Atende, Domine et Miserere, qui apec abimus Tibi.
The law of God reveals His love to us.
In the responsorial psalm, we praise the Lord, praise the Lord Jerusalem,
because God has loved us enough so as to reveal His great law to us.
He has not done this for any other nation.
He has proclaimed His word to Jacob, His statutes, and His ordinances to Israel.
He has not done this for any other nation.
His ordinances He has not made known to them.
This is just one place in the Old Testament
where we are reminded that the revelation of God's law to His people
is the manifestation of His love.
He opens His mind to them. He opens His heart to them.
He teaches them His own wisdom.
And He treats them as His children, disciplining them
and calling them back to Himself, punishing them for their iniquities
and rewarding them for their fidelity.
He intervened in their life.
He opened His mind and heart to them
and then followed up on what He had revealed
by remaining within their lives and directing them back to Himself.
This is something that we sometimes lose sight of,
thinking that God's law is somehow a fence around our lives,
preventing us from really stepping outside and being able to live.
A lot of people think this way.
And sometimes, nowadays, people will talk about, as I said on Sunday,
the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.
So there are two different people.
In the Old Testament we have the God of the law
and in the New Testament we have the God of grace.
Of course, in the letters of St. Paul, he does juxtapose,
he does actually oppose, in a certain sense, the law and grace.
But not in the way that most people believe.
And our Lord makes it clear today in the Gospel of what St. Paul is actually trying to say.
Because our Lord tells us that the law has not passed away.
There are elements of the old law, the ceremonial elements of the law,
the ritual elements that have passed away.
But not the Ten Commandments.
Sometimes people say that the Ten Commandments was the code of ethics for the Old Testament,
and the Beatitudes are the code of ethics for the New Testament.
As though we no longer have to observe,
thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, and all the rest.
And of course, that's just ludicrous.
We'll never experience the blessings of God that are promised to us in the Beatitudes,
unless we observe God's commandments.
Beatitudes are a fulfillment.
Beatitudes are the blessing that is bestowed upon us when we are faithful to the Lord.
So what?
What St. Paul is actually saying when he talks about, you know, the law and grace,
sort of the law on one hand and grace on the other, is that without Christ,
without the blessing of God's grace that's been poured into our hearts,
we can't even observe the law in the first place.
And the law becomes a burden.
And we remain in a kind of a situation where, you know, if we try to observe the law,
we're just trying to do it.
We don't have to stay out of hell.
Or we're just trying to do it because we feel this obligation and burden.
Whereas through the grace of Christ, through his presence in our life,
through the outpouring of his grace through the sacraments, especially through the Eucharist,
we are called to love and to observe God's law out of love and through love.
And that is the freedom of the children of God.
That's what St. Augustine meant when he said, love God and then do what you want.
Love and do what you want.
Because if we love, what pleases us will be the pleasure of God.
That's really what love is all about.
That's what supernatural charity is all about.
Doing everything that we do in order to please God.
And finding our pleasure in making God happy.
In doing what is pleasing to him.
That's the way the saints behave.
That's why the saints were happy.
No matter what happened to them.
Why they had peace and tranquility and were able to maintain their cool and persevere
in the midst of difficult situations.
No matter what was going on around them.
Because love was the key to everything.
And it is the key to everything for us as well.
So we want to praise the Lord for his goodness to us.
Praise him for having revealed his law to us.
And realize that that revelation of his law, along with the fact that when he tells us
to do something, he always gives us the grace to do it, that's a sign of how much God loves
us.
A sign of how much we have been made his children.
Let us ask Our Lady to teach us this truth.
Ask her to help us run in the way of God's commandments.
Motivated by love more and more each and every day.
Everything Our Lady did.
Everything she did out of love for her son.
She was perfect in her observance of the commandments.
But the commandments were not a fence around her life.
Out of which she would have otherwise wished to stop.
We can find ourselves in God's world.
We can find ourselves if we lose ourselves by putting God first.
And in everything.
And desiring always to please God.
And please him in everything that we do.
By observing his commandments out of love.
Praise the Lord, Jerusalem, for the wonderful works God has done in our lives by revealing
his law to us.
And giving us the grace to observe him.
Amen.
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