11 September 2006

Paul vs. Jesus, Law vs. Love

23rd Week OT: 1 Cor 5.1-8 and Luke 6.6-11
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

To perfect our participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity we first come to love God as He loves us. Our ability to love God is itself a gift from God Who Is Love. The degree to which we listen to and comply with our vocation to love God by loving one another is what we call “maturity.” A more mature spirituality will be one that has better perfected the gift of love.

Now, forgive my pedantic start. But there is a point here, I promise! We have two apparently conflicting scriptural readings this morning. Paul hears that there is a notorious sinner among the Corinthians, a man living with his father’s wife. He demands that the church expel this man from the community and “deliver [him] to Satan for the destruction of his flesh…” Over in Luke, we have Jesus battling the Pharisees again over the proper understanding of the relationship between the letter of the Law and the spirit of the Law. The Pharisees practically dare Jesus to heal a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. Of course, he does! And he asks, “…is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save a life rather than to destroy it?” Paul says that we must boot the sinners out and Jesus says that the letter of the Law is always understood in light of the greater good.

Our temptation here is to run to one pole or the other. If you will follow Paul on this issue, you will uphold the right and responsibility of the church to discipline its members using biblical and traditional measures of moral action. If you will follow Jesus on this issue, you will privilege the greater good in the spirit of the Law over a legalism required by the letter of the Law. The perversion of Paul’s position becomes self-righteousness, Pharisaical legalism in the name of purity. The perversion of Jesus’ position becomes indifferentism, a toleration of sin in the church in the name of spiritual liberty. Both legalism and indifferentism are immature spiritualities, that is, neither will help you cooperate with God’s grace in perfecting His love in you.

Recently, our bishops published an updated version of their Program for Priestly Formation. In the chapter titled, “Human Formation,” they write: “The foundation and center of all human formation is Jesus Christ […] In his fully developed humanity, he was truly free and with complete freedom gave himself totally for the salvation of the world”(74). Here is the key to our spirituality: Christ-like freedom. We will wither in sin if we fail to hold one another to basic moral standards. And we will smother the fire of the spirit in us if we lock our conscience in a legalistic coffin.

To be free, truly free as Christ is free, and therefore ready, willing, and able to cooperate with God’s gift of love to us, we cannot see our freedom as a license to do whatever we want. Our freedom came in a moment in history. We were liberated from the inevitability of death due to sin and given a renewed purpose, a new goal, a new life in Christ, to become Christ, and live with God forever. We mature spiritually when we submit our will to the law of freedom, the rule of the living Lord in our lives, and then give our lives for the good of others—sacrifice in love.

Paul insists that the sinner be expelled so that his soul may be saved. Jesus appeals to the greater good of a higher Law. Paul does not re-establish Pharisaical rule over the Corinthians. And Jesus does not sever us from the moral responsibilities of the Good. We cannot call on Paul to justify self-righteousness and we cannot call on Jesus to justify libertine abuse of moral freedom.

A truly adult spirituality then is a child-like submission to our final end, our ultimate human purpose: to be perfected as our Father is perfect—to become sacrificial Love.





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