Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated

to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every

continent and to facilitate and encounter with Christ and His Church. The efforts of

Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where

it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Baron as he preaches

the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, what a privilege this week to hear from the Book of Syrac. We

don't hear all that often in the book of Syrac but it's wonderful. A text probably

composed around the year 200 BC by a sage living in the holy city of Jerusalem. Now what

we know about him not much but we can garner from the text that he was a man deeply immersed

in the Torah, in the law, in the Jewish traditions and the rituals of the temple. In other words,

he was someone who got the Jewish thing from the inside. Well, what we find in our reading

for this weekend is what I would call a wonderful encomium to the law. And this is typical.

You find it for example in the famous Psalm 119. You find it throughout the Old Testament.

These hymns of praise if you want to the law. And as I've said many times before in

a different context, talk about law is problematic in our cultural setting and we have a hard

time understanding why anybody would sing a hymn of praise to the law. We put this enormous

store on freedom and therefore for us law, we get it, we get law but it's a kind of necessary

evil. It's a constraint upon freedom so as to allow other goods to be expressed but deep

down we kind of prefer there wouldn't be the law that we just do what we want to do.

But see for biblical people and the author of Syracuse prime example of this, law is not

intention with freedom but rather it's the very ground of freedom. And this reading for today

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