(5th Sunday after Pentecost, July 4)

In today's gospel, which is from the Sermon on the Mount, we are forced to delve deeply into the lesson of love. Hard words come from the lips of Our Lord: hating one's neighbor is equivalent to murder in his kingdom; the heavenly Father will accept no gifts or sacrifices from my hands if I am hostile toward my brother.

St Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church, has much to say on the subject of anger. As often as we subdue the stormy impulses of the soul through the virtue of mildness, he writes, we are striving to recover within us the likeness of our Creator.

Consider, he says, how great a sin is anger, through which, when we let go of mildness, the likeness of the heavenly image is marred within us. Through anger, wisdom is lost so that we no longer know what we are to do or in what way we should do it, because anger takes away the light of understanding when it confuses the mind by stirring it up. As is written in Proverbs: "Anger destroys even the wise."

The contemporary spiritual writer, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, writes: The coming of Christ inaugurates a new era, the new era of human history. Christ is the milestone separating everything that is old from the perenially youthful, the vigorous and the vibrant. His words are nothing less than that of a magistrate in an explicitly divine way. Against the impersonal "it is said," Jesus utters the emphatic, "I say." Against the impersonal prescriptions of the past, He proffers the highly intimate revelation of the immediate present "I say." Yet, in what follows, He shows His teaching to be so much in line with the traditional,Law that, if anything, He might be accused of being a rigorist, though of the spiritual rather than the legalistic kind.

On one hand, Christ's words today help us to realize that, if we want to enjoy permanent youth of soul, we cannot cling to a mere external observance of the Law. On the other hand, we see that Christ does not reject the Law but, rather, intensifies it. In a sense, He makes the Law even more demanding because He imposes conditions, not only on the externals of our lives, but, above all, on the abiding attitude of our hearts' and on the concrete results this attitude has on our actions.

In Christ's dispensation, merely becoming angry with one's brother is just as serious an offense against the Law as murder had been in the Old Testament. Our Lord' never tires of tracing specifics of the Old Testament revelation back to His Father's total design to save the world through His, Our Savior's, coming. Who but the Incarnate Word, Christ Our Lord, could fail to be the most excellent of exegetes, of scriptural interpreters? Here, He shows Himself to be a master of, if you will, religious psychology, in revealing man to himself by tracing an ordinary human emotion anger - back to its psychic source and forward to its social consequences. Human anger always really intends murder in a more or less explicit way, and it is a trait of Christ's radicalism to condemn even the partial manifestation of an act which the Old Law condemns only in its lethal accomplishment. The Greek Fathers of the Church call Christ the "Knower of Hearts," and with good reason. Christ will not take into His intimacy a person who I may be exteriorly clean but who, in the private chamber of his heart, allows himself vices that written Law cannot reach. God will not dwell in such a heart, and the dwelling of God in the human heart, and not just ritual purity, is the goal of true religion.

What Our Lord is saying to us today is, in fact, the fulfilment of the promise God had made through the prophet Jeremiah: "This is the Covenant I will make with Israel after those days says the Lord: I will set my Law within them and write it in their hearts." Our Lord is the Finger of God Who writes in man's interior being, Who etches living truth on our hearts of flesh with His tender yet powerful touch. And if He can do this at all, it is because He Himself, the Eternal Word, possesses a human heart and knows how to reach other human hearts.

We should keep in mind that a knowledge of the ancient grammar from which today's gospel is translated connotes the ongoing or interior state or habit of being angry rather than a specific act of anger, and for this ongoing, nurtured attitude of anger, Our Lord enjoins the exact same guilt as for an act of murder.

Human attitudes of hatred and contempt are expressed in human words of scorn. Our Lord turns to such expressions in speech now. "You imbecile. You fool." The great offense involved in these words directed at any brother, and the corresponding guilt their usage incurs, does not have to do so much with their content, because their literal meaning is not of the worst kind. But used in this vocative form of direct address, they imply a contemptuous dismissal, a total cutting off of a brother, as if someone were saying to another, "Drop dead. The world would be a better place without you." It is this attitude of deliberate break with another which puts the speaker into, one might almost say, despotic control of the situation that incurs Our Lord's condemnation. Who am I to dismiss another as worthless? Who am I to speak words of absolute contempt? Who am I to raise myself exaltedly above another and confine that child of God and brother of mine to the category of human debris? As the Psalm says, "Only One is Lawgiver and Judge. But who are you to judge your neighbor?"

It is because we so condemn one another in the unspoken intention of our angry words that the Lord then makes us liable to be cast into the Gehenna of Fire, the valley of waling that is the earthly metaphor for hell. Where, in our anger, we would confine others, is where we ourselves will be confined, for we are the prisoners of our own passions, just as, incidentally, we are the beneficiaries. of our own virtues. If I burn my brother to ashes with the fire of my contempt, I myself shall be destroyed by that fire I have refused to extinguish within myself. "When you are bringing your gift to the altar ..." Here, the material gift offered to God to fulfill a ritual prescription suddenly becomes the symbol of the human heart which is the real gift the external sacrifice intends. But the pious rite cannot be completed if the memory of a rift with one's brother intervenes. On the way to the altar, the gift must be dropped; not a minute more can pass; reconciliation cannot be left for later. The impediment to sacrifice and to right relationship with God in worship - what had been objectified as ritual impurity before the coming of Christ - now becomes the impediment of the memory of, the consciousness of disharmony with one's brother. One cannot present a heart to God as a gift offering on the altar of sacrifice, if the heart is turned against God's other children. I cannot love and adore God and at the same time hate and exclude God's children, my brothers, from my life. Christ's Resurrection, death and Resurrection means that He has become inseparable from those He came to redeem.

"Be reconciled with your brother." The Greek word for "being reconciled" stresses undergoing a change from one state to another. Concretely, it means to exchange enmity for friendship. Reconciliation is not, here, a state of going from a state of rift and bad feeling to a neutral state of indifference following just amends. It implies positive friendship and love, the reestablishment of the fulness of communion implied in the term, "your brother."

Sacrifice is the supreme act of religion, the attempt on the part of man to forge a lasting bond with God by offering something precious, really intending to offer himself. Thus, sacrifice is the supreme act of reconciliation and friendship with God. But we cannot be reconciled with God, Whom we cannot see, that is, we cannot exchange our enmity with God through our sins, for friendship with Him, if we do not first banish the rancor between us and our brothers whom we do see all to well, and who are our brothers because God is our common Father.

Cardinal Newman writes, "It is absolutely sinful to have any private enmities. Not the bitterest personal assaults upon us should induce us to retaliate. We must do good for evil, "love those who hate as, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who despitefully use us." It is only when it is impossible at once to be kind to them, and give glory to God, that we may cease to act kindly towards them. When David speaks of hating God's enemies, it was under circumstances when keeping friends with them would have been a desertion of the truth. But no personal feeling must intrude itself in any case."

The divine community that is the Blessed Trinity takes on a very human manifestation in our relations with our brother. Christian community and society are, fundamentally, the making visible on earth of the life of the Trinity that comes to us through the tangible Person and deeds of Our Lord. In our earthly life, we come to realize that the fundamental society is constituted by our brother, ourself and God. In this human community, which is, nonetheless, divine because rooted in God, my peace with God is inseparable from my peace with my brother. No "separate peace," in the parlance of political strategists, is possible with God.

Rev John McDaniels FSSP