NOT SWEAR AT ALL. His point is that if you truly follow him, you will become a person of such integrity that YOUR YES WILL MEAN YES AND YOUR NO WILL MEAN NO. Swearing to High Heaven is from the evil one.
St. Thomas Aquinas writes that the New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out into our hearts. This New Law is a Law of Freedom, but not a freedom that gives license to the impulses of the flesh, but one that gives us the power to become other Christs. After the Council of Jerusalem which ended the requirements of circumcision and of the acceptance of the Torah, and as Jewish Christians grew in Christ’s gift of himself in the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit, and as many new gentile converts came to be seen not as barbarous invaders, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord, in time more and more Christian synagogues matured as Christian Churches in which there were no longer gentiles and Jews at odds with each other, but one body in Christ.
Our monastic community here on this little mount is composed of monks from every inhabited continent in the world, except for Australia, composed of every age group from the early thirties to the high nineties, composed of every ethnic and cultural background—yet we live together in Christ as one. This is a gift, a witness, we give in the Church and to our divided nation—may our country become once again through the work of the Holy Spirit and the prayers of our patroness Immaculate Mary what we pledged about every morning as little children: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Yes, withliberty and justice for all! Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Let us now receive the King of the Kingdom in our reception of the Eucharist, the first fruit of which is the unity of the Body of Christ.
