The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sunday, February 15, 2026
St. James Cathedral

My friends, in our Responsorial Psalm today we sang, “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.” The law that the psalmist sings of is the covenant that God initiated and entered into with our ancestors. The following of this law, being faithful to this covenant will indeed bring us blessings beyond measure.
 
As I reflected this week on the centrality of law in our Judeo-Christian tradition, I thought about how law and freedom are so fundamentally connected in our relationship with God.
 
Long ago God took the initiative with our Hebrews ancestors in the faith when they were enslaved in Egypt. God freed them from that bondage out of love, and out of fidelity to the promise God had made to Abraham. But that freedom from bondage was only the first step in what it meant to be free. They had been freed from slavery but they were not clear yet what they had been freed for.
 
After their Exodus from Egypt, there were hard times in the desert and they wondered if they had just traded one kind of slavery for another – the slavery of poverty and hunger in the desert that would lead to their death. But eventually they saw not only what they had been freed from, but what they had been freed for.
 
They came to realize, through the leadership of Moses, that they had been freed for a special relationship with the God who had not only freed them, but sustained them in the desert.
 
At the heart of this relationship was a covenant of love initiated by God. This relationship, this covenant, became concretized in a way of life that was governed by commands and laws. Keeping these commandments was how God’s people could flourish in their relationship with each other and with God. This is what they had been freed for, this flourishing of relationship!
 
And they were indeed free – the responsibility was on them to follow the law. God would not force or coerce them.  This covenant relationship placed an enormous amount of responsibility on them - and on us who follow after them. As Sirach tells us in today’s first reading, “If you choose you can keep these commandments, they will save you.”
 
The Commandments are meant to free us, to save us. To freely choose to submit ourselves to God’s law does not lead us back into slavery, but to life. To use our freedom as an opportunity to enter more deeply into God’s life by following God’s commandments is to discover a freedom that St. Paul describes as being beyond our wildest dreams: “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard…what God has prepared for those who love him.”
 
But lest we think that rigid adherence to the law is enough to bring us to the depth of covenant love that God wants with us, Jesus challenges us to a broader and deeper vision of the law in today’s Gospel. As he continues to teach his disciples in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus affirms the tradition that has prepared the way for him. He has not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them. Jesus becomes the interpreter of the tradition that he inherits and the fulfillment of that tradition.
 
You and I inherit that tradition as the disciples he speaks to today, just as he spoke to his disciples long ago on that mountain. The commandments, the law, can still free us for relationship with God if we accept Jesus’ challenge to go beyond the letter of the law. We must keep the law, but we need to do more than that.
 
We must not only, for example, refrain from killing, but we must root out the anger in us that can lead to violence in word or deed.
 
It is not enough for us to refrain from committing adultery. We must go beyond the letter of the law and leave behind any thoughts or actions that would make another person simply an object for our personal pleasure, to be discarded when we’re through using them.
 
It is not enough for us, as followers of Jesus, to refrain from lying. We must go beyond the letter of the law, not using smokescreens or parsing words so finely that we can get away with partial truths. We must simply say “yes” when we mean yes and “no” when we mean no.
 
My friends, God has called you and me to a deep relationship of covenantal love. But he leaves us free to choose that love or to reject it. Such a free choice is not made once and for all time. We have to keep choosing, keep allowing ourselves to grow deeper in our relationship with God.
 
We must be committed to ongoing conversion to Jesus’ way of life. There is enormous responsibility in the freedom we have been given. And this freedom is not just a freedom from anything that constrains us. This is a freedom for life with God, a life that is guided by the demands and commands of faithful discipleship.
 
We must admit that this is a countercultural way of seeing law and freedom. Today freedom is often seen as doing anything I want, and law is often seen as anything an authoritarian leader says it is.
 
But for us, people of faith and followers of the Lord Jesus, freedom is not simply freedom from any constraint, but freedom to do what is right and good in God’s eyes. And law is not some arbitrary dictate, but the way we fulfill the demands of covenant love.
 
Yes, indeed, blessed are we who follow the law of the Lord. We pray that we will use our freedom, in our individual and communal lives, to choose wisely. May our choices lead us to deeper life with the one who gave himself freely for us, and who again offers himself to us in this Eucharist.

Father Gary F. Lazzeroni