Fifth Sunday After Pentecost - June 27, 2021

Dominica V Post Pentecosten (Extraordinary Form Low Mass)
27 June 2021

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST.  AMEN.

Today’s Gospel selection from St. Matthew, chapter 5, contains the first part of the large section of the Sermon on the Mount.  Chapter 5 in particular contains that part of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount that scholars call the “Antitheses.” These are a series of six statements setting up an antithesis, an opposition, between the Mosaic teaching from the Old Testament and the fulfillment of that teaching in the New Testament.  It treats of serious topics like anger, lust, divorce and remarriage, and the swearing of oaths.  We hear only of the first antithesis in today’s selection.  Our Blessed Lord notes in the Sermon on the Mount in the verses immediately before this passage that he has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but rather to fulfill them.  In other words, while there is a difference in how the Mosaic Law taught about matters, the Lord is not abolishing it but rather completing it, transforming it, transcending it…. to bring it up to the level of the Kingdom of God.  The Mosaic Law established a foundation, an incomplete and imperfect one, but one that was sufficient in God’s mind for its time and was what His people were prepared, at the time, to receive.  We might consider the location of the giving of the Mosaic Law as a sort of image for what Jesus is doing here.  The Mosaic Law was received from God and given to the People at the bottom of the mountain.  With his New Law that fulfills the Old Law it’s as if the Lord is wanting to bring his People up to the top of the mountain to a deeper encounter and union with God.  We do not repudiate the Mosaic Law or join in that ancient heresy that viewed the Old Testament God as somehow a different God; but with the advent of God’s Word in the flesh, the Lord Jesus, in the New Covenant it is time to live for more.  In fulfilling the law and the prophets, our Blessed Lord is not removing or deleting or abolishing them.  They are the important foundation for his higher teaching.

We are well aware, or at least we should be, that being a disciple of Jesus involves some fundamental requirements.  It involves obedience to God and worship of Him alone.  It involves acceptance of, and submitting to, specific teachings revealed by God in the Old Covenant and maintained and deepened in the New Covenant of Christ.  It involves acceptance of, and active membership in, the one Church that the Lord established as our Mother and our guide, believing that the Church, in her official teaching capacity, speaks to us with the very voice of the Good Shepherd.  It involves baptism and an appropriate sacramental life.  And at its very core, being a disciple of the Lord involves our response to the call to be holy, it involves our moral life.  The moral life cannot be excluded from our belonging to Jesus.  Unfortunately, that is a controversial statement in an age that tends to make the self the only reference point for moral truth, even placing the self above grave matters of the moral law.  The Lord teaches us that the moral life cannot be excluded for a disciple when he says: “Except your justice abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The antithesis we hear about today has to do with anger and insults.  In the Old Covenant Moses forbade murder: Thou shalt not kill.  But in the New Covenant, the Lord goes far beyond murder to forbid anger and insults.  And just like that, we are all perhaps considering something we said this past week, or something we posted on social media, or some family dispute, or some bad blood we hold deep in our heart toward someone.  The Lord notes that whoever is angry with his brother, and whoever says “raca,” an Aramaic word which means something like numbskull, empty headed, or worthless, something like “idiot,” and whoever says “you fool!” shall be in danger of judgment and fire.  In the New Covenant fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets we come to learn that there is more inherent in the commandments; they are not only the often negatively phrased “thou shalt nots.”  Rather, they contain far more and indicate the heights of virtue to which we are called.

So how do we respond to such a higher calling?  How can we attain a justice or a righteousness that surpasses that of the Scribes and the Pharisees?  I suggest an answer can be found in that Jesus concludes this first antithesis on anger and insults with a reference to one’s offering at the altar.  If you go to the altar to offer your gift and you recall that your brother has anything against you, “leave there thy offering before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother” and then come to offer your gift.  In other words, if we fail in justice or righteousness, if we fail not because we have taken physical life, but because we have killed another’s spirit with anger and insults, then we have failed to ascend the summit of the encounter with God and thereby, at the altar our offering is impeded.  That sounds like a tall order.  We live at a time when the powerful elite can and do convince themselves that their manifest grave sin in promoting abortion, gay marriage, and transgender ideology doesn’t even prevent them from approaching the altar for Holy Communion, and they are aided by derelict bureaucrats masquerading as bishops and priests.  And here is the Lord saying even to be angry and insulting to another impedes one’s offering at the altar.  He refuses the offering of one who has a heart set against his kingdom.  To be clear, the Lord is not indicting the emotion of anger that will rise in us to a greater or lesser degree based on our fallen nature and based on some aspects of our own personality.  What he is indicting is that to consent to that anger, to consent in such a way that leads to acting out upon it by outbursts and insults towards another is sinful; it fails to surpass the justice of the Old Covenant, and it impedes one’s sacrificial offering.  You see, the Lord is not undoing the Old Covenant law against murder, rather he is driving it deeper into the human heart and getting to the root cause of murder, which is wrath and anger, the desire to hurt someone else for revenge.

Fulfilling the law of our Lord’s kingdom is a tall order.  But we must resist the temptation of our fallen nature and resist joining in the chorus of some of the protestant reformers that would lead us to think this is impossible or that our free will does not present us with a real ability to choose.  How can we have hope of attaining to the transformed, loftier heights of the fulfillment of the Lord’s teaching?  Because we can participate in the very life of God and we are strengthened in charity by God’s action that emboldens our efforts.  God is love and He shares His life generously with us.  This is at the heart of the collect of this Mass, “O God, who hast prepared for them that love Thee such good things as pass understanding; pour into our hearts such love towards Thee, that we, loving Thee in all things and above all things, may obtain Thy promises which exceed all that we can desire.”  Let our offering of prayer and penance and especially the offerings we each bring to Holy Mass, to the mountain of Calvary, serve as a focus to examine and test ourselves to see and admit what might impede our offerings and so to receive anew the charity of God that emboldens us so that we do not remain only at the foundation or base of the mountain, but rather that we ascend up to the top of this mountain of Calvary, to the deeper union with God that He makes possible in His great love that is beyond understanding.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST.  AMEN.