Nothing is Impossible with God
Sixth Sunday of the Year. As Lent approaches, Fr Richard Finn reflects on the great challenge of Christ’s moral teaching.
‘If you desire’, if you wish, ‘you can keep the commandments’. Put like that, it seems so simple. God has gifted Israel with the commandments, to guide and sharpen their understanding of right and wrong, and to make their right living an act of fidelity to God, to make the moral life a continual act of worship.
‘If you wish’ – but do we? As St Augustine famously portrays the matter in his Confessions, it’s one thing to know what we should do, it’s another to bring ourselves to do it. It’s a problem for individuals; it’s also a serious social and political problem, finding the shared conviction and momentum to take courageous decisions for the common good against powerful vested interests. You know the issues – from responses to climate change to the reform of social care. Finding the will to act is all too hard, not least because it requires more than sheer will-power. It often means painful changes, difficult decisions and adjustments, real losses for other gains.
Who could deny the extent of the challenge? And that’s before we get to today’s Gospel, and the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus seemingly pushes the moral standards yet higher. Does He ask too much of weak flesh and blood? It can sound as though God is poised, ready to cast us into hell, for so much as a cross word, one lustful thought, a momentary expletive. To hell with the lot of us! For there’s no shortage of attractive people or sometimes quarrelsome brothers!
Can we soften the blow? Perhaps! We might hear the Lord as saying that evil deeds are simply the end-result or flowering of evil thoughts, to be traced back to our ill-intentions. What makes it wrong to murder someone also makes it wrong to have murderous thoughts towards him or her, thoughts which may harden into a murderous intention. From this perspective, Jesus has in mind not every angry outburst, but the kind of smouldering anger which settles into hatred, and which contains within itself the seeds of violence.
The manuscript tradition of Matthew’s Gospel reveals an early variant at just this point. The lectionary presents the text ‘everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment’, but the 1611 Bible reads ‘whosoever is angry without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment’. And that was the version known to St Augustine in the early fifth century. It is found in the pre-Vulgate Latin version and a number of Greek texts. Though unlikely to be original, it reflects the Church’s unease at any blanket condemnation of anger on the lips of Christ, especially when in St Mark’s Gospel the Lord Himself is visibly angry.
Again, from this perspective, what’s wrong in adultery is also what makes it wrong to size someone up as a possible partner or sexual object in adultery. Jesus brings us back to the importance of moral integrity, of character, of the heart. We go to hell when our own sinful desires take us there. For these desires, whether of anger or lust, undo the bonds of charity which make us who we are, give us our identity, as sons and daughters of the living God.
Even so, this doesn’t touch the nub of the matter – not if the problem lies with the heart itself. As the prophet Jeremiah has it ‘The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it?’ Where are we then to find the purity of heart, the resolve, to live in the way we should, the way that makes for our flourishing, for life not death? Here, we must look to Christ Himself, the One whose life and death perfectly fulfil the precepts of the Law, who embodies the life blessed in the beatitudes. His heart proves unfailingly true. His action was decisive in sacrificing Himself for love of us. The question then becomes how our hearts may remade to His pattern thanks to that unique sacrifice.
For this we need what St Paul terms the ‘hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.’ It is the gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling within the heart, the Spirit’s presence, which makes for our moral healing, the glory of rejoicing in what is good and doing what is right. Jesus shares with us, initially through baptism and confirmation, His Spirit, the divine love that embraces and exceeds the Law.
Of course, we fall back into sin, often venial, sometimes mortal. We need the repeated gifts of grace that come through the Eucharist, through regular confession, through daily prayer and discipleship. Lent, too, will soon help us with its rituals of fasting and abstinence. Even so, our healing may only be fully completed in Purgatory. Yet, there is much to inspire hope. The saints assure us that grace abounds to renew our hearts. They aid us by their prayers when we seek out their powerful intercession. We find support in the wider Christian community. What would otherwise seem hopeless, is now shot through with promise, for while our weaknesses are many, we may be even more confident of God’s abounding grace in Christ, the Spirit who dwells more intimately within our hearts than we can even imagine.
Readings: Ecclesiasticus 15:16-21 | 1 Corinthians 2:6-10 | Matthew 5:17-37
