First Reading - 1 Kings 18:20-39
Gospel - Matthew 5:17-19
Today’s Gospel passage, taken from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, presents Jesus as giving the highest compliments to the Mosaic Law. These words of Jesus that Matthew reports touched the communities of converted Jews, helping them to overcome the criticism of the brothers of their own race who accused them, saying, “You are unfaithful to the Law of Moses.” Ironically, Jesus himself would be falsely condemned and crucified as a Lawbreaker. Jesus says that the Old Testament, as the word of God, has Divine authority and deserves total respect. The Mosaic Law was ultimately intended to help people honor God by practicing love. Its moral precepts are to be respected because they are, for the most part, specific, Divine-positive promulgations of the natural law. But Christians are not obliged to observe the legal and liturgical precepts of the Old Testament because they were laid down by God for a specific stage in Salvation History.
In Jesus’ time, the Law was understood differently by different groups of the Jews to be: 1) The Ten Commandments, 2) The Pentateuch, 3) The Law and the Prophets, or 4) The oral (Scribal) and the written Law. Jesus, and later Paul, considered the oral Law as a heavy burden on the people and criticized it, while honoring the Mosaic Law and the teachings of the prophets. At the time of Jesus, the Jews believed that the Torah (Law given to Moses) was the eternal, unchangeable, Self-Revelation of God. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that he did not come to destroy the Torah but to bring it to perfection by bringing out its inner meaning because He IS the ultimate self-Revelation of God, the Lawgiver. That is why the Council of Trent declared that Jesus was given to us, “not only as a Redeemer, in whom we are to trust, but also as a Lawgiver whom we are to obey.”
The first reading tells us a beautiful story of the victory of Yahweh over the Baal worshipers. The prophet Elijah challenges the people of Israel to stand strong in their faith in God and never allow their hearts to be deviated to worship Baal, a false god. The prophet Elijah demonstrates that Yahweh is the true God by offering a sacrifice to Him, and Yahweh, on His part, consumes the sacrifice by sending the fire. Seeing a marvelous thing, people repented for their fickle mind and believed in the true God. Thus, the prophet taught the people to keep their eyes fixed on the true God rather than be distracted by other allurements of the world.
Dear friends, Jesus teaches us today to remain faithful to the law. What is the law for us that Jesus speaks about? It's his teachings. We are to remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus. Those who faithfully carry out the teachings of Jesus and teach others to do so are considered great in the kingdom of heaven as is promised by Jesus himself. The teachings of Jesus are contained in the sacred scripture. Therefore, daily reading of the sacred scripture is a prerequisite for us to deepen our understanding of the teachings of Jesus. However, the first reading tells us that, in order to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus, we need to keep our eyes fixed on him; It means, we shouldn't allow ourselves to replace him with anything else or anybody else. If we keep Jesus as our sole treasure, we will always try to do what he has asked us to do.
Let's pray that we may remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus.
.jpeg)
0 Comments