Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent
Family life is spirit-filled. When it’s healthy, it is life-giving. Care, respect, serving one another, and being able to rely on one another - these are foundational to healthy family life. Ideally, we’d need only one rule, love one another. Love is expressed in showing up for one another day after day, doing the dishes before we are asked, taking care of our own things, recognizing when someone is overwhelmed, and taking care of them…Practically, we need the structure that rules or guides provide - who is responsible for the dishes, the trash, paying the electric bill, sorting the laundry (and making sure the socks aren’t in a ball when they go through the laundry)?
And sometimes the rules/guides add up. When simple requests to do the dishes are routinely not met in a timely way, we add a rule, “do the dishes before you leave for practice.” The expectation that a room is shared becomes a piece of tape on the floor, delineating space, kids making rules of their own. Of course, these added rules are only necessary when we are struggling with the more fundamental rule of mutual love and respect.
All of this is swimming in my mind as I read today’s readings. Moses tells the people to hear and observe the law. Jesus says today that he has not come to abolish the law given to Israel nor to abolish the prophets, but to fulfill it all. Every aspect of the law must be fulfilled. If you know how many laws Jesus is talking about, this might give us anxiety.
When we read the gospels and the entire Old and New Testaments as a whole, we know there is no need for anxiety. We are not called to nitpick. We learn in scripture that God’s Word is Spirit and Life. Anxiety over every detail of the law is not life-giving. Elsewhere in the gospel, Jesus summarizes the law and prophets as loving God with all one's heart, soul, and mind, and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The rest of the law supports this.
Over time, the rules accumulated, like kids who aren’t following the basic family expectation of living in love. Jesus points us back to love, reminding us that every rule from God comes from this place. When we learn to live in love, we can freely move in it, and some things, like tape-drawn boundaries, drop away, because we are living in God’s Love. This love grows in us, because we keep showing up - to personal prayer, to communal worship, to acts of service and justice. The law becomes written on our hearts, and we know how to hold it in freedom and love. Indeed, as our gospel acclamation proclaimed today, God’s words are Spirit and life.
—Kelly Adamson