Are Christians still bound to obey the Mosaic Law? There are some that say that we are still bound to the commandments, especially keeping the Saturday alone as the Sabbath… I say no. Jesus, who gave the Law to Moses, abrogated the Mosaic Law for all His followers and gave us a new Law and Everlasting Covenant. What is your take, or understanding?
Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments as a matter of course (see for example Mk 10:19; Lk 16:17). In the Sermon on the Mount he recapitulates and gives added depth to the commandments of the second tablet, but he does not abolish them (cf. Mat 5:21-48). To do so would in any case diametrically contradict the fundamental principle underpinning his discussion of the Ten Commandments (Mt 5:17-18). Jesus understands himself as the Torah—as the Word of God in person.
The concrete juridical and social forms and political arrangements are no longer treated as a sacred law that is set for all times and is so for all peoples. The decisive thing is the underlying communion of will with God given by Jesus. It frees men and nations to discover what aspects of political and social order accord with this communion of will and so to work out their own juridical arrangements. The absence of the whole social dimension in Jesus’ preaching so obvious from a Jewish perspective includes and also conceals an epoch making event in world history that has not occured as such in any other culture: The concrete political and social order is released from the directly sacred realm, from theocratic legislation, and is transferred to the freedom of man, whom Jesus has established in God’s will and taught thereby to see the right and the good.
This is what Ratzinger calls The Torah of the Messiah, in Gal 5:13 we read “you were called to freedom”—not to a blind and arbitrary freedom—a freedom “understood according to the flesh,” as Paul would say, but to a “seeing” freedom, anchored in communion of will with Jesus and so with God himself. It is a freedom that, as a result of this new way of seeing, is able to build the very thing that is at the heart of the Torah—with Jesus, universalising the essential content of the Torah and thus truly “fulfilling” it.
The ceremonial laws expressed a theology of separation appropriate to the Old Covenant as they served through antiquity as the symbol of election, demonstrating Israel’s distinction from the Gentiles. Because the Church is an international community including both Jews and Gentiles, instituted by Christ who came to gather all nations into the fold of the New Covenant, the ceremonial boundaries that divided Israel from everyone else were redundant (Rom 1:5, 16; 3:29-30; Gal 3:28).66 These Mosaic rituals constituted ceremonies which were signs of grace but not sacraments of grace. They point to better things to come in Christ (Col 2:16-17), but they did not, in themselves, confer the benefits they direct us towards (Heb 7:18-19; 10:1-4).
The sacrifices of the Mosaic Law set the stage for the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, which alone effects a true remission of sins (Heb 10:11-18).
Jesus Christ came not to “abolish the old law but to fulfil it” (Mt 5:17); but he also speaks of his blood as being the blood of the “new covenant” (cf. Lk 22:20), and like a new Moses he speaks words which bring the Old Covenant to its ultimate perfection, a perfection which at the same time transcends it. Therefore, while it “gives fulfilment to the law”, it sets us free from the regime of the Mosaic Law.
St. Paul is emphatic that Christ’s victory over sin also brings freedom from the Old Law. The Law was in itself holy, just and good (cf Rom 7:12) but it was in some way an occasion of sin; firstly, because the detailed knowledge it gave if the natural law and of what was sinful meant that sin was something people were more aware of and they could sin more gravely. The Apostle points this out when he says: “If it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’” (Rom 7:7). Secondly, because once the Law was promulgated, sin became a transgression of a positive law of God. That does not mean that there were no sins before the Law came (the natural law, impressed on men’s hearts, made them responsible for their actions); it means that sin acquired a new dimension, one which only Adam’s sin had before that—transgression of a positive divine law. This explains why St. Paul could say that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law” (Gal 3:13).
Once God sent His Son “to redeem those who were under the law” (Gal 4:5), the Christian is no longer under the letter of the Law. The old legal precepts are no longer in force, and the rites of that Law have no longer any meaning (as signalled by the rending of the veil of the Temple when Christ died on the Cross: cf. Mt 27:51). However, the moral precepts of the Law remain in force, not because they are part of the Mosaic Law, but because all that law did was to spell out the natural law. By virtue of the Passion of Christ, the New Law confers the grace needed to keep its commandments. And so St. Paul can write that we are “not under the law but under grace” (Rom 6:14). Grace always brings with it charity, whereby we share in the Holy Spirit who is infinite love, and since the new Law is summed up in the precepts of charity, the obligatory nature of this Law does not force our freedom, because one cannot love unless one is free. The New Law then is “the perfect law of liberty” (Jas 1:25). According to Pauline teaching, the Old Law "disappears naturally with the coming of Christ, who is its end, when it has no more reason for existence, and when the promises which are irreconcilable with it are realised. But even though it should retain its validity in principle, the Christian, by the fact of Baptism, is released from its empire.
