Is obeying the commandments easy for you?

Good News Reflection
Thursday after Epiphany
January 7, 2010

Today's Readings*:
1 John 4:19–5:4
Ps 72:1-2, 14, 15bc, 17 (with 11)
Luke 4:14-22
http://www.usccb.org/nab/010710.shtml
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/10_01_07.mp3

*Today's reflection is based on the readings for the US. To read the scriptures for other parts of the world, see:
http://www.universalis.com/20100107/mass.htm

Is obeying the commandments easy for you?

Today's first reading tells us that God's commandments are not burdensome. Well, have you ever found God's commandments to be difficult? I sure have! It IS a burden to examine my conscience and force myself to change. Ahh, but John shares with us the secret to making it easy: Our faith.

Faith conquers all, he says. So, do you have enough faith to conquer all temptations, stay pure and resist evil? Not me!

Therefore, we can conclude that, although we do have faith in God, our faith is too little. Right? No. We were given the Holy Spirit during our baptisms, and both Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 say that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit, which means that we have all the faith that God has! An awesome thought, so what's missing? Why do we do things that are not holy?

Look at what John is talking about in the whole of the first reading: Love. This is the key to preventing the commandments from feeling burdensome.

If we know that God loves us unconditionally, regardless of how sinful or holy we are, then we naturally want to love him with our whole heart, whole soul, and whole mind. And when we love him that much, we naturally want to unite ourselves to him in loving everyone whom he loves, even the jerks (I mean those irritating, errr, precious children of God who are causing us problems). When we truly love others, we are less likely to sin against them.

If we try to obey God's commandments simply because he says so, it is a burden. Holiness is then as difficult for us as it was for the folks of the Old Testament who lived by the letter of the law without the help of the Spirit of the law, the Holy Spirit. But only Jesus could succeed in fulfilling the law perfectly, and he added love into the equation. Whereas the old laws allowed people to demand an eye for an eye when they were wronged, Jesus commanded: "Do good to your enemies." And he gave us his Holy Spirit so that we could succeed at this.

If we desire to obey God's commandments because we want to remain united to his love, and if we rely on the Holy Spirit to help us love others unconditionally (sometimes we need supernatural love), it becomes much easier to resist sin.

In fact, we often don't even feel tempted. We enjoy doing good to our enemies, we consider ourselves blessed when persecuted by jerks, and we have great patience because we notice that those jerks are really more wounded than we are, and instead of getting angry, we feel sorry for them.

In every situation, including the most burdensome, we need to ask: "What would Jesus do?" Better yet, ask: "What would LOVE do?" This melts the weight of the burden.

© 2010 by Terry A. Modica
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