Are you a Doer of the Word? Seek the Beauty of the Law!

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

La vita e bella! Life is beautiful! Perhaps you saw the magnificent 1997 film Life is Beautiful… if you haven’t seen it, run, don’t walk, and rent it or buy it. It’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and it tells a tale of great joy and gratitude in the midst of the very dark circumstances of World War II and the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Life is beautiful even in our broken and fallen world. From a young age I’ve often experienced an intense awareness of gratitude for God’s blessings in my life. James alludes to this in his letter, our second reading:

Dearest brothers and sisters: All good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change. He willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

God is perfect and perfectly faithful in His love for us, and all that is good comes to us from him. The greatest of his gifts is His Word of Truth. God created us by His Word: when God speaks, we are. Having loved us into existence, He didn’t abandon us when we turned away, but continued to love us and call us to Himself. One of God’s greatest and most perfect gifts to us is His Law.

Wait… what did I just say? One of God’s most beautiful gifts to us is His Law? Does that sound right to you? That’s what Moses told people in our first reading,

This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people. For what great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the LORD, our God, is to us whenever we call upon him? Or what great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?

Although counter-intuitive, this is exactly right… God IS TRUTH, and He IS LOVE, and so His Word to us is perfectly true and perfectly loving at the same time, and thus His Law to us is an expression of the truth of things, of reality, and also an act of love. The One who made us knows what works for us and what does not. When we reject that law, when we live our lives against God’s plan for us as our Creator and Redeemer… well, we get the world we all live in today where sin and vice are glorified and rewarded and virtue is mocked.

In my own life Boy Scouting was a source of great grace to me, and one of the places, after my own home, where I learned about virtue and service and living well. I also began to notice that I was most full of joy and peace precisely when I was serving and helping others, whether that was running recycling drives, raking the lawns of the elderly, or helping the younger Scouts learn to start a fire or tie a square knot. Later in high school, one of the very first serious books about the faith I read was Back to Virtue by Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft is a convert to the Catholic faith, and a brilliant speaker and writer… anything by him is worth reading, and very likely entertaining to boot! God was working through that little book, because for the first time I realized how thoroughly mixed up our world was, and how we’d lost track of God’s law, and how this path we’ve been on for some decades leads to self-destruction. I don’t know if I was 17 or 18, but I PRAISE GOD for giving me this clear glimpse of an authentically beautiful life of virtue, even as I struggled to live it.

God’s law is one of His greatest, most beautiful, and most difficult gifts to us. In our Gospel, Jesus challenges the Pharisees and scribes because they had embraced one of the two most common errors regarding God’s law: they had turned it into an empty and outward observance. They observed secondary consequences of the law, careful ceremonial washing of hands and dishes, but ignored the substance and heart of the law. Jesus quotes from Isaiah—this was not a new problem:

This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts. You disregard God's commandment but cling to human tradition.

So, the Pharisees went through the motions, and their hearts were often stone cold. This is still a very real possibility if we let Mass attendance, or regular confession, or “being good people” become an empty outward sign unconnected to the fire of love or conversion.

However, I think it is strikingly clear that in our own time, even among those of us who practice the faith, a far more common error is the outright abandonment of any standard of right and wrong, the great lie of relativism and individualism. One crude definition could be this: To live by the principle that nothing’s wrong if I want to do it. This is not only a big fat lie, but the surest path to sorrow and emptiness.

God loves us and gives us the beautiful gift of His Law, a Law perfected and fulfilled in Jesus Christ. St. James lays out the path for us clearly enough:

Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

May we reach out to those in need with generous hearts, may we reject the lies and sins that the world offers to us in such appealing disguises. May we receive the Lord today, and being filled with His grace, become doers of the Word, living beautiful lives.

+ A. M. D. G. +