“Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s law will be alive and working” Matthew 5, the Message

I wonder what you instinctively believe about the Law? Is it about restriction and oppression, or is it about freedom and life? Does it strike you as a list of rules or something much deeper?

I’ve been thinking recently about the fact that God’s “good, pleasing and perfect will” is more beautiful and life-giving than anything I could ever dream of myself.

St Ignatius wrote that “There are very few people who realise what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace.”

In this meditation on Matthew 5:17-20 from the Message, we consider Jesus’ assertion that he has come not to demolish the law, but to fulfil it. Jesus challenges his listeners to understand the law in a deeper, broader way than those who have been following it to the letter. “Trivialise even the smallest item in God’s law and you will have trivialised yourself,” he asserts, and yet “Unless you do far better than the Pharisees in the matters of right living, you won’t know the first thing about entering the kingdom.”

May you glimpse the freedom and grace the deep Law of God offers as you pray with this passage today.