Therefore our Lord’s attitude towards the Mosaic Law, which comprehended both moral regulations and an abundance of liturgical ordinances, was by no means one of indifference, or one of unwilling tolerance. He is come for this purpose, and regards it as an essential part of His task, not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it, down to its last iota. He explains in what sense He conceived this fulfillment in the verses which follow immediately, in which He presses for a fully spiritual interpretation of the commandments of the Law. “It was said to them of old: Thou shalt not kill. But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.” So that He conceives the fulfillment of the Law as a moral and religious deepening of it, or, more precisely, as its permeation by love of God and of one’s neighbor. Nothing whatsoever, He teaches, should be done in a merely external fashion, just because it is the Law. Everything should be done on interior principle, under the inspiration of the love of God and of one’s neighbor. For on these two commandments “dependeth the whole law and the prophets” (Mk. xii, 29=Mt. xxii, 40). The six examples which Jesus gives all inculcate whole-hearted observance of these commandments. Indeed, such is His insistence on the law of love, that He is compelled four times to break the letter of the Mosaic Law. He sets Himself above even the authority of Moses; yet not in order to deny or destroy that law absolutely, but only to elucidate and fulfill it in its innermost meaning. The fulfillment of the Law means, in His eyes, that we should penetrate to the full depth of the divine intention and that we should bring out the truest and most profound meaning of the Law. Every legal ordinance is to be tested by this whole- hearted fulfillment of the two-fold law of love, and this is our Golden Rule

Jesus subordinates the Mosaic law of the Sabbath to this rule. So long as the love of one’s neighbor is not affected, this law remains obligatory; but if the two run counter to each other, and His hungry disciples are forbidden to pluck the ears of corn because it is the Sabbath, then the law must be subordinated to charity. “For the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mk. ii, 27).