Building on Bedrock - Favor With God and Man - Response to Chapter 4

Favor With God and Man

Few passages in Scripture better capture the hidden years of Our Lord’s earthly life than Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” Mark’s fourth chapter, Favor With God and Man, presents a detailed, almost nostalgic reconstruction of Jesus’ youth, His growth in a Jewish home, and His unwavering observance of the Mosaic Law. Mark wishes to portray Jesus as the ideal law-abiding Israelite, and in doing so, seeks to make a strong case that Christ’s mission was never to alter the faith or practice commanded in the Law of Moses.

There is much here that is true, and much that Catholics wholeheartedly affirm. Yet, there is also a significant misunderstanding: one that confuses the continuity of God’s plan with a kind of legal immobility, as if Christ’s coming made no real difference in the actual practice of the faith. Let us examine, with the clarity of the Church’s perennial wisdom, what it means for Jesus to “fulfill the Law,” and how He truly brings favor with God and man.

1. The Hidden Years of Christ: True Humanity, True Obedience

Mark rightly highlights that Jesus, in His humanity, grew as any child would: learning the trade of Joseph, attending synagogue, and participating in the religious life of Israel. The Church has always celebrated the “hidden years” of Nazareth as a profound mystery. God did not disdain to become subject to His own creatures; Christ “was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51), sanctifying family life, labor, and the ordinary routines of human existence.

This real growth, both physical and spiritual, is not a sign of imperfection, but a testimony to the true Incarnation. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, Christ’s human nature was perfect and complete, but “the acquired knowledge of Christ is caused by the active intellect which does not produce the whole at once, but successively; and hence by this knowledge Christ did not know everything from the beginning, but step by step, and after a time, i.e. in His perfect age; and this is plain from what the Evangelist says, that He increased in ‘knowledge and age’ together.” (Summa Theologica, III, q.12, a.2). He was, in truth, “like us in all things but sin” (Hebrews 4:15), giving us a model of humble, hidden virtue.

But let us be clear: Christ’s obedience was not the obedience of an ordinary Jew, nor was it merely the observance of external precepts. From the first moment of His Incarnation, He possessed the fullness of the divine law in His heart - He is the eternal Wisdom of the Father made flesh.

2. Did Jesus Simply “Keep the Law”?

Mark insists, again and again, that Jesus “never assumed the right to transgress” the Mosaic Law, never changed its requirements, and never led anyone to do otherwise. On the surface, this sounds pious. But we must recall what the Church, reading the Gospels with the mind of the Apostles, has always taught: Christ did not come merely to observe the Law, but to fulfill and perfect it.

When Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17), He is not offering an endorsement of every rabbinical application or legal permission given in Israel. He is announcing that in Him the law reaches its goal. Consider how Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, takes up the very commands of Moses and brings them to their intended fullness:

• “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” (Matthew 5:21-44).
• He closes loopholes, abolishes permissions for divorce (Matthew 19:8-9), deepens the command to love neighbor and enemy alike, and points to a holiness that surpasses even the strictest Pharisees (Matthew 5:20).

As St. Augustine writes, “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is made manifest in the New.” Christ’s fidelity to the Father is not mere external conformity, but the interior transformation for which the whole law was always intended (cf. Romans 8:3-4).

3. Obedience and Authority: The Example of Christ

It is true, as Mark notes, that Christ respected legitimate human authority and the religious customs of His day. He was not an anarchist nor a revolutionary. Yet, He also showed that authority must always be subordinate to God’s will. Jesus never obeyed “blindly.” When the commands of men contradicted the intention of God, Christ stood firm (Mark 7:6-13). His words and actions continually revealed the heart of the Law: mercy, justice, faithfulness (Matthew 23:23) - and He rebuked traditions that “make void the word of God.”

Moreover, Christ’s obedience is not simply a “model” for individual law-keeping; it is redemptive. By submitting to the law, Christ “redeemed those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:5). The Catholic Church teaches that the Law could never justify in itself; it was a “tutor” leading to Christ, Who alone brings true righteousness (cf. Council of Trent, Session VI, canon 1).

4. Jesus and the Law: Continuity, Correction, and Fulfillment

One of the gravest mistakes Mark makes in this chapter is to present Christ’s relationship with the Law as if it were static: nothing changed, nothing fulfilled, nothing transcended. Yet, the testimony of the Gospels and the apostolic preaching is clear: in Christ, the old order finds both its consummation and its transformation.

• Jesus allows His disciples to pluck grain on the Sabbath, declaring Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28).
• He touches lepers, forgives sins, and eats with sinners - actions that scandalized the religious legalists of His time.
• He definitively abrogates the Old Testament’s toleration of divorce (Matthew 19:8), a radical step the Catholic Church alone has preserved in her moral teaching.
• He announces a New Covenant “in my blood” (Luke 22:20), instituting a new and greater Passover in the Eucharist.

The apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, soon recognized that many ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic law - dietary laws, circumcision, ritual purity - were fulfilled and no longer binding (see Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem). To suggest, as Mark does, that “the only change” was that Jews could now eat with Gentiles is contrary to both Scripture and history.

5. Favor With God and Man: Not Law Alone, But Grace

It is not strict law-keeping alone that wins favor with God, but a heart transformed by grace. The Church teaches that Christ, by His perfect obedience and sacrificial love, not only models virtue but pours the very life of God into those who believe. Through the sacraments, especially Baptism - which St. Paul calls “the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11) - Christians are given a share in the very sonship of Christ, made capable of keeping God’s law “in the Spirit,” not merely in the letter (cf. Romans 8:2-4).

The “favor” with God and man that Christ wins is no mere human achievement: it is the fruit of the divine life given to us by the Incarnate Son.

6. Tradition and Worship: What Did Jesus Leave His Church?

Mark’s chapter closes with a subtle but significant claim: that Jesus’ disciples, for years, continued to keep the Mosaic law unchanged. Yet the testimony of the New Testament and the earliest Fathers is that Christ’s resurrection brought a new reality: the Church gathered on the “first day of the week,” the Eucharist at the heart of worship, the old sacrifices fulfilled in the “once-for-all” sacrifice of Christ.

The apostles did not “abandon” the law, but received its fulfillment: a new way of living, not bound by the “shadow” but by the “substance” (Colossians 2:16-17). The external practices gave way to the inward transformation promised by the prophets: “I will write my law on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33).

The True Favor of Christ - Law Fulfilled, Grace Perfected

To contemplate the hidden years of Jesus is to see the humility of God, the perfection of obedience, and the dawn of the new creation. Christ did not come to preserve the law as a museum piece, but to bring it to life in Himself, and to make of us, through grace, true sons and daughters of God.

The Catholic Church alone has preserved the fullness of this mystery: not lawless, but living in the freedom and power of the Holy Spirit; not abolishing the Law, but fulfilling it in Christ, Who alone brings true favor with God and man.

“Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). To remain merely with the old is to miss the fullness of the new. If you seek true favor, look to Christ and to His Church, where the fullness of life is found.