When I consider the Law of God, I am reminded of a scripture I memorised years ago: God is not man, that he should repent. If he said it, it stands. So I see the promises to Israel as great, glorious and still standing.

If they can keep the covenant. If past performance predicts future performance, they can not: they have never been able to do this. They have followed after other Gods, leaving remnant after remnant as their judges died, their kingdoms destroyed, their republic conquered, and they were chased out of many countries from Persia to Paris.

But within this passage is another warning. For Christ is the fulfilment of the Law, and what is said about the Law applies to us as well. For we were not taught that some scripture is inspired and profitable for teaching, but all of it.

Now, I am not Jewish: I am adopted. Theologically, through Christ: physically by a lovely couple who are of English/European extraction (the English do not care about genetic purity) and an Anglo-Irish young and frightened woman who gave me up at birth. My home is not between the Euphrates and the Ocean. But the command to take the words of God and memorize them: to do acts of righteousness remains.

And one of the fruits of embracing evil, one of the patterns, is a hatred of Israel and Jewry: in this the Islamic State are the perverted sons of the NSDAP, Godwin’s rule be damned.

“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the LORD your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, then the LORD will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you. Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea. No one shall be able to stand against you. The LORD your God will lay the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land that you shall tread, as he promised you.

“See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known.

(Deuteronomy 11:18-28 ESV)

Now, we know that going full Jewish is not of Christ: that was the theological challenge that Peter and Paul wrestled with — the irony that the theologian who was an accepted Pharisee and Rabbi is the one who argued for grace, while the self-confessed sinner kept Kosher.

Yet there are things for us here. The first is that it is our role to teach our children, particularly our sons. Moses was speaking to all, but he is clear that this is the duty of fathers — you cannot delegate this. Much of this is example: if you follow the word and pray and attend and comment then the kids will pick it up. Much of this is fervent prayer, that your children will meet the living God and repent: the covenant of infant baptism relates to this.

The second is that if we turn away from the word of God and the law of God we will be destroyed. As I walk around Western towns I see this: as the church as turned away from God, allowing the secular within the congregation, and compromising with the spirit of the age, the churches empty and become nightclubs or mosques. What we forget is that God is patient, and lets the iniquity of a society reach full rot before removing that culture: for the righteous preserve society. As Abram pointed out: the righteous should not be destroyed in a town because of the evil around them.

At this point Cardinal Pell gives us a good example: of truth, and how brevity produces wit.

It is true that Jesus did not condemn the adulterous woman who was threatened with death by stoning, but he did not tell her to keep up her good work, to continue unchanged in her ways. He told her to sin no more (see Jn 8:1–11).

One insurmountable barrier for those advocating a new doctrinal and pastoral discipline for the reception of Holy Communion is the almost complete unanimity of two thousand years of Catholic history on this point. It is true that the Orthodox have a long-standing but different tradition, forced on them originally by their Byzantine emperors, but this has never been the Catholic practice.

One might claim that the penitential disciplines in the early centuries before the Council of Nicaea were too fierce as they argued whether those guilty of murder, adultery, or apostasy could be reconciled by the Church to their local communities only once—or not at all. They always acknowledged that God could forgive, even when the Church’s ability to readmit sinners to the community was limited.

Such severity was the norm at a time when the Church was expanding in numbers, despite persecution. It can no more be ignored than the teachings of the Council of Trent or those of Saint John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI on marriage can be ignored. Were the decisions that followed Henry VIII’s divorce totally unnecessary?

And the third follows. It is to take care. We are all fallen. None of us have a monopoly on the truth. We need to talk with each other, perhaps harshly at times, so that we repent. For we are not God. We are man: and since we err, repentance is our duty.