A Homily for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Moses or Christ? Both the Epistle and Gospel of this Holy Mass play on the nature of this question. Saint Paul, who had grown up at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) – one of the best known Pharisees, knew that the truth proclaimed through Moses was truly a Revelation of God. A Revelation wherein the Glory of God shone on the face of Moses as a lasting reflection of His seeing God’s back.

Yet he also recognised that the pharisaic practice of studying the law so as to use it for one’s own end in itself it cannot suffice. He, like Moses, had seen Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:6, Acts 9) and knew that the Law given to Moses was nothing if not a preparation for the coming of Christ, that all may live in the charity of Christ. Christ Himself tells the lawyer that follow the Law will bring him to salvation – even praising the lawyer on correctly understanding the law: nothing is more important than loving God with all your soul, all your heart, all your mind and all your strength. Together with its compliment in loving neighbour as yourself. What the lawyer could not accept, however, is that everybody was his neighbour: “I, knowing the law of God, am of far greater dignity that these others who I do not need to bother myself with.” But this is in manifest contradiction of Moses. The more one stands above the another in a given area, the more one must lower oneself so as to raise them up. Christ, in His Incarnation, Passion and death is the preeminent example of this – but He, unlike us, was under no obligation.

It is in ignoring this prophecy of Christ that the Apostle is referring to when he rejects the letter of the Law as bring death. To know the spirit of the Law is to know Him from Whom it comes, Who judges us according to its prescriptions. By knowing the Lawgiver, we know what the Law intends which can then bring life. This is how Moses received the Law, but he, unlike the Apostles, only saw the back of God as He passed by. The Apostles spoke with God face to face. Hence he can tell the Apostles, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see.”

According to the flesh the Apostles see exactly the same things as the Pharisees, the man Jesus, according to the spirit they could confess He is “the Christ the Son of the Living God” (Matthew 16:16). And through this confession they could not accept anything that denies such a reality. Never, however, did they reject the people denying Him as people to be despised. Rather they did all in their power to convert them – to open their eyes to the Truth of Christ Who alone can save them.

Yet the Apostles could never fail to recognise that there were many who did not want to be saved, who wanted to show themselves as almost better than God. The Pharisees and Sadducees ever sought to trap Our Lord and make Him deny the truth of the preceding Revelation – to deny that which is true in the Law and the Prophets. Unfailingly Christ only used their questions to raise the stakes and show the questioner himself to be at fault. Whilst the Pharisees made of the Law a burden rigorously imposed on the people, Christ struck through the minutiae to demand a far more rigorous moral norm: one which is inherent in the reality concerned. But this reality the Pharisees ever rejected. It is as if the pharisee, had he been robbed on the road to Jerico, had hidden his shame, rolling off the road rather than letting a Samaritan help him. Only Christ could perfectly fulfil the Law – for He is its subject and norm. Only He could effect that which the Law promises, being Himself the promise.

Nobody can more truly be called the Samaritan of this parable than Our Lord. The man stripped of his dignity by original sin and beaten half to death by personal sin needs to be restored to his former dignity and strength that he may enter heaven.

By baptism He restores to us our position as adoptive sons of God: the sacraments are given us to restore us to the dignity of innocence as it was enjoyed by Adam and Eve before original sin robbed us through our self-will and to sustain us in living according to that dignity. Moses received a share of this dignity when he received the Law from Christ on the mountain. It was seen by all Israel when he came down the mountain, such that he had to veil his face. Yet it is the glory proper to Christ, which can never be taken away from Him.

In glimpsing His glory anew as we offer this Holy Sacrifice as worthily as we are able this morning, let us be drawn ever more deeply into that consuming love of God and of our neigbour which it demands. +