The Old Law says what to do; the New Law gives the strength to do it

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Dt 4:1-2, 6-8
Second Reading: Jas 1:17-18, 22-22, 27
Gospel Reading: Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God calls us to beatitude: the perfect happiness of heaven. However, “wounded by sin,” we cannot achieve it without his law to guide us and his grace to sustain us, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The moral law prescribes the conduct that leads to beatitude and forbids the conduct that turns us away. It is expressed in natural law, revealed law, the law of the Gospel, and civil and Church law.

Natural law is “written” in the soul of each person, says the Catechism. It provides “the indispensable moral foundation for building the human community” and constitutes “the necessary basis” for civil law. However, in our present fallen state, its precepts “are not perceived by everyone clearly and immediately,” the Catechism notes; we also need “grace” and God’s “revelation.” 

Revealed law comprises the Old Law and the New Law. The Old Law is the law God gave his chosen people to prepare them for Christ’s coming. Much of it is accessible to human reason, but the Old Law states it as part of God’s covenant with his people.

Like natural law, it lays the foundation for beatitude: it is “a light offered to the conscience of every man to make God’s call and ways known to him and to protect him against evil,” says the Catechism. “God wrote on the tablets of the law what men did not read in their hearts.”

“What other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us?” Moses asks in this Sunday’s First Reading. “And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?”

Nevertheless, the Old Law is “imperfect,” the Catechism says. “Like a tutor, it shows what must be done,” but does not “give the strength” to do it. Accordingly, when Christ came, he revealed the New Law: the law of the Gospel.

The New Law does not abrogate the Old, which “endures forever” and “remains the first stage on the way to the Kingdom,” the Catechism notes; rather, the New Law fulfills and refines the Old Law, leading it “to its perfection.”

Neither does the New Law add anything to the Old Law; it “proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure,” says the Catechism. Christ says this in the Gospel Reading: “for it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, [and] folly.”

Besides the precepts of the Old Law, the New Law includes the “evangelical counsels,” which are poverty, chastity, and obedience, which are intended to remove “whatever is incompatible” with charity and even “whatever might hinder” its development.

The whole law of the Gospel is contained in Jesus’ “new commandment” to love one another as he has loved us, says the Catechism. It is called “a law of love,” because it makes us act not out of fear, but out of the love infused by the Holy Spirit; “a law of grace,” because it confers strength through faith and the sacraments; and “a law of freedom,” because it frees us from the ritual observances of the Old Law, inclines us to act spontaneously out of charity, and changes us from servants who do not know what our master is doing to friends or brothers of Christ and children and heirs of God.

Finally, the letters of the New Testament hand on Christ’s teaching “with the authority of the apostles” and teach us “to deal with cases of conscience in the light of our relationship to Christ and to the Church.”

“Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls,” St. James says in the Second Reading. “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, however the course remains available in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Starting Sept. 22, he will again teach the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.

Your voice matters! Join the conversation by submitting a Letter to the Editor here.