Msgr. Peter J. Vaghi
Title of Series: "Moral Life: Living the Hope Within Us"

Part 1: "The One Who Has Hope (Faith) Lives Differently"

September 4th, 2008
First Thursday

A most warm welcome to each and every one of you as we gather on this September day for yet another year of friendship and reflection on our faith !  Not only do we learn from each other by our presence and hopefully the content of these nine reflections, but together we grow in fellowship.

We continue this year our journey through the two catechisms of the Catholic Church -- the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church and the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults. We have studied the first two pillars -- the creed and the sacraments. This year our focus is on the moral life, the faith lived, with special focus on the Ten Commandments. I have entitled this series of nine talks: “The Moral Life: Living the Hope Within Us.” The first reflection is: “The One Who has Hope (Faith) Lives Differently.”

At its heart, our subject matter is about free choices, the choices we make each day in our concrete daily lives, our lives at home, in the workplace, at places of recreation, with our families and the time we spend alone. “Human freedom is more than a capacity to  choose between this and that. It is the God-given power to become who he created us to be and so to share eternal union with him.” USCCA 311

How then is it that our Catholic faith, a faith rooted in the living Person of Jesus Christ, gives us direction and inner strength to make the right choices? How is it that our faith helps us form our consciences to make those correct choices. Our conscience is our most secret core, our sanctuary. It requires lifelong formation according to objective moral standards. “The Word of God is a principal tool in the formation of conscience when it is assimilated by study, prayer and practice.” USCCA 314  In addition, our consciences are formed with the prudent advice and good example of others, the authoritative teaching of the Church and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

But it is ultimately about living that informed Hope within us. In his magnificant encyclical letter, Spe Salvi (On Christian Hope), Benedict XVI teaches us: “The one who has hope lives differently: the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.” SS 2 Why is this?

The answer can be found  in Galatians, Chapter 2:20, where St. Paul writes: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” These are revolutionary words. Do we ever stop to think about their impact? Christ lives within us. His presence, to the extent we yield to His presence and the presence of His Holy Spirit, has to make us live differently and more hopeful lives. We are not alone. Not only are we made in the image and likeness of God, which is a basic principal of the moral life, but by His living presence within us, we act differently and live more hopefully. He so desires to express Himself through our facial expressions, our business decisions, the tone of our voices, even our body language. You and I are credible witnesses to our faith to the extent that we mirror the living presence of Christ within us.

This is my daily challenge as a priest and the challenge of each of us precisely in our very hectic and busy lives at home and in our workplaces.

Along with Benedict, we must daily  ask ourselves whether our Christian faith is “ ‘performative’ for us -- is it a message which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just ‘information’ which, in the meantime, we have set aside and which now seems to us to have been superseded by more recent information?” SS 10  In that same encyclical letter, he answers beautifully: “…Christianity was not only ‘good news’ -- the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only ‘informative’ but ‘performative.’ That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known -- it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing.” SS 2  But why?

It is a daily encounter with a living God within us. Our challenge is to be in regular communication, regular touch with Him in our prayer, in our study, in our sacramental encounters, in our concern and love for the poor, in our sacrifices for one another, in our living as Jesus lived and continues to live. It is another name for GRACE -- that life in Christ and the inner presence of the Holy Spirit. “The grace that comes to us from Christ in the Spirit is as essential as love and rules and, in fact, makes love and keeping the rules possible.” USCCA 318. In effect, that is the Moral Life: the Faith Lived, the subject of this year’s reflections.

Jesus Christ is the ultimate teacher of the moral life. He ratified the Ten Commandments, adopted them as His own, deepens them, and showed us how each is an example of love of God or love of neighbor and together are fundamental to the moral life. In addition, the beatitudes are taught by Jesus and they  “give spirit to the Law of the Ten Commandments and bring perfection to the moral life.” USCCA 309

Turn with me to Matthew’s Gospel, but  a text found in all three of the synoptic gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke, a text entitled the Rich Young Man. It is the same text used  in that magna carta  encyclical on the moral life  entitled Veritatis Splendor, (On the Splendor of Truth) (VS) and a text used in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults at the beginning of the moral section. USCCA 307-308

In that text, we read that “someone approached” Jesus and asked Him a question. We have no idea who that “someone” is. It could be you or I. No name is given. It is probably just as well. Put yourself in that scene right now. Try and ask Jesus the same question: “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?” Is this even the kind of question you would raise today? When was the last time you thought about “eternal life?” Most of us are focused, perhaps unduly, on the pressing demands of the here and now with our time sheets, palm pilots, blackberries, various habits of successful time management skills ingrained in us, emails, voice mails and faxes.

How does Jesus answer the question? He says directly: “There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He doesn’t list rules and regulations, at least initially. No, He speaks of the good. “The good is belonging To God, obeying him, walking humbly with him in doing justice and in loving kindness.” VS lI

Almost immediately, He then tells him to keep the commandments. As if to appropriate the Jewish law, Jesus enumerates the commandments in summary form and makes them His own -- you shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and your mother; love your neighbor as yourself. When the rich young man told Jesus he had done all of that, Jesus told him to live the love command in its most radical form -- go sell what you have and give to the poor. The commandments “are the first necessary step on the journey towards freedom, its starting-point.” VS 13

Only then did Jesus say: “Then, come, follow me.”

