Monday, October 27, 2014

Obey the law and you'll be free

          It is a myth of modern culture that freedom is to be completely unhindered by anything (laws, morality, cultural norms, etc.).  In other words, only anarchy could guarantee perfect freedom.  Our faith, however, acknowledges that there is a natural order and that true freedom comes when we align our desires with that order.  Just as music, in order to be music, must obey the natural order of harmony in order to be expressed freely, so too must human persons obey the natural order of love - love of God and love of neighbor - in order to be truly human, and thus to be truly free.

"Love, and do what you want."
~ Saint Augustine

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Homily: 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A
          If I asked you all the question, “What is music?”, how many of you think you could give me a one-sentence answer?  Now, I don’t mean “what instruments make music?” or “what style of music do you like best?”, but rather “what is music?”  Perhaps it’s not immediately apparent, but if you all thought about it for a bit I imagine that each of you could come up with an answer.  My answer is that “music is a collection of sounds, harmoniously arranged in such a way so as to be aesthetically pleasing and/or emotionally expressive.”  Given this definition, we can see that there is a law that governs whether or not something is music, right?  And that law is harmony.
          Suppose that I pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and begin to strum the strings or press the keys so as to produce sounds from these instruments of music.  If I’ve never had a lesson on how to play these instruments, is there any chance that I’ll actually be making music?  I will be producing a collection of sounds, for sure, but it’s unlikely that those sounds will be harmoniously arranged; and so what I would be producing would be noise, not music.
          If I keep at it, however, and if I begin to learn how to read sheet music, then I will begin to be able to play music.  If all I do, however, is learn how to produce those notes on the page using the instrument that I am playing, then I will never really be making music; I’ll only be reproducing music that others have made.  If I want to be free to make music, however, I need to learn music theory: that is, I need to learn which sound tones complement each other and so learn how to arrange the sounds that I produce on the instrument that I am playing harmoniously.  In other words, I have to learn the law of harmony, and then, I must obey it.
          In our Gospel reading today, Jesus is confronted by Pharisees—scholars of the Law—asking him to prioritize the 613 prescripts of Jewish law and to tell them which of the laws was the greatest.  They were experts in the law and how to obey it, and they took pride in displaying that fact.  In other words, they knew how to reproduce the notes on the page.  In their defense, they took very seriously the Law as commands from God for how to honor Him and live rightly and so, out of respect for God, they were meticulous in their efforts to follow them.  But they did not have a grasp of the underlying “music theory”: that is, they didn’t understand that these commandments were products of a greater law that governed interactions with God and with others so as to produce “music”, that is, harmony between God, them, and others.  For them, the laws were like notes on a page: not to be deviated from.  They did not understand the underlying law from which the particular laws were produced, and so they weren’t free to produce something new: a “harmony” of righteous living that perhaps hadn’t been produced before.
          Jesus’ response reveals to them this underlying law that they were missing.  Just as harmony is the law that gives a person the freedom to produce music, so Jesus names love as the law that gives a person the freedom to live in right relationship with God and his neighbor.  And so Jesus tells these scholars of the law that to love God with your whole being is the greatest and first commandment; and that the second is to love your neighbor no less than you would love yourself.  Everything else, Jesus implies, that is, all of the 613 precepts of the law, are simply tools and techniques—that is, particular arrangements of notes on a page—for fulfilling this commandment of love.
          And so, my brothers and sisters, we see that obeying the law of love gives us freedom because it transforms “I can’t” into “I can”.  Let me try to explain how.  Dr. Martin Luther King famously explained the parable of the Good Samaritan in this way: he said that the failure of the priest and the Levite was that they encountered the man in need and focused on this question: “what will happen to me if I stop and help him?”  The Samaritan, however, saw the man and instead asked this question: “what will happen to him if I do not help him?”  In other words, the priest and Levite said “I can’t help him, because the law prevents me from doing so”, while the Samaritan said “I can help him—in fact, I must help him—because the law of love of neighbor compels me to do so.”  The priest and Levite failed in love, because they were restricted by the precepts of the law.  The Samaritan, however, fulfilled love, because he obeyed the law that underlies all of the law’s precepts when he did for the man exactly what he would have done for himself had he fell victim to the robbers.  Obeying the law of love freed the Samaritan to respond.
          Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel like this is really hard to do in real life.  My guess is that each of us much more readily identifies with the priest and the Levite than we do with the Samaritan.  Well, this is why love of God must be first.  In the reading from Exodus, we heard God’s instructions to the Israelites that they are not to neglect the most vulnerable among them—aliens, widows, and orphans—because God is compassionate and He will intervene to help them.  When we love God—that is, when we give ourselves over completely to Him, who is love—we come to realize just how compassionate He has been to us; and we realize, too, that compassion is the one thing that we have lacked the most.  Thus we are inspired to have compassion for others; and we begin to realize that this kind of love actually frees us, because it moves us to respond to those good desires in our hearts to offer ourselves for the good of others (however foolish it may seem at the time).  Thus, we no longer say, “I won’t help him, because of what might happen to me”, but rather, “I will help, because it is what God would will for him, and it is what I would will for myself, and this person deserves nothing less.”
          My brothers and sisters: love God, and meditate on His love, that is, His compassion for us, and you will find the freedom, that is, the inspiration, to have compassion for everyone around you that you find in need.  And when you do, then harmony will begin to return to the world and the law of love, that is, the law of freedom that we find in Christ Jesus, will make us truly free.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – October 26th, 2014

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