The Heart of the Matter
Matthew 5:17-37
Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries
There is something profoundly unsettling about today’s Gospel. Not because Jesus overturns the Law—he explicitly denies doing that—but because he deepens it. He takes commandments we thought we understood, commandments we perhaps even prided ourselves on keeping, and shows us their bottomless depths.
“I have not come to annul but to fulfil.”
What does this fulfilment look like? Not a tightening of regulations. Not a more elaborate system of rewards and punishments. No—Jesus fulfils the Law by tracing each commandment back to its origin in the human heart, and then tracing that heart back to its origin in God.
Consider the sixth commandment. We who have never committed adultery breathe easily—until Jesus shows us that adultery begins not in the act but in the look, the fantasy nurtured, the person reduced to an object of consumption. Suddenly, the commandment is no longer a fence around behaviour but a mirror held up to our interior life. And who among us can claim purity here?
This is not moral cruelty. Jesus is not burdening us with impossible standards so that we might despair. Rather, he is revealing the direction of the spiritual life: from the external to the internal, from the letter to the spirit, from the minimum required to the fullness of love.
Notice how each example moves inward.
“You have heard… do not kill. But I say… whoever is angry.”
“You have heard… do not commit adultery. But I say… whoever looks with lust.”
“You have heard… do not break your oath. But I say… let your yes be yes.”
Jesus is not discarding the external commandments. He is showing us where they actually live. The Law was never meant to be merely a code of conduct; it was meant to form a people whose hearts beat in rhythm with God’s own heart. Anger, contempt, lust, deception—these are not violations of separate rules. They are cracks in the very vessel of love that we are called to become.
And here is the most liberating truth: because Jesus traces sin back to its roots in the heart, he also traces holiness back to its roots there. Holiness is not achieved through strenuous acts of self-mutilation—cutting off hands, plucking out eyes. Holiness is received through a transformed heart. And a transformed heart is not our project; it is God’s gift.
This is why Jesus can speak so radically about divorce, about oaths, about reconciliation. He is not legislating for a society of sinners; he is describing the life of the Kingdom breaking into our world. In that Kingdom, marriage reflects the faithful covenant of God. Speech needs no reinforcement because trust is complete. Worship flows from hearts already at peace with every brother and sister.
But we live between the times. We are citizens of this Kingdom and yet still residents of a world marked by hardness of heart. The same Jesus who declares God’s original intention for marriage also meets the Samaritan woman at the well, offers living water to one who has had five husbands, and refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery. The same Jesus who demands truth without oath also receives Peter’s denial with a look of love.
This is the genius of Christian morality. It holds together, without compromise, both the radical demand of the Gospel and the radical mercy of God. The demand reveals our need; the mercy meets us there.
Perhaps this is what it means for Jesus to “fulfil” the Law. He does not merely interpret it correctly; he embodies it. In his own person, he is both the perfect obedience the Law requires and the perfect mercy the Law could never produce. He is the faithful Israelite who never breaks a single commandment, and he is the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one who has shattered them all.
And so we approach these difficult words of Jesus not as burdens to carry but as invitations. The invitation to examine our hearts without fear, knowing that the One who searches us is the One who saves us. The invitation to confess that our anger has indeed killed, our looks have indeed objectified, our words have indeed deceived. And the invitation to receive, again and again, the forgiveness that makes possible the new heart we cannot manufacture for ourselves.
“Do not think that I have come to annul the Law and the Prophets.”
No. He has come to fulfil them—by fulfilling us.
© Claretian Publications, Macau
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