GOSPEL REFLECTION, WEDNESDAY, 3RD WEEK OF LENT, 26 MARCH 2025

Matthew 5:17-19.  Matthew’s gospel repeatedly shows how Jesus is the ‘fulfilment’ of the Law and the Prophets.  Today’s reading is one such instance.  In the context of Jesus’ repeated rejection of the kind of observance of the Law by the Pharisees and Scribes, for example, this reading may seem puzzling at first.  Much depends on how they and Jesus understood the Law and the Prophets.

The people of Israel, or more properly their religious leaders, understood the Law in at least four different but related ways: (1) the Ten Commandments; (2) the first five books of the Bible – the Torah, or Pentateuch; (3) the oral scribal law of the rabbis which largely emphasised external practices, ethical actions, and liturgical actions.  It is these three which Jesus resisted.  Jesus in Matthew’s gospel used the expression  ‘the Law and the Prophets’ to mean what we now call the whole of the Old Testament.  It is these that Jesus here says  that he has come to ‘fulfil.’  We must pay particular attention to this because these words are in the first part of the Sermon on the Mount shortly after the Beatitudes.  Their location in Matthew’s gospel tells us a lot.  Like the Beatitudes and the three Works of Holiness (fasting, prayer, and almsgiving), they emphasis conversion of our ‘heart,’ of our inner being rather than external actions which attract attention.  An essential part of Christian teaching is that whatever we are externally is firstly and most importantly an expression of who and what we are ‘in our hearts.’  It is there that we obey or disobey God, or commit sin, and it is ‘in the heart’ that we truly meet God.  It is there that repentance and conversion occur first of all before all external actions or practices.  That is what we are called to in Lent and by today’s gospel.