No less ridiculous are those who try and find in this gospel an attack on rules, as if they believe all we should say is “Love one another” and a Church should not have all those rules. Even Catholics fall into this without realizing how silly it is.
Firstly there is the textuaL problem. Jesus says the opposite. He commands the people to do everything the scribes and the Pharisees tell them. What he tells them not to do is follow their example.
Second and more importantly, there seems to be this erroneous notion that “rules and regulations” are bad. Truth is: every person has them. Even the people who say they hate rules has them. If you want to know what your rules are, ask what makes you angry. When we get angry with others it is usually because they have violated some rule of ours, our personal law. We all have one.
Some rules are spoken and some are unspoken. With married couples the conflict often is cuase by conflicting rules. If one has the rule, “You pay bills on time” and the other does not there is going to be a problem.
In raising children, parents often have to repeat the rules over and over. The hope is that in time the rules become internalized. When they are so internalize we don’t have to think about it, we call it habit.
Harmonious relationship are not those without rules, but those in which the rules are agreed upon and internalized, whether we are taking about children playing together, a team of co-workers, a family, or a Church. The goal is not to live without rules but to make sure that our personal law and our communal laws, conform to the law of God.
