Law Of Love Total Commitment

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. All that we have said up to this point can be summarized in the difference between law and love. Really in the Christian way, we are not governed by law at all. We should be beyond it. We seek not just merely the keeping of the commandments, but we seek to be related to our blessed Lord. Is it hard? Is it possible? Remember one day a young man came to our blessed Lord, and he asked what he must do to be saved. And our blessed Lord said that he must keep the commandments. And our Lord mentioned about five or six of the commandments, such as not stealing, not committing adultery, and the like. And the young man said, I have kept all these from my youth. Our blessed Lord then added, if you would be perfect, go sell all you have. Give to the poor, then come follow me. The young man left our Lord and went away sad because he had made possessions. The apostles were troubled about this. After all, must everybody sell everything that he has to follow our Lord? So they said, who then can be saved? And our Lord answered that it is not possible with men alone, that is to say, by our own human power we cannot, but it is possible with God. All things are possible with God. We have his grace. Is Christianity hard, therefore? In a certain sense it is hard, hard from a worldly point of view, but it gives such inner peace and joy that those who obey the law of love of our blessed Lord find it very easy. Really when we understand the full import of the law of our blessed Lord, we find it to be this. Our Lord is saying, give me all, all of you. I do not want just so much of your time, so many hours a day, so much of your money, so much of your work. I want you. I have not come to torment this natural self of yours. I've come to kill it. No half measures are any good. I do not want to cut off a branch here and a branch there. I want to have this whole tree of the natural man cut down. I do not wish just to drill a tooth or crown it. If it's bad, I want it out. So he says, give me your whole self. Is that a loss? No, because he said, I will give you a new self. I will give you myself. My own will shall become yours. The trouble with us when we hear the law of our blessed Lord is that we are trying to remain what we are and at the same time to keep a reasonable amount of peace. We want to be what we call good. We want our heart and our mind to go one way. Maybe it's after money. Maybe it's after pleasure. Maybe it's after social prestige. And at the same time, we do want to behave honestly and chastely and to keep the commandments. Now, that is exactly what our blessed Lord said that we were not to do. He said a thistle cannot produce a fig. And if I am a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I cannot produce wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change has to go deep, down below the surface. I have to be plowed up and to be re-sown. That was why our Lord said, if you would be perfect, come follow me. Oh, and again, be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. He meant that we have to go in for full treatment. It is hard, but the sort of hankering after it is a bit harder. Really, when we get down to rock bottom, what are we afraid of? We are afraid to give our finger to God because we fear that he may take our hand. So we have little secret gardens back in our heart that we tend. The fruit is not his, it's ours. We wall it off from him, sometimes a petty sin or vice or selfishness, whatever it happens to be. We do not get the full joy of being a Christian. It's very hard for an egg, for example, to turn into a bird, but it would be much harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are just like eggs now, and we cannot go on being just what we call a good egg. If we insist upon being a good egg, we either become a good egg, a really good one, or a bad one. And what is a good egg? A good egg is an egg that hatches. It can be readily seen that what our blessed Lord insists upon is a kind of a death. Surely we have to renew in our own lives exactly what happened in his. He is the pattern. He repeatedly said not only to Nicodemus, but to us, that if we are to live again, we have to perish to that old existence. If there is anybody who hopes that in Christ the real danger spots are rendered harmless, and that nothing else can happen to us, because after all he is what we call a kind Savior and who takes even hardened sinners back with no questions asked, well, that person must first come to terms with the text that our blessed Lord said he would not subtract one jot or tittle from the severity of God's law. That he had come not to abolish the law, but to perfect it. In other words, grace is not cheap. Cost our Lord is life. Can you think of anything that is more costly than that for which a man must pay on a cross? So if we want peace, we have to pay that price without that death to the lower life. Not the death to our higher life, no. But without that death to our lower life, there is no peace. There's only fear. And we live just a kind of a half existence. Remember our blessed Lord said that he who wills to do the will of the Father in heaven will know whether the teaching is from God. By this he means one of the reasons there are agnostics and skeptics is because they are not keeping the law of God. We know his will. We will understand his doctrine. It could very well be that we have entirely too much insistence upon a knowledge of Christian doctrine and not enough insistence on the doing. Our blessed Lord never said that if you know my doctrine, you will do my will. But he did say that if you do my will, you will know my doctrine. In other words, only he who does the will, who is an earnest about it, who stakes his life on it, will come to understand Christ and all that his redemption means. Our Lord is known really only to those who venture. Not to the cowards is he known. Now at first, our blessed Lord is always a disturber. When you are still living in the natural order, oh, he seems to irritate you. You're dealing with a God who seems to be leading you into a kind of a crucifixion. You are a nice, easygoing worldling, and you have settled down comfortably into what you call your worldview. But if you are in earnest with Christ, you will have to give up that comfort. And not because you're supposed to be a nervous worrier, but simply because it is a false peace. The first advent, therefore, of Christ into our lives is actually that of one who upsets us. But then once we give ourselves to him, he becomes our defender. Before we have Christ, our heart accuses us. We are unhappy with