LAW OF CHRIST

This entry treats many aspects of the law of Christ. First it provides a survey of Christ’s moral teaching. Then it points out that his law gives his disciples power to live excellent lives. Next it shows that Christ’s moral teaching binds in conscience. (Still, it is a morality of freedom, a morality that sets his disciples free.) Finally, it recalls that Jesus is himself the law of the Gospel.

The Sublime Moral Teaching of Jesus • In the Gospels, Christ is most commonly called “Teacher.” In the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5—7), in many parables and earnest exhortations, he is clearly presenting his followers a way of living that he counts immensely important for them. Those who walk in accord with his teaching will build their lives on solid ground; to neglect his teaching is to build one’s life on foundations that will not endure (Mt 7:13). Their happiness in this life and their eternal salvation require that they love God and one another sincerely, that they avoid evil deeds incompatible with love (Lk 18:20), and that they do the positive acts that love requires (cf. Mt 25:31-46).

Those who heard Christ teach cried out, “Never has anyone spoken as this man speaks” (Jn 7:40). People hung on his words, because he spoke to them with great compassion and kindness and with a wisdom that astonished them. He spoke to their inmost hopes and hearts out of his own excellent life.
When a lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt 22:36-40).

In this Jesus made two things clear. First, the commandments that we love God and love our neighbor as ourselves have first place in the moral life. Other valid moral commandments have moral force precisely because they are rooted in love. All the moral requirements that God revealed – “all the law and the prophets” – “hang on,” flow from, the commandments of love.
Christ does, then, firmly teach the continuing validity of the Ten Commandments. A certain young man came to Our Lord to learn how he should live to find eternal life. He had seen Jesus, and had longed to live a life like that of Jesus, a life shining with the glory of eternal life. Jesus told the young man that if he sought eternal life, he should keep the commandments. And he made clear that he meant precisely the familiar commands of the Decalogue: “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother’ ” (Lk 18:20).

St. Thomas Aquinas points out how the Ten Commandments flow from the precepts of love.
The precepts of love are the first principles in the moral vision Jesus teaches. They are the most evidently true of all precepts. But only a modest amount of reflection is needed to see how the Ten Commandments follow from them. The commandments require of us that we avoid acts incompatible with love or do actions required by love. We must love our neighbor; but one who performs acts that of their very nature harm the neighbor, clearly is not acting as love of neighbor requires. This is what the New Testament teaches: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; . . . and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom 13:9-10; cf. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 100, a. 3).

Other commandments are so important because they really do unfold the requirements of the precepts of love. The love that Christ teaches requires that we care about everyone. Breaking the commandments mars the world and wounds the lives of those we directly harm with our evil deeds. The Gospel makes clear that there are evil kinds of deeds that one should never deliberately do. Doing evil even to achieve good is profoundly contrary to New Testament teaching (cf. Rom 3:8). Such conduct by no means assures that the goods sought by evil deeds will be achieved; but it does directly accomplish the evil it does.

The commandments of love are not entirely new in the teaching of Jesus. The Old Law, too, taught the duty to love God with all the heart (cf. Dt 6:5), and in many rich ways it called for love of the neighbor. Still, the Old Law is imperfect in what it teaches as the meaning and measure of love.
How much God loved us, and how much one could love God, had not been fully revealed in the Old Law. In Christ alone is the right measure of love put into place. We are to seek to love God with that immense love with which Christ, our brother, loved the Father and willingly endured everything out of love for him. Christ also provides us with the new and perfect standard we are to aspire to in loving one another: “As I have loved you, so you are to love one another” (cf. Jn 15:12).

Hence Christ takes care to clarify what love requires. We are not to love only our friends and neighbors; we are not to love only those who love us and treat us well. Life does not work if love does not soar far beyond that. We must love those who do not love us, forgive those who have hurt us, show mercy to those who have done us wrong. Only thus, Jesus tells his disciples, may you be “sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:44).
The Decalogue, too, needed to be brought to perfection. Frequently in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus contrasts what people had once thought the commandments to mean with his more perfect explanation of them. “You have heard it said . . .” Jesus would say, presenting the precept in its familiar form. “But I say to you . . .” Jesus adds, showing that in the light of love the commandment requires more than had earlier been realized. For example, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:27-28). The New Law, St. Thomas points out, requires more universally than the Old Law did that we avoid not only external evil acts but also wrong interior movements of the heart. It requires things that the unfaithfulness of cultures has kept hearts from realizing; and it calls us to realize that the precepts of love, from which the commandments flow, must illumine our understanding of them (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 107, a. 4, c.).

