Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr A 2026

Title

If you choose, you can keep the commandments

Outline

God has given us free choice

So, “if you choose, you can keep the commandments. . . . Before everyone are life and death, whichever they choose will be given them.” And that is true on the level of natural revelation.

But there is more beyond natural revelation. First, God’s wisdom is “not a wisdom of this age,” for it is “God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden.” To grasp it we need the Spirit. Second, we have become habituated and perhaps addicted to the way of life of this age and we need a wonder of a counselor who can help us break free. And third, some have opened themselves or have been opened to demons, and the best we can do is like the Geresene demoniac, drag ourselves to the feet of Jesus so he can break the bondage.

By God’s grace he has given us Jesus as teacher, counselor, and deliverer so we can choose.

We see an example of his work as wisdom teacher in the gospel

First, he tells us that God’s wisdom is in continuity with the law and the prophets, not in discontinuity. So we should expect him to give us a fulfillment, a filling fuller, not an excuse to disregard them.

Second, he tells us that the interpreters of the law and the prophets, the Pharisaic scribes, did not have the correct interpretation, had not built the correct fences around the law. That is not the way to life, that is not the fulfillment.

Third, he takes us through four Pharisaic interpretations to show us how true wisdom differs. Deal with anger at the root and uproot it rather than define righteous and unrighteous anger. Deal with unchastity at its root rather than define when one has gone too far. Third, related to this, marriage is until death and therefore divorce does not have grounds, but is itself the grounds of adultery. Fourth, speech should always be simple and true. Period. Otherwise keep silence.

Now we say, “Who can do this?”

Jesus would say, “No one unless he or she is totally committed to me as their teacher, totally seeking me as their counselor to point the way to freedom, totally dependent on me for their deliverance.

For us that means we avoid the way of the Pharisees who explained the commandments so as to teach smooth or at least smoother things (depending on which school they were in). And we stick with the teaching of Jesus in in prayer and meditation and fasting and tears and allow him to pour his Spirit into us so that we can live the freedom of obedience.