Date: February 7, 2026

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20

Preacher: Sermon by Fr. Travis O'Brian

NOT TO ABOLISH BUT TO FULFILL

            Next week, we shall be starting a course for adults seeking baptism and confirmation.  We will meet on Wednesday evenings through the season of Lent.  If you are seeking either of these sacraments, or know someone who might be, please get in touch with me.          Since the earliest centuries of the church, Lent has been the time we’ve set aside for instructing catechumens, those preparing to receive the sacraments of baptism and confirmation at Easter.  In these preparations, we study the Bible and the Creeds, we examine the basic tenants of the Christian faith, we explore the Sacraments, and enquire what it means to be a member of the mystical body of Christ Jesus, the church.  There always seems more to learn!  But no matter how difficult theological language and concepts can sometimes seem, we must always be mindful that the Creeds and the liturgies and the books of theology are all footnotes to something really quite simple.  In Jesus’ words, we are to

love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul,

and with all our strength . . . And we are to love our neighbour as our self.  On

these two commandments (he says) hang all the law and the prophets.

     So Christian faith is about one simple and very difficult thing: it is about Love.  It is about the Love that is God; and it is about how we ought rightly to love Him in response to his love for us.  We are to love because God is Love: Love is the beginning and the end, the purpose, of all things.  When someone asks you, “what is the meaning of life?” you now have the answer: Love is the meaning, and love the purpose, of life and being.  I believe that everything, the whole of creation – the trees, the rocks, the sea and the birds, the moon and stars and every “creeping thing” – God made to love Him, each in the unique way Love shaped it for.  Everything that is-is made to offer its being to the chorus of the whole, sing its unique part in the universal song of praise that is Love’s unending hymn.

All things, all material things, must spend the being that is given them.  Time is the story of the self-spending of each thing.  We have been given time to add our particular voice, the voice God calls from us, to the hymn of the whole, Love’s hymn.  Our time, the story  of our self-spending, is our life.  We must give our life, we must die, in order to live.  But listen: the good news, promised to us by Christ Jesus, is this: that though to live is to spend our life, we do not empty ourselves into death.  We do not pour our life into death.  Death is not the end of life: love is the end of life.  To live is to pour our life into God, into the Love that sends and summons all things from beginning to end.

            All creatures were made to praise God, were made to spend their time and their being in the name of the life of all, the life of the world, who is Christ Jesus.  But God created humanity for a special purpose within the life of the whole.  God created us to spend ourselves “in his own image.”  The note we have been given to sing in the universal chorus of creation, is the note of a freely-given and consciously-bestowed love.  Whereas the lily and the bird are not free to sing the part they sing; are not conscious of the time God has given them, we are both free (at least, free within the limits of our material creation), and we are aware.  Our place, our purpose, is to love – is to say “Yes!” and “Amen!” to God, freely and consciously.  In our yes, the self-spending of the whole creation rises into free and conscious expression.  In the “yes” of our praise, we thus “give voice to the yes! of every creature under heaven.”  That is to say, in the love we freely offer, the self-spending of all creation in the name of the Love that brings all into being, comes to fullness of expression. 

            That is a beautiful and difficult vocation we have been given, we human beings – and a godly responsibility.  It is difficult because freedom is difficult.  We are easily seduced, distracted, led astray; we cling desperately to ourselves – rather than spend ourselves freely; often enough we simply don’t know, can’t’ understand, what Love is asking of us, or we feel to weak, or too trapped, or too uncertain of how to give it; we suffer, we are afraid of life, for we are afraid of death.  We lose sight of God; and thus lose sight of ourselves.  Yet God never loses sight of us.  God sent even his very Self to us in Christ Jesus, to restore us to Love and so also to ourselves, our being and purpose.  In St John’s words, “God’s love was revealed among us in this way, God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9).

            Reading from the Gospel of Matthew today, we heard Jesus say, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill.”  Well, what has the law to do with love?  Because we human beings continually lose sight of Love – and thus of our selves – God, in His mercy, provided a law.  The law was to be a kind of blueprint to show humanity how to shape its life in Love’s way.  It’s as if God said, “live according to this law, and you will come to see what the love-shaped life looks like.”  God gave the law to the Hebrew people, choosing them to model for all nations the love-shaped life, the truly human life.  But because even they continually lost sight of Love, God opened the mouth of the prophets to command them, his people, not only to return to the law, but also how to return to it.  The prophets reminded the people that to obey the law in a spirit of mere obedience fails the intention of the law.  If obedience is not motivated by love, not freely given in all self-awareness; if, in the prophet Ezekiel’s image, we find the law chiseled on hard, unempathetic stone, rather than in the flesh of our hearts – then we obscure again what the law was given to reveal.  The lily is a creature of blind obedience.  The bird is a creature of blind obedience.  But our obedience, our “yes” and “amen,” is not blind, but a free-will offering, a Eucharistic offering, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving – made not only on our behalf, but on behalf also of the lily and the bird.  That is what we are to remember.  That is how we are to live.

            “I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill,” said Jesus.  Christ crucified is the perfect – perfectly free, perfectly aware – expression of the life of self-spending.  What the law gave in blueprint, he perfected, for all to see.  Christ Jesus is the one perfect, that is to say, the one fully human life.  In him alone is humanity’s final and perfect “yes.”  Our yes.  In him alone we live the life for which God created us.  He is our perfect Eucharist, the perfect note of praise and thanksgiving which we have been given to sing on behalf of the whole of creation.

We fail to live the life Love has made us for.  But the good news is that we are baptised into Christ Jesus – into his life of self-spending, even unto the cross.  In his life, his love, is our own made perfect.  United to him, we become ourselves, freely and consciously spending our time in the name of the eternal life of Love.

                                                            AMEN