Matthew 5:17-37; Sirach 15:15-20
You have heard that it was said of old… But I say to you… (Mt 5:21).
Six times in the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by St. Matthew, our Lord uses this formula. Next week is the First Sunday of Lent: so we will miss the continuation and completion of this series of sayings, which contrast the standards of the law with the standards of the Kingdom. In the verses omitted from today’s reading, our Lord commands that when struck on one cheek, we should turn the other; also that we should love our enemies as well as our neighbours. He ends this part of his discourse with the instruction to be perfect, even as our Heavenly Father is perfect.
Each time we hear this teaching of Jesus, we surely find it somehow attractive, compelling, inspiring, even strangely thrilling. Yet also it disturbs us, baffles us, seems hopelessly beyond our reach. Yes: we want to live like this. We wish everyone else in the world did too. But it can all seem so unrealistic, impracticable, impossible! The apparent overturning of the Old Testament law can also give us unease. We Christians steadfastly believe that the text of the Old Testament is divinely inspired. So its law is part of divine revelation. Our Lord himself says that every dot and every iota of the law must be maintained until heaven and earth have passed away (5:18). So we are left wrestling with a paradox, which, if understood wrongly, can even seem like a contradiction.
I think it’s good for us to feel challenged, wrong-footed, even upset, by this text, so that we’re forced to find ways, ever anew, of understanding it, making it our own, living by it. We can be helped in this of course by the great commentators: implicitly by St. Paul, and explicitly by such theologians and exegetes as St. Augustine; or by the Catholic Catechism.
The Sermon on the Mount gives us, as it were, the manifesto of Jesus. Here he sets out the code of conduct, the moral law for those who would belong to God’s Kingdom. Unlike the Old Law, this law is not a list of commandments to be externally obeyed, but above all an interior disposition of the heart. In Pauline terms, it’s the law of the Spirit. By the light and grace of the Spirit, we are able to see how the law of Christ is perfect wisdom and true prudence; how it’s a law of liberty, leading always towards its consummation in heaven. The Spirit shows also how the two Testaments are truly one; how the Old prepares for the New, and the New both fulfils and transcends the Old.
The Holy Spirit also gives Himself, so that we are able at last to live in accordance with his law; so that our hearts become conformed to the Heart of Jesus. The Heart of Jesus, we know, filled with the Holy Spirit, overflows with divine and human love. It is perfectly righteous; consistently turned in adoration towards God the Father; completely separated from evil. The Heart of Jesus is also vulnerable: wounded by rejection and contempt; bearing all the filth that human and demonic wickedness can direct at it, pierced through by our sins, offering neither defence nor retaliation.
Let me now very briefly just touch on today’s sayings of Jesus about adultery and murder: or let us say, sex and violence. In the secular environment we all inhabit, sex and violence are routinely glorified, commercialised, cheapened, normalised. Their opposites were sketched out in the Beatitudes with which the Sermon on the Mount begins. Blessed are meek, for they shall inherit the earth ... Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. So we have before us a choice: either one or the other. