How to love the rules.

Homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time B
30 August 2009
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
Year for Priests

For daily readings, click here

Moses is hosting a rules meeting. He is giving the Israelites an additional set of rules. The name Deuteronomy means second law. The Israelites have already received the 10 commandments. Now Moses is hosting a follow-up meeting. A clarification of the original 10, or how to apply the original 10 in your daily lives. Moses is hosting a rules meeting. He is giving them hundreds of new rules to play by, telling the people to learn them well, and not to add or subtract from them. He is like a coach who tells his team that if we don't get our act together, we are going to get waylaid in our next game. Moses is telling his team how to get their acts together before entering into the promised land the Lord has marked out for them. He is holding a rules meeting so that once the Israelites get there, all the nations around them will see what an awesome nation they are, and how beautiful are the rules by which they live.

Rules meetings by definition have a bad rap. Most of us like fewer rules, not more. We like our free time. We love having a free day when we don't have to follow any rules. We can just do what we feel like doing, without any pressure. Rules meetings are about expectations, and most of us have a hard enough time fulfilling the expectations we have for ourselves, let alone fulfilling the expectations others have for us. We hate to be a disappointment, to ourselves or to others. So we naturally avoid rules meetings. They oftentimes expose us for who we really are. It is tempting to think that less rules means less pressure means less expectations means more free party time for me!

This can be our attitude when we come to Church sometimes. We can approach Church as if it is only a rules meeting, nothing more, and nothing to be excited about. We can have a hard time finding the energy to go, because we know that the Scriptures will cut to the heart, and maybe the priest will say something that cuts to the heart, and at the very least, I will feel like promising things to God in Church that I'm not sure I can really get done. Going to Church can feel like adding pressure to a life that already has plenty of pressure. More expectations, or else. Going to Church can feel like going to a rules meeting. This is what you are not doing, and if you don't get your act together, you are going to lose bigtime. No wonder sometimes we don't feel like coming.

Moses is trying to hold a different kind of rules meeting. In this meeting, he asks the people to be excited about the law he is giving them. He invites them to the see the law not as a burden, or as a restriction, but as a gift. He promises two profound things about the law that is being set before them. First of all, he says that their following of the law will show to the world how wise and intelligent they are. Secondly, he says that their following of the law will show their closeness to God.

At the beginning of a new semester, most of us have a sense of where we are in regard to the moral law that is put before us by the Church. We know intuitively whether the law that we hear here and celebrate here is becoming more of a gift or more of a burden to us. Most of those for whom the law has become a burden have chosen not to come to Mass tonight. Such people, if I may presume to speak about them, have listened to the Church's expectations of how to do good and avoid evil their entire lives, and the rehearsal of the same laws - don't do this, don't do that, has become annoyingly burdensome to them. Like Adam and Eve, they have grown suspicious of God and the happiness that He has marked out for them, and have chosen instead to define good and evil for themselves, without reference to any external rules. For most of us who have chosen to come tonight though, we are excited, as Moses instructs us, to hear the law of God pointed out to us once again, to be reminded to never stop seeking truth, goodness, beauty and unity, and to know that our relationship with God, our ability to realize how close he is to us, truly does depend on our willigness to continue to seek the good and to avoid evil.

It is this last piece, our friendship with God, that is really at stake whenever we have a rules meeting. The Mass, as we know, is more than a chance for us to get together and discuss rules, as necessary as this may be. The Mass is most of all a celebration that God Himself, through the gift of His Son and through their mutual gift of the Holy Spirit, is close to His people. That he has chosen to remain with His people, as close as He possibly can, especially through the gift of the body and blood of His Son. So Jesus is good to remind us through his rebuke of the Pharisees, that as we get together to discuss rules about doing good and avoiding evil, that what really matters is not our perfect identification of what is outside of us that can defile us, but our perfect knowledge of who we are from within. As Jesus says, it is not exposure to evil that defiles a person, but a person's choice to do evil because he does not understand who He really is at his core.

Jesus in the Gospel does not define sin not as the overpowering of our will by temptation from outside, which is how we usually think of sin. No, Jesus defines sin completely differently, as what is happening on the inside of us. Jesus says sin is not so much the power of evil conquering our weak nature, but sin is most of all an incorrect knowledge of who we are at our core. Sin is not simply defined as evil conquering good. It is also defined as an identity crisis happening at the core of a person.

In the Eucharist that we share tonight, this identity crisis is reversed. We are here tonight not only for a rules meeting, so that we can more clearly see what is good and what is evil outside of us, and so have a better knowledge of what on the outside we should choose and what we should avoid, we are also here to celebrate who we are on the inside. As we eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, we are reminded of Moses' promise to the Israelites that no nation has a God who has come as close to His people as God has come to us. For us Catholics, this promise is fulfilled in Jesus Christ coming so close to us, as to make himself small enough to fit in our very bodies! It is this identity that flows from the Eucharist, that we are in Christ and He is in us, that there is no distinction of where we end and He begins, that frees us to receive the law just as Moses instructs us to receive it. We come to Mass to receive rules from God, not as the Pharisees received them, as an additional burden to be used as a criteria for judgment, but as a way for us to hold onto and to cherish the deep friendship we have with God which defines who we are, at the very core of our being. +m