Getting Past the Rules: What It Means to Live Christianity Well
Sixth Sunday of the Year
Cognates are two words in different languages that are similar in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. False cognates are two words in different languages that are similar in spelling and pronunciation but are different in meaning.
There is a famous story from my time in seminary. We were gathered together at the end of the fall semester for our annual talent show and Christmas party. Maybe 180 seminarians were in the auditorium, along with dozens of faculty and staff and University officials with their families. The Master of Ceremony for the evening was a young deacon from Kansas. At one point during the talent show, a volunteer was needed to come up onto the stage. There in the audience was our seminary Professor of Spanish Language Studies, her husband, her three children, and a high school aged foreign exchange student from Germany. The deacon knew the family well because he had studied Spanish for two semesters, so he gestured to the young woman from Germany and told her to come up to the stage. She didn’t want to go, but she was brave. As soon as she turned around and faced the crowd, her face went flush—she was embarrassed. The deacon, wanting to disarm her and make her feel more comfortable, grabbed the microphone. What he wanted to say, in Spanish, was: “You don’t need to be embarrassed.” The problem is that the English word ‘embarrassed’ and the Spanish word ‘embarazada’ are false cognates. These words share a similar spelling and pronunciation, but are very different in meaning. What he told the young girl was: “You don’t need to be pregnant.” The girls face turned an even deeper shade of red, and our Professor of Spanish Language Studies shouted out from the audience: “You’re terrible.”
What went wrong? Well, the deacon forgot one of the most important rules for speaking a foreign language: beware of false cognates.
Learning to speak a foreign language well is, I think, much like learning to live Christianity well. What do I mean? Well, when you start to learn a foreign language, you start with the rules. Long list of rules of grammar that must be memorized: how to conjugate verbs, how to properly gender or decline nouns or adjectives, how to order the words in a sentence, how to properly use prepositions—learning a language requires the memorization of dozens, maybe hundreds, of similar rules. And when we first start to speak a foreign language, those rules stay at the forefront of our mind. We grope our way forward in conversation, rule by rule, trying to get it right, until the day comes that with enough practice we no longer need the rules. We reach a point with foreign language study at which the rules are completely interiorized. We no longer move from rule to rule in conversation, but now find ourselves living in the freedom of having learned how to speak another language.
Learning how to live the Christian life is similar to learning a foreign language. We usually start with the rules—long lists of laws and commandments. We grope our way forward in life, moving from law to law, from commandment to commandment, keeping the rules at the forefront of our minds. Sometimes we make a mistake, we break a rule or forget a rule, and so find ourselves following yet another rule and getting ourselves to confession. We might spend years living a rule-based Christianity. But, like learning a foreign language, to live the Christian life in freedom is about no longer needing the rules to live well. Christ tells us in today’s Gospel that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law. What does Christ mean with those words?
Christ fulfills the law by making a new reality possible for the Christian life: the interiorization of the law. The prophet Jeremiah had spoken of a New Covenant, a New Law, that would one day be written not on stone tablets but on the human heart—a law that will be inscribed within the human person. The prophet Ezekiel spoke of a time when God will remove hearts of stone from the people of Israel and give them hearts of flesh. Christ is the New Law inscribed upon the human heart, the New Law that turns our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. The New Law is the life of grace: Christ given to us through the sacraments, God dwelling within us, making it possible to live in the freedom of having interiorized the laws and commandments. St. Paul says the authentic Christian life is a life lived according to the Spirit, a life that keeps in step with the Holy Spirit.
Christian freedom means no longer needing the rules to live well. Consider the commandments about which Christ speaks in today’s Gospel. For the Christian who loves his God and his neighbor as he loves himself, the commandment ‘You shall not kill’ is meaningless. Love, made possible by Christ’s grace, admits of no violence. For the Christian who loves his spouse, the commandment ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ is meaningless. Love, made possible by Christ’s grace, admits of no betrayal. For the Christian who loves the God by whose providence he lives and moves and has his being, the commandment ‘Do not take a false oath’ is meaningless. Love, made possible by Christ’s grace, admits of no dishonesty.
St. Paul says that freedom from the law is the highest form of Christian freedom: higher than freedom from sin, from the flesh, or even freedom from death. “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” St. Paul teaches in his Letter to the Romans, “since you are not under the Law, but under grace” (6:14). For the Christian to live free from the law is to live a life so deeply united to Christ that neither sin nor death retains its power. The New Law of grace, Christ inscribed upon a human heart now made of flesh, makes authentic freedom possible.
Most times, when I give a talk on the theology of St. Paul and his teaching on the law and freedom, someone objects and tells me that we still need the law to live well. And I always tell these people: “You’re right.” The problem, however, is not that St. Paul is wrong about freedom from the law and the life of grace. The problem is that most of us, maybe all of us, are still learning to speak a new language. We lack proficiency. We are not yet fluent. We still grope our way forward in life, moving rule to rule, trying to live well. The kind of freedom of which St. Paul speaks is possible—it is absolutely possible. The problem is that we are not yet free because the interiorization of the grace of Christ in us is not yet complete. Our hearts, partially enfleshed by Christ’s grace, are still burdened by the weight of stone.
How do we make the move to live under the grace of the New Law, with a heart made completely of flesh?
The best method for learning a new language is a full immersion into a foreign culture. To master a foreign language admits of no half-measures. Moving from language course to language course, semester to semester, exercise to exercise, over the course of years, will almost never result in fluency. You will always need a dictionary and a grammar workbook. You will never speak in the freedom of having interiorized the rules.
Christ makes the same point in today’s Gospel: Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Freedom in Christ admits of no half-measures. The exercises and disciplines and devotions that constitute the Christian life mean nothing if behind these exercises and disciplines and devotions is not a wholehearted commitment to Christ. We are told in our first reading today that: Before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him.
Half-measures won’t get anyone to freedom. The choice we make for Christ matters.
Homily delivered February 11th/12th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.