It’s simple: Make a promise and keep it. But life happens; vows are broken, truthfulness is blurred. Jesus reminds you that he accepts your humanity and gives you God’s perspective: what you can’t see, what you can’t hear, and what only your heart can know. God is there. When are you humbled by God’s covenant of love? Be assured: God doesn’t break promises.

My 85-year-old mother is addicted to cop shows and courtroom dramas. She's not an active lawbreaker herself, mind you, but she loves to invest her evenings in following criminals down their morally darkened paths outsmarting clever law-enforcers and heavily-degreed legal counsels by slipping through loopholes in jurisprudence and all but disappearing behind the wall of their crimes in triumph—until the end of the hour, that is, when some infinitesimal fact comes to light, condemning the guilty and vindicating the innocent. The disturbing thing is, I’m not sure which my elderly mother enjoys more: that justice is finally served, or that the perp almost got away with it!

Don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures—either God’s Law or the Prophets. I’m not here to demolish but to complete. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working.

Don’t drink the last root beer in the fridge. That was the cardinal rule in our house. As each of my sisters—and a few cousins—and I learned early on: Invariably, if you drank the last root beer in the fridge, you would find that to be the day when Dad would come home from a hard day’s work and have his sights set on an ice-cold A&W poured into the frosty glass mug he kept at the ready in the freezer. His look of disappointment and disgust when he saw that there was no root beer awaiting him was not something any impressionable young mind could forget. 

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins,  and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

The importance of knowing is front and center in this week’s reading. God’s immense wisdom, of course, knows all. It “understands . . . every deed,” in the words of Sirach, and, as Saint Paul puts it, “The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God.” Human beings, though, also have some things they need to know: for one thing what God has revealed, and for another what lies behind their own behavior, including their sins. God has set before us the choice of whether to know and follow God’s ways.

Why do we need sex education?” a student asked his religion teacher. “We already know all the answers are no!” Commandments, moral and ethical codes, rules and regulations get a bad rap. They’re seen as punitive and stifling, when in fact the best commandments—the ones our faith tradition tells us God gave us—were meant to bring us joy.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. —H. L. Mencken