Navarre Bible Commentary:Wednesday, 3rd Week in Lent

Orthodox Icon of Jesus Christ

Matthew 5:17-19

Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)

The Law and the Prophets

17 “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them.[a]18 For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Footnotes:

1. 5.17 Jesus came to bring the old law to its natural fulfilment in the new, while discarding what had become obsolete; cf. Jn 4.21.

Cited in the Catechism:  In promulgating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Blessed John Paul II explained that the Catechism "is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium."  He went on to "declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion" (Fidei Depositum). Passages from this Gospel reading are cited in the Catechism, paragraphs 577, 578, 592, 764, 1454, 1967, 2053 and 2763.

Commentary

Jesus and his teaching, the fullness of the Law

5:17–19. In this passage Jesus stresses the perennial value of the Old Testament, it is the word of God; because it has a divine authority it deserves total respect. The Old Law enjoined precepts of a moral, legal and liturgical type. Its moral precepts still hold good in the New Testament because they are for the most part specific, divine-positive, promulgations of the natural law. However, our Lord gives them greater weight and meaning. But the legal and liturgical precepts of the Old Law were laid down by God for a specific stage in salvation history, that is, up to the coming of Christ; Christians are not obliged to observe them (cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1–2, 108, 3 ad 3).

The law promulgated through Moses and explained by the prophets was God’s gift to his people, a kind of anticipation of the definitive Law which the Christ or Messiah would lay down. Thus, as the Council of Trent defined, Jesus not only “was given to men as a redeemer in whom they are to trust, but also as lawgiver whom they are to obey” (De iustificatione, can. 21).

Source: The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries. Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

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