We’ve been talking these last weeks about the idea of covenant, the “sacred family bond” that God forms with his people.  We’ve seen the covenant with Noah, which foreshadowed the cleansing waters of baptism.  We’ve remembered the covenant with Abraham, a relationship made possible by Abraham’s intense and profound trust in God.  We now move on to the covenant with Moses; it might more accurately be called the covenant with the entire Chosen People of Israel, with Moses as mediator.  And this is where we begin to see the complex system of rituals and laws that fill books like Leviticus, which are more interesting than they might seem.  God led the Chosen People out of their slavery in Egypt and established a covenant with them at Mt. Sinai.  

One of the main features of this covenant is the law, beginning with the Ten Commandments which God gave the people through Moses as the fundamental building blocks for their relationship with God and with each other.  And beyond these ten, there are 600-and-something other laws that God provides the Chosen People to guide and direct their lives.  Now, because we’re Americans and we all learned in school about things like the Stamp Act and the Quartering Laws and we have sort of a patriotic distaste for too much law and government, this might seem ironic and confusing to us.  Okay, so God led the people out of a life of slavery, and the very next thing he does is subject them to this vast and seemingly restrictive body of laws.  Did they just trade one kind of slavery for another?  I thought this was about a relationship, a relationship between God and his beloved children?  What’s up with all this law?  

First, we look to the beautiful psalm we sang this morning, which reminds us that “the law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul,” and “the decree of the LORD is trustworthy, giving wisdom to the simple.”  Unlike the inhumane laws of oppressive 18th-century English tyranny for example, “the ordinances of the Lord are true,” and “all of them [are] just.”  In other words, when God himself is the legislator, we’re not going to get in a situation where law is imperfect because it has to survive political compromise like the laws of our congress.  Or because the law might be motivated by greed or thirst for power, like the laws of a king.  God’s laws are designed to foster the relationship, to preserve it and deepen it, to keep the relationship healthy and alive.  

And he wants so much more from us than mere external observance.  Christ explains this in his Sermon on the Mount.  “Thou shalt not kill” certainly means, first of all, that you shouldn’t murder people.  But there’s a deeper reality.  There’s a deeper righteousness that Christ is calling us to.  He doesn’t want us just to avoid doing hateful things.  He wants there to be to no hate in our hearts at all.  He wants those deeper realities that lie behind the Ten Commandments, like justice and equity and peace, he wants those things to convert our hearts and become who we are.  Our Lord says that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.  He fulfills the law first of all by insisting upon a profound observance of the commandments themselves and their underlying meaning, which we see an example of, when he protects the First Commandment by casting out the moneychangers from the Temple.  He also fulfills the law in his very person and in the most important events of his life.  The law is all about relationship, establishing and maintaining right relationships.  And in Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, he seals forever the New and Eternal Covenant, uniting God and man directly in a permanent relationship of justice, mercy, and love, bringing the law and the commandments to their final and definitive meaning and purpose: the salvation of the whole world.