“All Christians . . . are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love” (Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 40; cf. Mt 5:48; 1 Thes 4:3). We are commanded to love God with our whole hearts and to love one another as Christ has loved us. These are indeed sublime precepts. We cannot keep them perfectly in this life, even with the aid of grace. But we can grow faithfully toward the peaks to which love calls us. St. Thomas gives the example of the soldier who is commanded to do specific things and also to fight all the way to victory. He cannot fulfill the total command until victory is finally won, but he is a faithful soldier if he carries out his specific duties and does continue efforts toward victory. So we do not violate the command of entire love, if we accept it, if we keep the specific precepts that flow from it and which grace does enable us to keep, and if our hearts resolve to continue growing toward fuller love and to love’s final completion in beatitude (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 44, a. 6, c.).

Christ’s moral teaching does not consist only of precepts. He begins his Sermon on the Mount with a proclamation of the Beatitudes (Mt 5:2ff.). These Beatitudes recall the sublime characteristics the disciple should have. They are encouraging promises of the Lord, assuring his disciples that they shall be given the kingdom and every longed-for blessing if they allow the Lord to make them poor in spirit and merciful and pure of heart, like their master. The Beatitudes show eloquently the sort of life called for by the Christian vocation. They outline the traits needed to have happiness on this earth in the midst of trials, and to have assurance of everlasting life (CCC 1716-1717).

Living a Christian Life • The Gospel counsels are poverty, perfect chastity for the sake of the kingdom, and willing acceptance of an obedience that goes beyond keeping precepts required of all. Christ, though he was rich, willingly became poor for our sakes (2 Cor 8:9); he lived a life of generous love in a perfectly chaste and unmarried life; and, though he was Lord of all, he willingly subjected himself to obedience to others. He calls those who “would be perfect” (Mt 19:21) to profit from the assistance that the Gospel counsels offer. Observing them helps one escape more fully from burdensome obstacles that so often keep people from holy lives.

Not all are called to live the counsels in their fullest scope. But all Christians are called to live in the spirit of the counsels: to be detached from material goods, to be entirely chaste, and to have hearts prepared to live in generous obedience to the Lord (CCC 917-919, 1973-1974).
Jesus was fully aware of how difficult many thought it would be to live in his excellent ways. He conceded that such excellent living was impossible for the resources of unaided human nature: the grace and assistance of God would be necessary (cf. Mt 19:25-26).

But Jesus also assured his disciples that those who drew near to him would indeed find power to walk with gladness in his ways. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt 11:28-30).
We have seen that Christ indeed teaches many difficult precepts. But his law is not fundamentally a moral system; at its heart it is not even the precepts of love. “Now that which is preponderant in the law of the New Testament, and that on which all its efficacy is based, is the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is given through faith in Christ. Consequently the new law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Spirit, which is given through faith in Christ” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 106, a. 1, c.; cf. Rom 3:27, 8:2). Through this grace the love of God is poured into our hearts, giving us the desire and the power to love him and one another, and to keep all his ways. As St. Augustine said: “Love makes light and nothing of things that seem arduous and beyond our power” (On the Words of the Lord, Sermon 79).

Binding Precepts • Since the law of Christ is, as we shall see, a law that sets us truly free, some have argued that the law of Christ is not morally binding. There have been extreme movements at the fringes of Christianity that argued: Since Christ saves those who believe in him, true believers can with impunity break any of the commandments. Others have argued that the more difficult and distinctive precepts of Christ, the commands to forgive from the heart, to have chaste minds, not to divorce and remarry, are simply ideals, and that one does not have a strict duty to observe these.

Such views clearly contradict the constant teaching of faith, and contemporary scholarship reveals how false they are to the whole moral message of the Gospel (cf. R. Schnackenburg, The Moral Teaching of the New Testament [1964], Ch. 2). Christ clearly presents his precepts as binding for those who seek eternal life. So, for instance, the one who divorces and remarries “commits adultery,” an offense of the sort that keeps one from the kingdom of God (cf. 1 Cor 6:9).

Moreover, as Pope John Paul II has pointed out with great force, the commandments themselves are calls to heroic living in charity. One of the signs of great love is the firm will never to act in ways that directly or deliberately dishonor God or do harm to the neighbor, no matter what one may suffer in refusing to act against the basic duties of love. Thus, Thomas More, knowing the sacredness of an oath and the great harm done to states and to persons when public truth is undermined, knew that he had a duty even to let his life be taken from him rather than to swear falsely. Christian faith has always taught that the precepts that Christ confirmed forbid kinds of actions that are always hostile to love, always wrong, no matter how difficult it may be keep them in one’s particular circumstances (cf. Pope John Paul II, encyclical The Splendor of Truth, Veritatis Splendor, 79-83, 90-94).

