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We have been building up to this reading throughout this past year. We have looked at what the Prophets have told us from God throughout the Season after Pentecost. We heard more from some of those same Prophets during Advent. We finally heard this passage of the Gospel according to Matthew we read today in a much larger passage towards the end of the Season after the Epiphany.
Jesus comes to fulfill the Law and the Prophets in 2 ways. He does so first through His Death and sacrifice for us. We could not fulfill the Law and the Prophets on our own, though we were told to and how time and time again. Only Jesus could do that for us, and by His fulfilling we have received salvation for our souls purely as a gift of His Grace.
In this gift of Grace, Jesus has given us the means of finally listening to all those words that have come before us and which we have been listening to this past year. Through that gift of Grace, we are transformed. We are now able to come back to God. We are now able to follow His Will again. We are able to fulfill the Law and the Prophets in a way we were not able to do on our own before.
This does not mean we do not struggle. We do. Yet we finally have hope, and this hope is made clear in Paul’s words in Philippians 3:12-14: “Not that I have already obtained [the goal] or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
We have the gift of Grace from Jesus. We need it and nothing else. Yet we are also called to do Christ’s Will in this world, and God makes clear that will through the Law and the Prophets. We are called, as Jesus sums it up for us, to love God with all our being and from that love to love our neighbor as ourself.
Jesus makes it possible for you to fulfill those Two Great Commandments through His Death and Resurrection. In showing our love to Him, strive to follow Paul’s example and at least try to make that fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets our own.