As a people, we have been given the Lords Commandments, and what is needed to live our lives in such a way that we are following the will of God and will be found pleasing to Him on the day we are judged by Him. The laws that He gave us do not change, nor should they, because they are timeless in their relevance. What we as people develop to try to add to them, or to modify them, is almost without exception flawed, and very often full of the follies of mortal men who are too caught up in their worldliness to be attempting such things. The laws we have been given by God on the other hand, are flawless because they have been provided by Him who can read mind and heart, and who is the source of all wisdom. Only God himself can provide us with anything more than what was originally given by Himself.
In our first reading, we hear a caution from our Lord against our trying to manipulate the commandments which he has given us. To neither add nor subtract from the perfection which was already created with the full knowledge of God as to the people’s needs, and their abilities to successfully follow them. The trouble is, the people pretty much either ignored, or lost sight of this, as the codex of Mosaic law had some 603 additional entries added to it. Many of these were nearly impossible for any, but the most privileged to carry out successfully because of the burden of resources that were required in order to do so. These laws of men placed the people very often in a hopeless state, and one that they had to shoulder as a tremendous burden to them. That was never what God intended for his people, and yet those whose job it was to guide the people in His ways and to carry out His will were the very ones who created these burdensome human laws. The sad part is that it came about through what were often good intentions. The desire was to please God by offering Him what they thought would be appealing to Him through various offerings of material goods for the expiation of sins, and to show deep reverence for Him. Somewhere though, in their pursuit of this, and perhaps with the influence of human arrogance as part of the equation, they lost sight of His commandments to the point that adherence to their own formulated laws sometimes eclipsed what God had decreed. We seem to suffer from a similar mentality today. We have decided that the relevance of God’s laws is questionable in our “modern” society, and we try to develop our own laws to address what we see as something that the one who created heaven and earth, and our very selves, could not have anticipated – yeah right. The gifts of knowledge, including the law, came to us in perfection. If we truly carried out God’s commandments in both the word and the spirit, we would find that there is nothing they do not address, and there is no social, moral, or theological issue that is beyond them.
In the conversation that our Lord had with the pharisee’s, who were the politicians / legislators as well as religious leaders of the day, the above points are perfectly illustrated. While it can be a good thing to make a habit and follow the tradition of something as simple as washing one’s hands, when taken to extremes it can easily backfire to the point where it no longer benefits man in the intended way. Jesus disciples were acting out of necessity in not washing their hands, they had likely been without food for quite a while, and equally as likely did not have the facilities to wash their hands at that point. Yet this is all that the pharisees keyed in on. Not the fact that there were people in need of food to simply sustain themselves, not the fact that they needed to be on guard against the greater sins that can come from within, only that their precious traditions (for all intents and purposes laws) were not being observed. This was done in many respects so that it developed, a subtle point of control that like so many others could be used to ingrain a sense of obedience in the people. That same control mindset could easily be used to guide the people toward executing things that their rulers felt important, even if at some level it did not agree with the moral awareness and will of the common man. Case in point, when we hear in the Gospels about how the rulers used their influence to incite the people to riot and insist on Jesus’ crucifixion when he was before Pilate and about to be exonerated, we can easily see how far this can go. The same holds true to us today, when we are faced with a leadership that is passing legislation or using the resources of the people to accomplish things that go against our most basic morals and beliefs. Again, as an example, there is no question of what our Lords opinion would be of those who slaughter his creations. Whether they are the most vulnerable among us – prebirth or very elderly, or perhaps those who share the misfortune to live in a less developed part of the world that we use only for exploiting its resources with no thought to the impact this has on its people. The examples of the way we now seem to callously compromise humanity are numerous, but they share one common element – they exist because we are being led to view the human person as something within a societal construct, rather than someone who was created by, and in the image of, God. Yet there are those in our leadership who do nothing to stop this and feign their own moral distaste for such policies and acts, while continuing to vote in favor of their existence. It cannot all be laid at the feet of our leadership, we placed them there, if we as a people continue to allow this to happen by electing them knowing their stance through their voting record, we are complicit, and we must ask ourselves do we also really want to be seen by our Lord as those who honor Him with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him? We have what we need to make proper decisions in every instance. We have the gift of God’s commandments to live by, and we have been granted a moral sense of direction that if we allow it to do its job will guide us when we follow it in humility, and not let our own intellect be our sole decision maker. That is not to say that we do not use the gift of the intellect that God has granted us, that would be wasting a precious gift. We simply need to temper our thoughts and ideas with a beautiful and humble acceptance of our own limitations and God’s conversely infinite wisdom.
Podcast Link
The Deacons Bench 