Ordinary 6

The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 15:15-20; Psalm 199; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

The Gospel catalogue is stunning in its breathe of human failure: anger – insult – murder – lust – sexual object – adultery – divorce – oath taking – lack of integrity – lying.

Do you perceive a common thread through all of these actions and words?

Many people today are angry. Most of us think we know why, but I don’t think we do. The anger I encounter is too diffuse and broad to be named. Social media has not helped. Social media has made it very easy to express our anger and insult people because we can do so anonymously. Even if our name is present on an email, if the person we are attacking doesn’t know us, is it still not anonymous? How many of us would say the things we have written on social media and in emails directly to the face of the person we are criticizing or attacking? And if we would, what does that say about our understanding of respect and civility? How much easier is it to express our anger at people we really have never taken the time to know as a person; a person with a history, with feelings, and with their own fears?

How many murders are committed in anger? Now there are different kinds of murder. It is one thing to take a person’s life with a weapon but what about the murders we all commit of people’s reputations through gossip, slander and insult? That includes those of us who, though we may not pass on the slander, listen to it with no objections. How many opportunities have been cut off and dead ends created for people because…face it, we more easily believe the worst of each other than the good. Or that the worst among us has good within them, and of course, we are not among the worst among us, are we?

How many of us remember the uproar over President Carter’s 1976 comment that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and had “committed adultery in my heart many times”. He became a laughingstock because he was considered a naïve Christian peanut farmer. Viewing people as sexual objects has become the norm. Advertisers have always known the power of the human body to entice. The human body as a sexual object can be used to sell us anything.

Pornography, now readily available on our phones and computers, is the number one kind of site people seek out on the web. Pornography is the pinnacle of viewing people as objects. We live in a society that is saturated in images that degrade the human body and person in the guise of beauty. Beauty is of God but beauty can also be used to misdirect us away from God. Beauty is not the problem, how we use beauty is the issue. Can sexual activity outside of marriage, adultery and divorce be far behind in such an atmosphere?

In a world of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, “embellishing”, all manner of ways as I understand them, of lying, Pilates’s question resounds, “What is truth?”. Who do you believe is truthful? What do you believe is truth?

Have you perceived the common thread between all these actions, words, and interactions that Jesus addresses?

Are they not all causes for destroying relationships? Anger and insult destroy mutual respect and human lives. Adultery destroys God’s purpose for marriage. Lying destroys trust between people. Are not broken relationships, lack of trust, and the degradation of the human person at the core of so many of our interpersonal and societal issues today?

At the heart of the Gospel message and the Eucharist is reconciliation. Matthew does not offer any specific strategies to move toward reconciliation except to leave our gift at the altar and go be reconciled. And we are to do this from the perspective of the person who has wronged; the perspective of the guilty party: “and if you recall that anyone has anything against you, settle with your opponent quickly otherwise you be thrown into prison”.

How is the follower of Jesus to act?

Jesus recognizes that we do get angry but his concern seems to be less of having anger than what a person does with their anger. How does our anger shape our relationships? Does it preclude the possibility of reconciliation?

It is impossible to control what pops into our minds and we are as God created us sexual beings, however, it is possible to control what subjects and images we linger on. Whenever we reduce a person to an object that is used and discarded; and this can happen between husband and wife, and between friends, we are not seeing each other as Jesus does.

There should be no need for oaths since the follower of Jesus is verified by truthfulness. Say, “yes” when you mean ‘yes and ‘no’ when you mean ‘no’. This does not mean that oaths are never taken, but that truth telling is its own validation and a characteristic of a follower of Jesus.

Jesus in referring to ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not referring to life after death but how a follower is to live now in the present moment. Jesus asks much of us. At the heart of our lives is to be a lived life that reconciles and heals the brokenness in our relationships and communities. It may, no, it is the most difficult aspect of following Jesus that there is to live out. “Leave your gift at the altar and first go and be reconciled and then come again and offer your gift”.

See the gift we place on the altar is the work of reconciliation, the broken body and poured out blood of Jesus that is healed.