6A23.    Sirach 15:15-20.     “Before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him.”  Every day is given us the opportunity to come closer to our loving God who loves us dearly, or to go our own way.  “If you trust in God, you too shall live.”  If we trust in anything or anyone else, we shall destroy our hope for the future.

Matthew 5:17-37.  Jesus said, “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”  Jesus said in Mark 1:15, “This is the time of fulfillment.  The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe in the gospel.”  God gave the Law or Torah to the Hebrew People to give them a share in his divine life.  What was initiated in the Old Testament times is brought to fulfillment or to the establishment of the spiritual kingdom of God in this world in which we accept God as the God of our lives and so come to possess the life that only God can give us.  In this Sunday’s gospel Jesus goes on to enlarge upon, amplify, and further develop certain prescriptions in the Torah or Law of Moses.  He claims the divine authority to enhance the Torah, which originally came through divine inspiration, when he says four times, “But I say to you.”  What is in common with the four enlargements Jesus makes on the Torah is that he demands that, not only what we do externally but who we are internally, is in accord with the mind of God.  As God is love, Jesus commands that we likewise be love in the fullness of our being.

1 Corinthians 2:6-10.   “We speak God’s wisdom,” “not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away.”  This wisdom “God has revealed to us through the Spirit.”   When Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God, Jesus said to him in reply, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.”  (Matthew 16:16-17)  Knowledge or understanding of spiritual things comes to us from God and not from human sources.  Jesus, God made man, revealed to us and continues to reveal to us through the Holy Spirit how God thinks so that we may truly be children of God, our Father.