THIS DO, AND THOU SHALT LIVE

A SERMON FOR THE 12TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Has anyone seen that Sandals commercial for vacations in the Caribbean?  Sandals seeks to entice us to their resorts by placing an image in our mind.  The line they use is “Imagine being able to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it.  Now doesn’t that sound awfully familiar?  Isn’t that what the devil constantly wants us to imagine?  “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law..”  Sandals assures us that these imaginings can become a reality at its resorts.  The devil assures us of the same thing, all you have to do is throw away the law and “do what thou wilt.”

To put it in its simplest terms, the law is what keeps us from doing bad things.  The only way to prevent wicked people from doing literally whatever they want, is by promulgating laws to warn them of the consequences of disobeying them, and then enforcing those laws with appropriate punishments.  Don’t drive your car at 70 mph through a school zone.  If you do, you’ll be fined, imprisoned, lose your license, whatever. This protects children from people who put their own haste or thirst for speed above the safety of the innocent. That’s what laws do.  Protect the innocent from the wicked.  It’s why there are laws against murder, robbery, and so on. It’s why, in a truly Catholic society, there would be laws against abortion, homosexuality, and heresy, laws that protect not only the bodily welfare of the innocent, but also their souls.

So when you see depictions of the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms being painted over, scraped off, and otherwise destroyed, we’re seeing our legal system destroying itself first of all, and then civilization itself as the ultimate consequence.  It’s accepting the invitation by Satan to do away with the very foundation of the law. It’s the usual pure craziness of liberals and their self-destructive agenda, who annihilate all principles until they end up with no principles whatever.

This deluded view of the law is based on their failure to understand its underlying purpose, which is to give glory to God and protect us from sin.  They see laws as merely rules and regulations, and make it their motto that “laws are made to be broken.”  This is the progressive mind at work, a mind that makes progress only in the wrong direction.  Ours should be a “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a step-by-step advance towards eternal union with God.  Our progress is true progress in holiness, a movement towards an ever stronger love of God.

How many times have we been reminded of what our Lord calls the great commandment, which is “to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself?” Hopefully, it’s beginning to sink in. Just how important it is, our Lord reinforces with the following promise, which we read in today’s Gospel.  “This do,” he says, “and thou shalt live.”

It’s almost an ultimatum from God.  “Love him and you’ll live.”  Presumably, the opposite is also true: “Love him not and you will die.”  We learn from other Gospels that all the other laws that exist depend upon this one great commandment to love God and our neighbor. We could go through the Ten Commandments given to Moses, analyzing each of them and showing how they all come back to either loving God or our neighbor.  Our Lord’s purpose in redeeming us from the sin of Adam was not to destroy or overturn this law of Moses.  He told us he came not to destroy but to fulfill the law.  He explained that the spirit of the law is based on love of God and neighbor, not on love of the law itself. 

Very often the two tablets that contain the Ten Commandments are depicted with the first one listing the first three commandments, which pertain to our relationship with God, and the second one listing the seven others that pertain to our neighbor.  If we love both God and neighbor, we can easily see that any encroachment upon these laws would involve a deficit, a failing, of that love.

This is how we live our lives as Catholics.  We follow, or try to follow, the Ten Commandments.  By doing this, we prove our love for God and neighbor—remember, after all, what our Lord told us: “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” If we break one of these ten laws, we recognize that we have offended God.  How?  Not because we have defied one of the rules and regulations established at the whim of a tyrannical Creator, but because we have defied the great commandment of a lovingCreator, the fundamental law that commands us to love him in return.

Let’s remind ourselves for a moment how much God has given us, not just our daily bread, our daily wages, our home, our family, and all the other material things that come to us from above, but even our eternal life, paid for by every drop of Blood of his only-begotten Son.  We should spend our lives thinking what we can give back to God in return.  We should live to please God.  But instead, we put ourselves ahead of God every time we sin, and we know this, and we are appalled by our own ingratitude, and we kneel and beat our breasts with our mea culpas, and then we sin again.  What sad creatures we are.  

All God asks is that we love him.  He gives us laws so that we can know what displeases him and do what’s necessary to avoid giving offence.  The laws are merely the outward sign pointing us in the direction of God.  The laws, the commandments, are not the end in themselves, but merely the essential way by which we arrive at that end, which is the love of God.  The letter of the law killeth, says St. Paul in today’s Epistle, but the spirit giveth life. The spirit of the law is none other than to love God, pure and simple.  Obey the laws of God.  Obey the laws of the Church.  Do this, and thou shalt live.