6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
If I was God, I would not have created human beings with free will. I don’t know about you, but I am seemly always using my free will to just mess up the beauty of God’s masterpiece. There is something in human nature that just wants to rebel with our freedom. To be free from the law or rules or whatever. This is probably most clear for parents who have teenagers. This desire to rebel in freedom is probably the reason why in high school I wanted to break curfew and why I got that tattoo… Just kidding… Or am I…
But God was crazy enough to create us with freedom. But as Jesus says in the gospel, he has not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. And so our freedom is not freedom from the law and rules, but freedom for something. Freedom for the law of love that is written in our hearts. Freedom for greatness and beauty. But there is a problem. We have freedom and I don’t know about you but I often times use that freedom not for supernatural beauty and love but for selfishness. And so sometimes I wish that God would have just made me as a tree so that I could just follow the natural law of a tree and sprout forth with natural beauty during spring. This would be much easier then having the freedom to love.
Just think how nice it would be to just be a natural thing like a tree or stream or mountain. Natural things have beauty because they obey the laws of nature. But those natural things don’t have a choice. They are not free and so they cannot love. A tree cannot love a dog cannot love. Although my mom would have you believe that her dog loves but he really only loves me when I give him a treat or scratch his belly and that is not love.
Natural things can have natural beauty because they obey the natural law. We were created not as natural beings, but as supernatural beings that can have a supernatural beauty because we obey the supernatural law of love written in our hearts. This is what Jesus is calling us too!
God is crazy to have created us with freedom because he knew we could choose to just screw things up. What a wild risk he took! What vulnerability on His part to give us freedom and open Himself up to being rejected! But this choice to give us freedom was a radical act of love that allows us to love.
Jesus has come to fulfil this law. Not a law written on stone tablets or on paper but a law of love written on our hearts. And God has given us freedom to choose or reject this law of love. How will we use our freedom?