Two Gifts: Law And Faith

Saturday of the 27th week in course 2022

St. Paul is sharing his reflections with the Galatians and with us on two gifts given by the Father in His mercy. We need to first remind ourselves of the state we were in before God intervened in human history to call Abraham to be our spiritual ancestor, along with Sarah. Human beings after Adam were a mess, full of selfishness, violence, hatred. Read the first chapters of Genesis. Then God’s righteous wrath was poured out in the flood, and God called Noah and his family to continue the human race, following in obedience with a repetition of the original blessing: be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. He forbade violence as the first law, but should that not have been obvious from the beginning?

What would be the clear desire of God for humanity? We have to jump forward to the life of Jesus, Son of Mary, Son of God. His life and teaching exemplify the real objective. God wants us to live and die in love–to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves. Even better, He wants us to love Him and love our neighbor as Jesus did–all the way to sacrificing ourselves for the welfare of others.

So in the meantime, God gave us the gift of the Law–really the moral law summarized in the ten commandments. First, we honor and respect the Lord, keeping His Holy Name sacred and His Sabbath free of labor. Second, we honor and respect our neighbor, and especially all human families, by honoring parents, protecting human life from injury, respecting the marriage of self and others as one man and one woman for life, keeping others’ property from harm and not lusting after persons and things that I have no right to. That list functions as a kind of guardian until Christ came into the world. It was just a list of things to avoid, not a roadmap toward true Goodness. That comes with the second gift, faith.

Faith is not a result of our efforts. Oh, with our natural understanding we can know that there is something more and greater than we are. But to believe in the Blessed Trinity and His supreme and awesome love for us, we need to accept the gift of faith. That makes each of us equal in dignity, if not in ability. That gift makes us true children of Abraham, our father in faith, and disciples of Jesus, who has made Himself our Brother.

By accepting the gift of faith, and being washed in the water of regeneration and anointed with the Holy Spirit, we then become equal in dignity even to Mary, Mother of Jesus. Her dignity came not so much from her bearing Jesus in the flesh as her conceiving the Son of God in her heart and in her willingness to give up her own will to the will of God. Yes, we honor her above all other Christians, as the Queen Mother, the Mother of the Messiah, but it is what God brought about in her mind and will and disposition to discipleship that Jesus celebrates. Before anyone else, she heard the word of God and kept it.