Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: rules

  • Thursday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    This week we have been hearing in our first readings from the Acts of the Apostles, about the controversy concerning the Gentiles.  As the Church grew and grew, many people from all walks of life began to turn to the Lord.  That’s the kind of thing we want to have happen.  But as the Church grew, it became time to clarify which traditions were just traditions and which really pertained to the faith.  How much of the Judaic faith was really necessary for salvation in Christ?

    Many of the traditions had to go.  Jesus himself chastised the Pharisees and Scribes often enough for the parts of the law that they rigorously defended when they should long ago have been dismissed as scrupulous and irrelevant.  But not everything would have to go.  Certainly there were tenets of Judaic faith that should and do apply to Christians too.  We retain a lot of Judaic faith in our own practice of religion even to this day: the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, even the berekah prayer form is part of our Liturgy right now.  So the task for the Church was to untangle what needed to stay, and what had to go.

    The blueprint for them is as it is for us: the Gospel.  What traditions pertained to the great love that Christ brought us and called us to live for God and neighbor?  Those we should keep.  What traditions merely amounted to undue burden on our brothers and sisters and became irrelevant in the light of the Gospel?  Those would have to go.

    We’ll see in the coming days that the Church figured this out.  We know they did, or we would probably not be around today.  But we still have to figure it out sometimes, I think.  As we call Catholics to come home, we have to figure out how to welcome them back.  Maybe they have been put off long ago by irrelevant rules that amounted to undue burden.  We have to teach them what parts of our faith are Gospel values and put aside those things that are not.

    Controversies like the one with which the early Church wrestled teach us things.  We are forced to examine our faith and keep it lively and fresh, instead of letting it grow dim and lifeless.  Keeping our eye on the Gospel will help us to welcome people home, to the Church and to the family of God.

  • Friday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today's readings

    “There is something greater than the temple here.”

     

    Jesus uses this kind of argument with the Pharisees very often, because they are always missing the significance of what Jesus is doing.  They are among those who refuse to see that a man like him could possibly be the Messiah, God’s anointed one, the One who is to come.  And so they instead continue to ponder all the tiniest implications of the Law and look out for anyone who might be living contrary to their interpretation of what the Law meant.  And since Jesus had a very different idea of the meaning of the Law, that meant he and his disciples were always running afoul of the Pharisees.

     

    “There is something greater than the temple here.”

     

    In today’s Gospel story, the Pharisees are supposedly defending the law that the Sabbath was a day of rest, in accordance with the Third Commandment.  What the disciples were doing though, was to provide food for their own hunger.  The disciples weren’t rich men, and so we can probably surmise that they depended on the generosity of those with means who had been touched by Jesus’ message or ministry.  The Law itself provided that grain in the fields that was not taken up by the first pass of the harvest was to be left in the field for the poor.  But the Pharisees mostly didn’t care about the poor, so they wouldn’t have seen that application.  But even worse than that, they didn’t see that Jesus was inaugurating a whole new Law – one that God always intended – one that provided for the needs of people rather than just the minutiae of the law.

     

    “There is something greater than the temple here.”

     

    So we have to hear this too.  Because there is always the temptation to defend the rules instead of seeing how the rules apply to people.  Even our own Canon law, with its many rules and regulations, provides that the most important part of the law is that it is to assist in the salvation of God’s people.  The law is meaningless in and of itself.  Law is there to help people on the way to salvation, to help people to know Christ, who is certainly greater than the temple, greater than the law.  And so, whenever we’re tempted to bind ourselves with our own interpretation of the law or rules of the Church, we should instead submit ourselves to the Gospel, which is the only authentic interpreter of the Law.  There is always something greater than the temple here.