6th Sunday in Ordinary time 2023
Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Cor 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37
Well, that’s a relief: the chapel hasn’t emptied. When I read Jesus’ words “If you are bringing your offering to the altar, and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar, and go and be reconciled with them first,” I half expected a clattering of feet as everyone rushed through the door.
Jesus is using a very emphatic illustration of the duty of mutual reconciliation, declaring that it must come before the duty of worship: indeed, we are not fit to worship if we are at odds with our brother or sister, meaning, presumably, those who, like us, belong to the one body; but then those outside the body. If the Church is truly the body of Christ, then we cannot truly receive that body in the Eucharist if we are responsible for a wound in the body which is the Church.
There is a tremendous need for reconciliation within the Church. Critics of the Holy Father accuse him of creating division, but this is a distortion of the truth. What Pope Francis is doing is, like Jesus Himself, to call the Church to a more radical following, a deeper faithfulness to God. In the resistance to him, we see that same adherence to rules, whilst neglecting their deeper purpose, of which Jesus accused the Pharisees.
The Pope has been accused of being lax, which was precisely the complaint which the Pharisees levelled against Our Lord. Today’s Gospel shows that Jesus was actually demanding something more difficult than the mere keeping of rules: in other words, a complete conversion of heart. Very few of us, I suspect, are tempted to break the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”: how many of us can say, hand on heart, that we never become angry with those whom we call our brothers and sisters, that we never say harsh things to or about them?
Jesus’ command to love is not, as it might appear at first sight, an easier option than the simple avoidance of rule breaking but, as those examples show which he gives us today, something far more demanding. If love is indeed a soft option, why do so many songs lament the pain and heartache which love brings? Admittedly, they are speaking of erotic love, but the same holds true of every kind of love. The song “Love hurts” has, according to Google, been recorded more than a hundred times.
I am reminded of the two elderly Jewish ladies who were on the visiting list of the parish where I did my diaconate placement. One of them said to me “Religion is the Lord, and religion is love, and love means sacrifice”. Forty eight years on, I still haven’t found a better definition.
The need for, and the demands of, reconciliation, were demonstrated both by the Pope’s gesture of kissing the feet of the warring President and Vice President of South Sudan, and by his joint pilgrimage to that country with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, something which would have been unthinkable not many years ago. How many other parts of the world show that same need, when a self-professed Orthodox Christian President of Russia is killing thousands of his fellow Orthodox Christians in invading another country, when Muslims are the most numerous victims of Muslim jihadists, and when religious differences provide the excuse for persecutions, invasions, and massacres?
What, though, of Jesus’ call to rid ourselves of erring hands or eyes? This is an instance of Semitic hyperbole—if we took it literally, the world would be full of one handed, one eyed Christians, but what else? Surely few, if any, of us would possess a tongue, because that would be the first part of our body to be surrendered. As St. James points out in his epistle, the tongue is a whole wicked world in itself.
Which brings us back to our starting point. Whilst it is a relief that the chapel is not deserted, it is worth considering whether we have ground to make up in terms of sins of the tongue. But, what about sins of the mind???
