DAILY GOSPEL AND COMMENTARY:
“I HAVE COME NOT TO ABOLISH BUT TO FULFILL THE LAW”
(Mt 5:17–19).
“I HAVE COME NOT TO ABOLISH BUT TO FULFILL THE LAW”
(Mt 5:17–19).
- vv. 17-19 In this passage Jesus stresses the perennial value of the Old Testament; it is the word of God; because it has a divine authority it deserves total respect. The Old Law enjoined precepts of a moral, legal and liturgical type.
- Its moral precepts still hold good in the New Testament, because they are for the most part specific, divine-positive, promulgations of the natural law.
- However, our Lord gives them greater weight and meaning. But the legal and liturgical precepts of the Old Law were laid down by God for a specific stage in salvation history, that is, up to the coming of Christ; Christians are not obliged to observe them (cf. Summa theologiae, I-Il, q. 108, a. 3 ad 3).
- The law promulgated through Moses and explained by the prophets was God’s gift to his people, a kind of anticipation of the definitive Law which the Christ or Messiah would lay down. Thus, as the Council of Trent defined, Jesus not only “was given to men as a redeemer in whom they are to trust, but also as a lawgiver whom they are to obey” (De iustificatione, can. 21).
- As Saint Bernard says:
- “And since life is in the will of God, we cannot doubt in the least that we will find nothing that is more useful and profitable to us than that which agrees with the divine will which is the life of our soul. Let us try with care not to deviate in the least of God’s will (Sermon 5).”
- Lord, you have said: let not my will be done, but yours, (Mk 14:36; cf. Mt 26, 33-46; Lk 22, 40-46). And as Saint Leo the Great comments: “This voice of the Head is the salvation of the whole Body; this voice teaches all the faithful, inflames the confessors, crowns the martyrs (Sermon 58).” May thy Most Holy Will be done, praised and glorified!
