Gospel Reflection For The 6th day of March in the year of Our Lord, 2024
Gospel
Matthew 5:17-19
17 Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. 18 For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled. 19 He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
This is the verse that many of our more recent Protestant brothers and sisters quote to condemn Catholicism. The 7 Day Adventist, Torah Observant, etc. Christians say that the Catholic Church is purely evil for going to church on Sunday and not following Torah Law. They don’t pay attention to verses like “He who hears you hears me and he who rejects you rejects Him who sent me,” or “What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,” much less do they acknowledge that Christ gave His Church the “Keys of the Kingdom.” Even more odd is that they ignore all the writings from Acts on that make explicitly clear that Christians were not bound by the Law. Only by reading the Bible out of context can they come to such conclusions. After all, Jesus not only defied the Jewish Sabbath openly but said He was the Lord of The Sabbath. He said that everything would be changed when He rose on Sunday. The early Church, as described in the Didache which predates the Bible made clear that the Christian Sabbath was to be Sunday, the day our Lord rose.
The early Church Fathers wrote a lot about this subject, following in the stead of the Apostles who constantly and vehemently condemned the “Judaisers” who insisted that Christians follow Jewish Law in the books of the new Testament. Some said that Our Lord meant that the Law would be unchanged for Jews – so long as they followed the Torah and worshiped the true God, they could come to salvation through the First Covenant of God through Abraham and Moses, but that Christians had no part in this. Most, however, said that the true Law found its culmination in Jesus Christ and that Jews should believe in Him. A few, especially in the Epistle of Barnabas, said that the entire Law was allegorical, like the parables through which Jesus spoke to the Jews – that the laws they followed were merely symbolic and complex because they had rejected the simple teachings of the Ten Commandments and simple faith in the God who saved them again, and again; that the truth was to be found in Christianity.
One thing that is very clear in the writings of the early Church and the New Testament is that Christians are not bound by the Law, are freed from the Law and have a new Law through the New Covenant. Our Lord established the Catholic Church to teach and act in His stead. Outside of the Catholic Church, there is only confusion. Inside the Church there is peace and salvation. No matter how vehement our Protestant brothers and sisters may be, and no matter how much they hate us and our Church, we must remember that we have the fullness of the Truth through the Catholic Church. They are to be pitied and gently instructed. It is not at all hard to show them that their beliefs based on one verse of the Bible disagree with other parts of the Bible. Obviously, if they can get things so very wrong, they need to be taught the meaning of the Bible just as the Eunuch in the New Testament asked, “How can I understand if I have no one to explain it to me?”
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Gospel passages are taken from the Douay Rheims Bible.