Christmas 1C (Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7)

The relationship between faith and the Law seems to be dichotomized in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Faith sets us free where the Law enslaves us. Yet, this doesn’t mean there’s no need for the Law. Jesus abolished the Law, not by denying its necessity but by completing and fulfilling the Law. Think of the Law or rules as signposts to help us arrive at a destination. Let’s think about building IKEA furniture. We first need instructions to build a bookcase. We will try to follow each step to make sure it’s built correctly as directed in the instruction written with tiny letters. Once we succeed in putting things together, we don’t need to go back to the instruction for the second one. We become more skillful. The rules are like this instruction. Once we master, we embody the rules that become our second nature. 

The Ten Commandments are like these IKEA instructions. We are building (and rebuilding) the human being created in the image of God according to divine instructions which can be found in the life of Jesus with the help of the Holy Spirit. As we know, this instruction of the Ten Commandments is filled with “Thou shall not.” The Ten Commandments in a way presuppose what we can do. It presumes our tendencies to harm others. We can idolize, murder, steal, lie, and covet. We also have the potential to not honor our parents and live our lives restlessly and mindlessly being addicted to the life driven by a falsely fabricated version of self. 

The Ten Commandments suggest that we don’t know how to live our lives according to God’s will. We can’t and don’t know what it’s like to live fully if we’re not aware of ourselves in the most honest sense. The human state that the Ten Commandments presuppose and prescribe is the state of self-centeredness, the state of me-and-mine. This state limits our relationships with others. The only expansion of this me-and-mine state in terms of relationships is one’s own family but when one of the family members turns out to be a black sheep, that member is out. How often do we see blood is not so thicker than water in reality? In this state, we have no ability to see “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” 

So the Law is helpful to keep everyone in order. The rules are the boundaries that protect one another. But the downside of just keeping the rules is that it’s not motivated by freedom. We don’t feel like we willingly choose to keep them but we simply have to. When we’re forced to do things, there comes a temptation to break them. This rebellious retaliation is not just something bad but maybe a symptom of our freedom being suppressed. Its target is not merely to break the rules but to express one’s freedom in the most obvious and apparent way. What can be the most freeing behavior in a situation where we are coerced to be deadly quiet? Shout our lungs out! Our desire to be free would be expressed in the most rebellious way. 

In Jesus’ eyes, keeping the rules without spiritual awakening can never be a good approach to live harmoniously. This is why he is critical of the local religious authorities in his time who are overly legalistic in their teachings. The Ten Commandments are to teach us the human traits driven by selfishness. We are to accept its prescription of the current human state that we all somehow have desires to commit what the Ten Commandments prohibit. (This doesn’t mean we’ll actually commit them!) We candidly and humbly see them in ourselves by heart in contemplation. Doing this in contemplation matters because this is a way to see ourselves in the loving and compassionate presence of God. We have a choice to examine our selfish nature without contemplation but we may end up with self-hatred since there’s no way out of it on our own. 
Gazing at how our egoistic desires fabricate who we are in the light of God’s unconditional love in our act of contemplation, we encounter the Spirit in our hearts. St. Paul expresses, “...God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Deep in our hearts, we face the Great Mystery, the Ultimate Reality that is uncontainable and inexpressible in a word. This holy encounter is the first step before we blindly attempt to follow the rules. So we want to be skillful in our human encounter with the divine so that we become much more mindful of God’s presence everywhere and every moment. A Christian understanding of mindfulness is to keep in mind God’s presence, recalling the commandment of Jesus, “Do this in remembrance of me.” This in contemplation is to transform the bread of our egoistic desires to the Body of Christ for the sake of the world. In doing so, the rules are really the instructions or signposts that help us build our community more ethically and more compassionately. In the union with God, there’s nothing to fix or do but gratefully be and love. What’s freer than this?