Harden Not Your Hearts

Selected Passages from an Article by Christopher West titled "Body Language - 'Freedom From the Law'" which appeared in the West Texas Catholic on September 17, 2006

Jesus Christ did not die on a cross and rise from the dead to give us a long list of rules to follow. Christ came, in fact, to set us free from the rules.

What? Yes, it's true. As St. Paul tells us, if we are led by Christ, we are free from the law (see Gal 5).

But this doesn't mean we are free to break the law. Christ sets us free to fulfill the law. "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not some to abolish them, but to fulfill them: (Mt 5:17).

Christ fulfills the law, as the word implies, by living it to the fullest. This means not only meeting the law's demands externally, but living them to their fullest internally -- from the depths of the heart.

Christ didn't come into the world to shove laws down our rebellious throats. He came into the world to change our hearts so we would no longer need the laws.

This doesn't mean laws serve no purpose for us. To the degree that our hearts are still rebelling against God's will, we need his law to tell us where our hearts need to change.

But if we welcome God's grace in our lives and allow it to work in us, we come to find that the desires of our hearts conform more and more to God's will for us. To this extent we are "free from the law."

Again, this doesn't mean we are free to break the law. We are free to fulfill the law because we no longer desire to break it.

My point is this: we are only bitter towards the law when we desire to break it. Pick any teaching of the church that you are bitter about. Chances are it has something to do with sex (we're not usually bitter about the fact that the church calls us to feed the hungry).

Here's a proposal for us to chew on. Maybe the problem is not the teaching of the church. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is precisely what Jesus said it was: our own hardness of heart (see Mt 19:8).

And maybe the solution is not to throw the church's teaching out the window. Maybe the solution, instead, is to get on our knees and humbly pray, "Lord, please change my heart."

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.