To Abolish the Law or Not

5 Epiphany A February 5, 2023
Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12) Psalm 112:1-9
1 Corinthians 2:1-11 Matt.5:13-20

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In the words of Jesus, he states that he did not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them.

But what does fulfilling the law and the prophets mean in such words?   And how do these words comport with many other writings in the New Testament?

To fulfill the Torah, wouldn't that mean honoring the customs of the sabbath, the dietary rules, and the obligatory rule of circumcision?  Didn't St. Paul have a different view in his mission to the Gentiles which dispensed with the circumcision and dietary requirements of the Torah?

Did St. Paul disagree with Jesus?  And what are we to make of this apparent discrepancy?

Rather than pretending a nice and neat harmony among all the New Testament writers, it is important that we recognize the diversity among the early followers of Jesus.  First, there was no rigid and neat separation between Judaism and Christianity found in the New Testament.  The followers of Jesus were followers of Rabbi Jesus, a teacher in the Judaic tradition.  Jesus had followers of his teaching tradition, so did the Pharisees who followed the chief rabbi Gamaliel.  The Zealots had their own firebrand tradition which included open rebellion to the Roman occupiers.  The Temple based religion had priests, Sadducees, who were more conservative than the Pharisees in accepting what authoritative Hebrew Scriptures could be used for anchoring their practices.  They limited themselves for theological precedence to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  The Pharisees embraced the other two divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, the writings and the prophets, as basis for defining their beliefs and practices and so they considered the notions of the messiah and resurrection.  In this way the beliefs of Jesus and his followers were closer to the Pharisees than to the Sadducees.  St. Paul was a Pharisee who believed that Jesus was the Christ; many other Pharisees believed in the Messiah, but did not think Jesus was the Messiah.

Just as there were different parties within Judaism, so too there were many different parties within the early Christ communities.  The differences would arise from location of the gathering and the make up of the life experiences of the people in the gathering.  Some may have been followers of Jesus who remained in the synagogues which accepted the teachings of Rabbi Jesus.  Others may have been members who were lapsed Jews in their lack of adherence to Jewish ritual purity customs.  Other gatherings may consisted of exclusive Gentile followers of Jesus.  And still other gatherings may have consisted of mixture of all three groups.

But what unified all of these groups?  Jesus Christ.  They all followed a Christ-centered Judaism, and even the Gentiles, who came to see themselves as grafted into the spiritual traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So one can say the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, writing in or around the year 80 of the Common Era, was writing to a different community than the Corinthian community to whom Paul was writing in the late 50's or early 60's.

The writer of Matthew was channeling words of Jesus to a gathering familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures and traditions.

The words of Jesus in accepting the prophets and the Psalms as important foundation, was accepting that the prophets were already a development within Judaism from the writings of the Torah.  In fact, the prophets were extremely critical of their people who had ritual adherences to fasts, sabbath, sacrifices, and circumcision, but whose practice toward the poor, widows, and orphans indicated that they had religion without loving mercy, justice, and humility toward God.

Jesus, like the prophets, criticized religious people who emphasized ritual adherence but who did not practice love, mercy, justice, and humility.  He criticized religious leaders who reduced teachings about God to but political loyalty to a religious party or view point.  He said that his followers had to have a righteousness beyond the appearance of performing ritual behaviors.

For Jesus, the fulfillment of the law was in the doing of what is right everywhere, and not just for public performance in synagogue or Temple.

For Jesus, God's house, as this world was to be a place of worship for all people, a house of prayer for all people, just as it was stated by the prophet Isaiah.

What is the result of doing the religion of Jesus?  It makes one salt and light.  Following Christ, means that one's humble charisma is activated to season and influence one's environment and through one's life example one can help other people taste and see God's goodness.  Jesus said, be salt so that others can taste and see God's goodness.

Jesus also said his followers should be lights.  This means that with wisdom, we learn to provide contrasting contexts for people to be able to make more enlightened decision toward the way of God's love and justice.

For Paul, such wisdom meant that one learned inner knowledge, the poetry of the soul.  One could live poetically, and be motivated by another kind of energy rather than be trapped into crass literalism devoid of knowing the parallel inner charismatic life to accompany our very flesh and blood lives.

Whether for Jesus or Paul, the religion of God was to be universally available and not locked within any exclusive ethnic or national community.  The fulfillment of the law is for it to be accessibly promulgated to everyone.  This is what Jesus believed about his own life, namely, God being made accessible to all.  And this is what St. Paul believed his mission to be: To make God in Christ accessible to everyone and so fulfill the expansive law and the prophets.

It is to this universal tradition, and not to be limited by our experience, that we are to proclaim to all today.  Let us preach and live the universality of God to be the fulfillment of the law in as many ways as we can today.  Let us live the wisdom of God today. Amen.