VATICAN CITY (CNS) – People rigidly bound to the law suffer pain, pride and often live a double life, Pope Francis said in a morning homily.

God’s law was made not “to make us slaves but to make us free, to make us children” of God, he said in his homily during Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae.

The pope looked at the day’s Gospel reading from St. Luke (13:10-17) in which the leader of a synagogue is furious that Jesus heals a woman on the Sabbath. Jesus calls the religious leader a hypocrite because there is no problem releasing livestock from their ties for water on holy days, but it is considered wrong to release a woman from the chains of Satan.

The pope said that in the Gospel Jesus often accuses those who rigidly adhere to the law as being hypocrites; they are not free children of God, but “are slaves of the law.”

Behind this inflexibility, he said, “there is always something else. And that is why Jesus says, ‘Hypocrites!’”
“Meekness, yes, benevolence, yes, forgiveness, yes, But rigidity, no.”

Those who are rigid suffer when they realize they are not free, he said. “They do not know how to walk within the law of the Lord and they are not blessed.”