Law is relationship. When we dig into the idea of Law, it is really around relationship in order that people may have one. In the First Reading today, we hear how the Israelites, after coming back from a seventy year exile, are rebuilding Jerusalem. While they are fixing the temple, they discover a book of the Law and now they are reading it. They went into exile because they did not keep the Law, meaning they did not keep the relationship. Their relationship with God seems very complicated but it was not, so to speak, because the main point of the Law was that they had to put their trust in God. God had to be their strength and life. The minute that it was otherwise, for example when they relied on money, alliance or power, then they would be warned and if the warning was not heeded, they would lose it all. God promised to blessed them in their faithfulness if they lived the Law and they agreed to it. So, when they weren’t faithful, God removed the thing they would have been counting on. Today we see that Law plays the exact same part: it governs relationships. God’s Law governs our relationship with others, it purifies it and makes it life giving. When we don’t follow God’s Law, it is more dangerous than not following mathematical equations or chemical recipes. God’s will is not done and our lives go unfulfilled and we are stuck in chasing the elusion of happiness.
When we don’t follow laws we disrupt the relationship. For example, let’s say one person in the town of Quesnel doesn’t believe in stop lights and so that person simply drives through them. We could see how this one small transgression would cause many problems. There was a family who didn’t believe in traffic laws and so they all would drive through red lights. A person who was travelling with them was surprised when one of them stopped for a green light and asked why. “Well,” the driver said, “You never know when one of my brothers is coming.” The more we break the Law of God, the more our relationship will break down. And, in a real sense, our lives will become more and more absurd because then we have to follow a chaotic law. Law was meant to make us free. As we break law, we lose our freedom. The free countries where the most is accomplished are the countries where people follow law. Where no one enforces law, or the law can be bribed or easily overruled, we see chaos.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He sent me to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives.” There is no more harmful captive than the self imposed captive, the one who is held captive by their own pride. Pride is great self reliance where we trust not in God but ourselves to make things right. We trust ourselves to make us happy. We trust ourselves to make it work in our family. We trust ourselves to be stable. We are captive and weak because what we are leaning against for support cannot hold us. Only in God is there freedom.
Let us look at a simple example that probably affects most of us that go to confession. We go to confession and then at the end we resolve not to do it again. Like, Father, I won’t be back here I will do better. What happens? Well the next time we see we really haven’t done much better. Why? Because we thought we could do better. We are a captive to our own pride. We must trust that God can release this captive. We must realize that we are confessing the same thing because, like the last time, we did not trust in His grace and so we are back to where we started since the last time we didn’t trust. We can give many examples from wealth to sexuality when we don’t follow Law we enter into the captivity of our pride and then harm ourselves and the people around us.
Breaking Law, breaking relationships, harm people and ourselves in two ways: in what we do and in what we fail to do. It is easy to see what pride does to others in many cases, but us not following the Law does something even worse that we struggle to see its affect. The affect that we are not having, the positive affect we are meant to have. Because of our broken relationship with God, others are not experiencing that grace of change in their lives as well. Other are not experiencing freedom and then they get enslaved themselves into a harmful way of living. As the Second Reading says, everyone has a part to play in the mission of God. If we don’t take our place not only will we be unfulfilled but so will others. Can you imagine if we all played the role Christ has called us to play in the world, what our families would be like, what our city, our country would be like? How do we find out what Christ is calling us to do? Each moment of our lives Christ is calling us to follow. Each interaction. Our pride says they are free moments like I can ignore that sarcastic remark because, well, it was fun. But was Christ calling you to hurt that person? We know that is not true. If we want to grow from that interaction we say, “Lord, give the grace to heal and not to do that again.”
The Law of God makes life work and allows us to be holy and free for the greatest, most challenging life ever. Do you know that among us stand healers, prophets, mystics, people with power to bilocate? There are evangelists, catechists, people who are called to radically change the world. If you want to learn more about your call and how to live the Law of God after Mass, if you have the courage and time to stay, I will be giving instruction on how.