I learned from that encyclical a most significant lesson that Jesus was trying to teach the rich young man in the text from Matthew 19. The moral life for a Christian is not simply about rules and regulations as important and indeed essential that the 10 commandments are. Fundamentally, however, the moral life is about life in Christ Jesus, about following Him and living in Him which is made possible first of all because of our baptism into Him and from all the graces that flow from Him, from the sacraments, from our prayer, from our lives of service. No mere  human effort alone succeeds in our fulfilling the law no matter how hard we try. “This ‘fulfillment can come only from a gift of God: the offer of a share in the divine Goodness revealed and communicated in Jesus. ...What the young man now perhaps only dimly perceives will in the end be fully revealed by Jesus himself in the invitation: ‘Come, follow me.’” VS ll

The 10 commandments, the 10 words, give us guidance, make it possible for us to know the Truth as He gives the Truth to us. And Jesus teaches us that “the truth will set you free.” (Jn 8:32) In His very Person, Jesus is the Splendor of Truth. And Jesus came not to destroy the law, the law of Moses but to fulfill the law. He fulfilled the law precisely in and through His very Person. In His dying, rising, and sending the Holy Spirit, He sends His life to us and His love. He pours His love in us by the power of the Holy Spirit that  enables us to live as He teaches us.

The Christian life is thus about a love affair with the Person Jesus. The rules and regulations of that relationship are a part of a covenant first given to the Jewish people in the ten commandments (or Decalogue) on Sinai, a covenant relationship, which set them free from their oppressors, and gave them a new way of living. All the more did Christ give you and me a new way of living and loving in and through Him and our daily relationship with Him. In Baptism, you and I were freed from the slavery and inheritance of sin and made sharers in His life, a life destined for life eternal, a life of hope.

Now what do we hope these nine reflections on the moral life, and the commandments in particular, will accomplish? I have four points.

l.) To come to know the commandments and their implications for us.

Since most of us learned the 10 commandments (Decalogue) when we were children, the tendency may be for us to remember them simply through the eyes and ears of children.  Normally we think of two tablets -- the first three commandments concerning love of God and the second seven involving love of neighbor. I will not embarrass anyone today by asking him/her to recite from memory either tablets of the 10 commandments. But the biblical basis of the 10 commandments is found in two places in the Old Testament.  They are based in Deut 5 (generally thought to be the later text) -- Mt.  Horeb -- right before entry into the promised land AND Exodus 20 -- Mt. Sinai -- in the desert (a three hour climb at 2 a.m. which many of us made a number of years ago when we were in the Holy Land).

2.) To understand that, for Christians, the 10 commandments are not abolished. Moreover, we are empowered to live them in a new way.

This is the most important lesson from Mt 19. We are invited to rediscover the law in the person of Jesus Christ who is the perfect fulfillment of the law. “Do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” (Mt 5:17) It will become clear that Jesus, while underscoring love as the principal commandment, built upon and expanded what Moses was given on Mt. Sinai. Or as stated by Servant of God John Paul II in the Sinai desert on February 26, 200l: “Sinai finds its fulfillment on another mountain, the mountain of the Transfiguration, Mt Tabor, where Jesus appears to his Apostles shining with the glory of God. Moses and Elijah stand with him to testify that the fulfillment of God’s revelation is found in the glorified Christ.” And in the spirit of the glorified Christ, you and I are empowered to live the commandments in a new way.

The preacher of the Papal Household, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, in his book, Life in Christ, writes perceptively that: “St. John says that ‘the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’. If we apply this today to ourselves in the Church, it means that man can make the law and founders can make rules of life, but only Jesus Christ, with his Spirit, can give the strength to live them.” (p.130)

Precisely, the figure of the glorified Christ on Mt. Tabor, in the Transfiguration account, reminds us that only in Christ, who died and rose for us, is it possible that the commandments, given on Mt. Sinai, can be lived. This is what it means that Tabor fulfills Sinai. This is what is new about the Good News of the Gospel, what Jesus came to give us. This is a word of great hope for us who are called to live the commandments as the basis of our lives and as our hope for eternal life.

3.) To come to see that in responding in love in following the commandments is how we follow Christ.

“The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him. This is the way we may know that we are in union with him; whoever claims to abide in him ought to live just as he lived.” (l John 2: 3-6)

“Follow me.” That is the most important invitation of Christ to us as it was to the rich young man. Scripture says he went away sad because he had many possessions.  My hope is that each of us will go away, day in and day out, happy. We do this when we seek to follow the commandments. In other words, it is the actual attempt to live the commandments, in doing what we are asked to do, (with God’s help) that we come into relationship with God, that we come to know and love Him. This profound awareness has had an incredible effect on my spiritual journey. I hope you will experience the same point that in one’s effort to follow the commandments, precisely in that effort do we come in contact with the living God and His deep and abiding love for us. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.” (John 15: 10)

4.) A basis for our daily examination of conscience.

Hopefully, a deepened study of the commandments will help us in the on-going challenge to form our consciences and give us a deeper spiritual freedom which results from confessing our sins regularly and living the love commands of our Lord.

Most importantly, and in conclusion, “The one who has hope (faith) lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.” SS 2

                            AMEN