fulfilment

Jesus says that he comes to fulfil the law and not to abolish it. The law has become a static thing for the Jews - it no longer represents the living and vital covenant which God had entered in to with them, all those years before when God had first called Abraham out of the desert. To fulfil the law, then, for Jesus is to breath life back into it - to bring back that interaction between humanity and divinity which had so characterised those first encounters of the patriarchs.
When we think of fulfilment we tend to frame it in terms of having done the things which we thought we might like to do - we are fulfilled in families and jobs and even church or sometimes we complain that we do not feel fulfilled - those times when the pieces seems to stick and jar in our lives and things are not going smoothly. Fulfilment then gets linked to contentment and happiness.
What we talk about less is how we ourselves are a fulfilment. We are good at seeing what fulfils us but, sometimes, we measure ourselves only in these terms - if I am not fulfilled in whatever area I think I should be then I am not good enough. But the challenge Jesus seems to throw up is that fulfilment is not so much about what gets done to and for us but more about what we do and who we are for the world around us.
That was certainly how he lived his life - that his purpose, his fulfilment was to be a path back to God for the world. There was no fulfilment outside this daily invitation which he made into the heart of God.
I wonder what our lives would look like if we saw our lives, the fulfilment of who we are, as being invitations to others to God. This casts a very different light on the idea of fulfilment - apart from anything else it reduces that terrible sense of emptiness and failure that many people have when they realize that the rather external and world dreams which they have set for themselves are not going to happen, that they are not going to be fulfilled through things or even other people - and even those who tick every item off on their life plan, often find a nagging which they cannot explain.
If we only look to take to be fulfilled then we will be let down, but if we look to give we might just find that we are more than we ever thought we could be. If we see ourselves as looking out instead of in and of fulfilment as only happening when we are what God truly made us - and that is only really in communion with Christ - the world might look like a much more optimistic place.