Practice resurrection

A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:20-26) sees Jesus delivering a series of teachings about forgiveness to His disciples. The baseline is that they must be better than the Scribes and the Pharisees. The Old Law forbade murder, He says, but the New Law now forbids any kinds of violence or hostility in our thoughts towards another. So intrinsic is this to our discipleship that Jesus even commands us to reconcile ourselves with our enemies before going to offer our sacrifices. The price of not rising to this challenge is to fall foul of the Judge who, in Monday’s gospel, judged those who had neglected their neighbour.

The paradox at the heart of this New Law lies in our becoming like God: Love one another as I have loved you. While Adam and Eve fell because they desired the be like God by taking the law into their own hands and disobeying Him, we rise by also desiring to be like God but no longer through a jealous grasping of His privileges but rather through a humble imitation or conformity with His nature which is that of Love; we are adopted as His children and are made like Him. We must forgive our neighbour, not because they deserve it but because such conduct follows the example of our Father in Heaven. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, Jesus says elsewhere. It may not of course always be possible to follow all Jesus’ counsels to the letter with regard to reconciliation; sometimes such actions could make things worse; sometimes, our neighbour cannot even bring themselves to recognise that they have hurt us; there is a time and a place, and we should not be out to seek our own justice or justification.

Still, the spirit of reconciliation needs to “gentle our condition” as Shakespeare says: we must always be ready with an open hand, even if we must also use discretion when this spirit is not reciprocal; a smile or even a nod may be the beginning of the process, and Rome was not built in a day. This spirit protects us from the subtle forms of tribalism or enmity that arise when there are unrighted wrongs at stake. The virtues of peace and reconciliation are not honoured enough; or else they are honoured only in a superficial way, made into a kind of ostentatious, skin-deep spectacle, rather than being a labour of the inner heart and soul where Jesus wishes to dwell. We must put down our arms in order to forgive or raise them only in the name of His justice, not our own.

All these things are not mere moral injunctions like some heavy armour that we assume. Rather, they have deep roots for COLW in our call to incarnation. It is not enough to believe Christian principles; Christ’s teachings must take flesh in us. Easily said but not so easily done. Our failure to live these things is a failure that is lived not only in our wills but also in our hearts and unconscious minds, and even in our bodies. For we are creatures of flesh and blood. It is not merely our souls that must be evangelised but the whole man and woman. The gospel must sink below the level of our consciousness and cleanse us of our worse selves. Undoubtedly, this is the duty of what we call inner work, but it is above all the gift of the Holy Spirit who leads us into the desert or indeed to the cross to help us put our flesh – the very marrow of our inner self – to death. For if the grain of wheat falling to the ground does not die, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth new life.

Forgiving our brothers and sisters: this is part of the flourishing of new life in us, the life of the Spirit, leading us into the life of the Father and the Son who, together with the Spirit, take up their abode in our souls. We must allow ourselves to undergo this transformation; we must see that in fasting from the indulgences of hostility and enmity, we can feast on the bread which is to do the will of our Father in heaven. St Paul quotes the Psalmist, putting these words in the mouth of Christ:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,

 but a body you prepared for me;

with burnt offerings and sin offerings

 you were not pleased.

Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—

    I have come to do your will, my God.

This goal, the doing of the will of God, the living in the Divine Will, is so much above the spirit of the world, with its taste for conflict and power games that it is hardly to be understood. No matter. Our bread is to do the will of Him who sent us and who calls us to Himself incessantly again and again. To live reconciliation is to make present again on earth that force of reconciliation which Jesus embodied. We embody it again in our own limited way, but embody it we must, for we are body and soul. And if we bear His cross of reconciliation, our bodies are bound to be marked by the same wounds. How could it be otherwise for the followers of a wounded Saviour?

From the sublime to the ridiculous, let the last word go to the American poet Wendell Berry who dwelt more than most on the implications of such gospel injunctions:

 

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

 

Love someone who does not deserve it, Wendell? Which one of us really does? But God has called us to something better.

The final lines evoke a response to the masters of this world, the champions of hostility to reconciliation, the rulers, the dark principalities and powers into whose hands, as Satan told Jesus, this fallen world has been delivered. Berry concludes:

 

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.