Freed by the Law of Christ • Though called to lead truly good lives and obliged to live as love requires, we are certainly called to a magnificent freedom in Christ. “For freedom, Christ has set us free. . . . You were called to freedom, brethren” (Gal 5:1, 13). In Veritatis Splendor (35-53) Pope John Paul II points out the richness of freedom in the moral life that Jesus teaches.
Christ gives freedom to our moral lives in a rich variety of ways. He frees us by teaching us the truth. Thus he enables us to escape the sad mistakes of the sinful world, and to see and taste for ourselves the goodness of his form of life, which makes life work and gives gladness to our lives.

As a teacher of life, Jesus always speaks to our freedom. He never wishes us to be forced or driven to do his will, but to do it gladly and with the free hearts that he gave us.
His commandments are never arbitrary. Rather, he teaches us a way of life that corresponds to what our own hearts naturally long for. He wants us to live in ways that call us to fulfillment in the midst of a community of love. Unlike so many persuasive forces in this world, he calls us only to live the good lives we were made to live.

Jesus also sets us free by his grace and the gift of the Spirit. He will not permit life to be too burdensome for his friends (cf. Mt 11:28-30). He promises, and is faithful to his promise, to make lives of generous love easier and more happy than foolish and sinful lives could ever be.
Christ also liberates us from the burdens of the Old Law. The enduring goodness of the moral teaching of the Old Law he honored and brought to fulfillment; but he set us free from the old burden of having heavy duties, without the presence of grace to make the task easy. He freed us from many kinds of dietary and ceremonial laws that had little point after Christ, whom such laws saluted obscurely, was fully revealed.

But Christ does not call us to false kinds of freedom, to those counterfeits of freedom that undermine true personal freedom. Some would wish to have the right to do whatever they feel inclined to do, however cruel or wrong it might be. This is not freedom, but slavery to passions and to irrational drives that would create for us bitter and broken lives. Some would pretend (in the ancient way that the tempter urged in Genesis 2) that human beings should have the freedom to determine for themselves what is good or evil: to decide, if they wish, that killing the innocent or committing adultery or swearing falsely is a good thing for them to do. But our “deciding” does not change the nature of things. Our deciding that taking arsenic would heal our diseases would not make arsenic in fact healthful for us. Similarly, “deciding” that those kinds of behavior that are really evil and opposed to love are good ones does not make them in fact good ones, nor does it enable evil acts to bless our lives. Authentic freedom is meant to enable us to choose with willing hearts good forms of living, and so shape lives really dear to us.

Jesus, the New Law • Jesus is himself the New Law. He is the perfect love of the Father, and of all his brothers and sisters. His life is a teaching of the Ten Commandments, for he faithfully avoids all that is incompatible with love. “He committed no sin; . . . when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered he did not threaten” (1 Pt 3:22-23). He not only did no wrong; positively his life was a series of endless acts of love. He was mercy to the suffering, to the sinner, to the confused, to those who in any way “labor and are heavily laden” (Mt 11:23).

His life reveals the sublime greatness that he invites us to in the Beatitudes, for the Beatitudes paint a portrait of his own life (CCC 1717). He is, above all, the one who is poor in spirit, hungry for righteousness, meek, mourning with those who mourn, merciful, most pure in heart, maker of peace, and gentle when persecuted. In him shines all the greatness of the sublime Gospel counsels: Though he was rich, he became utterly poor, so as to be with and bless us poor ones and make us rich (cf. 2 Cor 8:9); with a perfect purity of heart he loves every person with a warm, chaste, and generous love; his obedience to the Father teaches us the strong ways of profound love.

Moreover, Jesus alone enables us to live lives of saving love. By his saving love upon the cross he won for us every grace; and it is he who sends his Holy Spirit into our hearts. He touches our life in all the sacraments, enabling us to share in the very life of God as we become one with him, the eternal Son.
Jesus is everything. As all our faith is caught up into the mystery of Jesus, and all our sacramental life ties us to him, and all prayer flows from the gifts and presence of Jesus, so all our moral life is rooted in him. He alone is sufficient.

See: Beatitudes; Evangelical Counsels; Freedom, Human; Grace; Holy Spirit; Moral Principles, Christian; Natural Law; Ten Commandments.
Suggested Readings: CCC 1691-1696, 1716-1724, 1730-1742, 1914-1974, 1987-2005, 2052-2074. Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 22-32; Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 39-42. John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, Veritatis Splendor. G. Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles, Chs. 19-25. W. May, An Introduction to Moral Theology, rev. ed., Chs. 2, 5, 8. R. Schnackenburg, The Moral Teaching of the New Testament, Ch. 2.

Ronald D. Lawler, O.F.M. Cap.




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 01:25:11 PM