“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.”
This morning we continue our reading from
the Sermon on the Mount. Like Moses before him, Jesus goes up a “mountain”,
from which he instructs his disciples in his new law. His is in many ways a very different kind of
law, but one he is at pains to show does not abolish the old law but fulfills
it.
So far Jesus has laid out for his disciples
a positive instruction about discipleship centered on beatitude and mission. In
the Beatitudes, he laid out man’s vocation to beatitude and showed the path to
the fulfillment of man’s natural desire for happiness. In them, we see outlined
the face of Christ. All who strive to embody them undergo a process of becoming
formed in his image and citizens of his kingdom. They become the “salt of the
earth” and “light of the world”, as we heard last week.
But now he makes a shift and delimits his
teaching by setting a negative boundary for their faith and behavior. He
presents what they are not to believe and what they are not to do. He has not
come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and anyone who breaks the least of
these commandments will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Yet if their
understanding of righteousness does not surpass that of the scribes and the
Pharisees they will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
In this way, he gives the faith of the
disciples shape. His goal is to create a clear and unambiguous unity between
why he has come and what they are to believe and do. Only in this accord can
they attain their vocation to beatitude and “be salt of the earth” and “light of
the world”. And so he lays out these poles in order for them to grow in their
capacity to understand his nature and follow him. Just as he is the fulfillment
of all that is good, so there are many things that he is not, and the disciples
must have a clear idea of these boundaries.
I have not come to abolish the law or the
prophets. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, these were holy, good, and spiritual. For they contained within them the Spirit of the Father. This original
goodness can in no way be dissolved by the Son, for he likewise carries the
same Spirit within himself, and his will and that of the Father are one. It
cannot be that all this is simply to be canceled out. On the other hand, Jesus
can in no way be reduced to a simple continuation of the old, for he is the
Father’s final, crowning act. As such he gives meaning to everything that went
before him. Everything that went before and contained the Spirit of the Father and
strove in its own way for the fulfillment of his will, finds its fulfillment
in him. Yet all of these were imperfect and so they fell short. But Christ
takes all of these previous attempts in their failure, lifts them up, and
fulfills them in the failure of the Cross, a fulfillment that they could not possibly
attain in themselves, and which no one was able to foresee in them. Until his
coming, they remained merely fragments incapable of attaining the whole of the
Father’s will.
Although he is the only perfect fulfillment
of the will of the Father in the world, he does not look down on all the limited
but genuine strivings that preceded him. Rather, in all of it he recognizes and
discovers the good that comes from the Father, and bows reverently over
everything because it is an expression of the Father's will and pointed toward
him. In all of it, however humble, or time-bound, he rejoices in his discovery
of the love of the Father that has prepared the way for him.
Jesus gave all of it the visible fullness
of his sonship so that all may share his joy of seeing how it points back to
the Father as its source and discloses his loving care and attentiveness to his
people and his entire creation. In Jesus, every word of the law and every
judgment of the prophets finds a new life and appears in a new unity.
Jesus looks to pour his life into every letter
and the smallest part of a letter of the old covenant in order to give it
visibility and fulfillment. But if he were only the fulfillment of the old
prophecy, he would be an end, a conclusion. But this is not the case. Rather, his
earthly life is itself prophetic fulfillment, and therefore always a beginning,
always new. So in Jesus, the prophecies of the old covenant are taken up and used
as a starting point to explain his own nature. An explanation that is not
exhausted with his death and resurrection. After his ascension, in glory, he
continues to unfold the riches of his earthly life until heaven and earth pass
away. The love of the Lord is utterly extravagant and prodigal and the same
passes over into his fulfillment. From him flows forth an excess of fulfillment,
like a bubbling, gushing overflowing spring, sparkling in the light of the sun,
that will not be spent until all things have taken place. His fulfillment is
such that he needs not only his earthly life but a whole new dimension in which
to pour it out. This will be the time of the Church, in her, he will carry out
his work through the gift of the Spirit. In this new dimension, as everything
in the old covenant was useful for him in his earthly life, so everything in
his earthly life is useful to him for the continuation of his work on earth
from his life in glory. The old is not useful to him simply as old, but only insofar
as he has made it new and capable of use for breathing new life into all that
is to come.
This is how the Lord redeems, by
fulfilling. But just as he himself places his work in an inseparable connection
with all that preceded it, which was sent by the Father, so he also wants to
show how all those who are to cooperate in his work and his mission are to
relate to these earlier missions. Jesus’s fulfillment is essentially shaped by
tradition, a tradition that he has taken up anew into his own being and set in
line with it. Made new in him, he passes on the tradition that he inherited to
his Church and to all the vocations, charisms, and missions working in it. As
Christ’s disciples, we possess the old in him and honor it by honoring him.
Our model for our participation in this
task of fulfilling the old in the new is given to us by the Church in the
Liturgy. Here we have the interaction of the old and new covenants working together
to disclose the living Word, Jesus Christ, who is present in word and sacrament
not as a past event but as a living reality. Our task is to allow him, by our
prayer, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the infused theological virtues
of faith, hope, and love, to so conform us to himself, that as he, the Son, came
in the flesh to show the Father how good and right his creation was, to prove
to him in love how much the laws and the prophecies the Father gave to his
people were right and fitting, so now, in this assembly of people the Father
has given him, may we likewise give him glory.
We give the Father glory and honor when we
fulfill the teachings of the Son, when we live the Beatitudes, when we allow him
to pour his life into everything that we do, when we strive to be faithful to
the commandments in today’s Gospel: not giving way to anger; being reconciled
to those we have wronged, living chastely, honoring God in our speech, and so
on; when we search for the Lord in the Scriptures and our Cistercian patrimony
in our lectio and study; when we appropriate our Monastic conversatio in its
integrity, always rejoicing in the divine goodness in everything. And when we
receive him in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the source and summit
of our Christian life. So let us now honor him in the celebration of this gift.
The enclosure of the monastery in an etching by Margaret Walters, (1924 - 1971). Today's homily by Father Timothy.