half-measures. And after we give ourselves to our Lord and his law of love, then our heart is at peace and Christ becomes our defender. His attitude completely changes once we have changed ours. This is just another way of putting the difference between commandments and love. Commandments only restrain me. We see them as hurdles and obstacles in the way of life. And those who live by the commandments ask, how far can I go? What is the limit? How close can I get to the abyss without tumbling in? Is it a mortal sin? This is not the way of love, it's not the way of peace. It is the old Adam that is within me that talks this way about commands. So when I merely obey commands, I am never there as a whole person, but perhaps at most only with a better half of myself, and the other half remains in opposition. That's the psychological state of everyone who obeys a command, never the whole heart. But when I love, I am a whole person, for love is a movement of my whole self. It's an overflowing, limitless giving of oneself. Therefore it can never be commanded, it can only happen. Up to this point we have said that the Christian doctrine of morality is a total commitment to Christ, so that we put on his mind, we think his thoughts, we love what he loves, and we ask ourselves whenever we do anything, will this be pleasing to him? But there's another side to the love of God, it is the love of neighbor. The two laws go together, and the love of neighbor is not merely giving eggs to a neighbor when the neighbor wishes it. It is really being a sin-bearer. What does that mean? Well some years ago I remember meeting a woman who was very much distressed because her son had been put into prison. I think it was the fourth arrest for crime and robbery and murder. She was bitterly ashamed and broken-hearted, and then I asked myself, why does she have all this shame? And there came to me the words of the prophet Isaiah that had referred to our Lord, and by my say of her, she had borne his griefs, carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace was upon her. And it would only be by her stripes that he would be healed. This good mother had very few sins in her life, certainly no serious sins. And yet love made her exceedingly sinful for his sake. So immediately the mystery cleared up, the love which a woman can put out for her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest thing that we can ever get on this earth to the love of God and to know what God really is. In our own turn, therefore, we have to see that all of our sins became his sins. Our disgrace was his disgrace, our shame his shame, and in his own body he bare our sins upon the tree. That is what forgiveness costs. That's why we said grace is not easy. We are not, therefore, to think that we are pious when we begin living our individual holy lives apart from our neighbor and apart from the world and suffering humanity. That was the trouble with Simon the Pharisee. The sinful woman came into the house and poured out ointment upon the feet of our blessed Lord. Simon was scandalized. He wanted no contact with anyone that was sinful. He was only concerned about keeping the law just for himself and maybe his own false inner peace. And our blessed Lord said to Simon, Do you see this woman? Do you understand her? Her sins are part of the sins of the world. And then he went on to say that he was taking on her sins, and the pouring of the ointment was a preparation for his crucifixion and his burial. He was forgiven much, and forgiveness costs an awful lot. Forgiveness is love in action, and love means sin-bearing. Forgiveness can only be accomplished by sin-bearing, and sin-bearing means a cross. It means that to God, and it must mean that to us. That is why our blessed Lord said, If any man will be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me. The meaning of the cross is love bearing the sin of the Beloved because of oneness with him. We can know the sin-bearer Christ only as we bear the sins of others. We are redeemed in order to be redeemers, and we are not saved until God makes us saviors. The Christian has to go with our Lord into the Garden of Gethsemane and must pass from there to Calvary, filling up in his body what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ. For his body's sake, which is the church, we cannot like Pilate wash our hands and say I'm innocent of the blood of the world and innocent of the sufferings of the world. If the church is a church indeed, it is a body of sin-bearing people. People who love with the love of God that is shed abroad in their hearts are a body of people who can forgive because they have been forgiven, who have been loved, and therefore they can become lovers. Unless the church of Christ is by love so united with the whole of mankind that the sin of the world is the sin of the church, the disgrace of the world is the disgrace of the church, the shame of the world, the shame of the church, the poverty of the world, the poverty of the church, then it is no church at all. The church is not and never can be an end in itself. It is a means of salvation for the world. Not just our own sanctification, we cannot save ourselves alone. We pray in the context of our Father, not my Father, our daily bread, not my daily bread. The church is the agent of salvation for mankind. It is not a refuge of peace. It is an army preparing for war. We seek security, but only in sacrifice, and this is the mark of the church and the hallmark of the cross itself. And if the sin of our modern slums and the degradation that they cause, if the sin of our overcrowded, rotten houses and the ugliness and vice they bring, if the sin of unemployment with the damnation of body and soul that it means to men and women, if the sin of the heartless, thoughtless luxury at one end, standing out against the squalid and degrading poverty of Africa and Asia and Latin America at the other, if the sin of commercial trickery and dishonesty and the wholesale defrauding of the poor, if the sin of prostitution and the murder of women and children by disease, and if the sin of war, the very sins which is but the bursting and the festering of all the filth that the others have bred in years of miscalled peace, if all of that is not laid upon the church as a burden and upon us as members of the church, and if we do not feel it, we are not worthy members of the church. We have missed our vocation. This is Christian morality, not just the keeping of the commandments. It's love, it's total commitment, and it's taking upon ourselves the sins of others. This is the new law. Love God. Love your neighbor. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