My sister, newly graduated from college, went to teach at an inner city high school in Baltimore. A more experienced teacher told her, “Don’t smile until Christmas.” The point: maintain class room decorum completely at the beginning. It is always easier to loosen up than it is to tighten up. There is something similar at work in the history of salvation. God insisted on the law to the Israelites to show what it meant to be the Chosen People. Jesus as a faithful Jew absorbed that lesson but saw in his tradition that one follows the law not for its own sake but so that it will produce a change of heart. He quoted the prophet Hosea, “It is love that I desire, not sacrifice,”
