24th Sunday 2020
Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35
“Resentment and anger, these are foul things, and both are found with the sinner.”
“Tell me about it”, to use the modern idiom. If you want resentment, I can show you resentment: if you want anger, I can give you anger.
Let me see the news headlines, and I will give you enough anger to sink the proverbial battleship. Is there something there about politics? I will reach a red hot pitch of anger in two seconds flat. Is there something about AMERICAN politics? Dive for cover before I explode, even though it isn’t strictly my business. Does the Church appear in those headlines? You can guarantee that there will be something to make me blow off steam enough to power a large sized boiler.
Then there are the sports headlines: once again there will be enough to inspire rage and fury, and if you actually take me to a match, then on your own head be it. Better turn then to something less controversial: this Facebook page “Lancaster Past and Present” will be nice and soothing. WHAT? How can anyone be so STUPID as to say that about that building? What does that idiot know about what went on down that road in that decade? I knew about that before this clown was born!
Right: that’s enough about anger. What about resentment? You can have that in bucketsful, and I can tell you exactly when and what it springs from. Picture the twelve year old me, sobbing over my Greek homework, unable for the present to make head or tail of it. My father comes through from the shop, where he is still working, even though it is seven o’clock at night, and he has been at it since seven this morning, as he will be every other day of the week, every other week of the year, apart from Wednesdays, when he will close at dinner time (12.30) and Sundays, when he won’t begin until after early Mass, and will close at 5.30 in time to go to Benediction. Oh yes, and he will also be closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and Good Friday, though Boxing morning will be devoted to stocking up ready for next day, and Good Friday afternoon will be spent in church.
Anyway, he comes through, and says, very gently, “Just do your best. I don’t want you to end up like me.”
WHAT???!!! The best man in the world, yet society regards him as of no account, yet that little minority gaggle of thugs on the school staff, of whom I think that every boys’ school of that era had its share, is highly respected by that same society. So there was born my resentment of the way society operates, and my inverted snobbery with which I have struggled ever since.
So there it is, and there am I, and there are you, each with our own quota of anger, and resentment, and bitterness. Or perhaps you are one of those blessed few who are exempt from such feelings. If so, thank God for it, and pray for those of us who are less gifted in that area.
What do the rest of us do about it? Do we continue to NURSE anger, to CHERISH resentment, as Sirach puts it, two powerful words which indicate an enjoyment of these evil feelings. We mustn’t. We need to be honest about their existence, and we must bring them before God, opening them up to His healing and forgiving mercy. We need to recognise how destructive they are of our own peace of mind, and how they insult the God who bore insults, humiliation, suffering, and an agonising death for our sakes, an agony deepened by that very bitterness of yours and mine.
Perhaps too we need to move from abstractions such as “society” and think rather in terms of individual human beings of flesh and blood with their own problems, their own hurts, their own share in our nature as children of God, brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, redeemed by His precious blood.
I am working on it. Please work on it with me, asking the Lord to transform us, to give us His Spirit of forgiveness, to remove from us these foul things.
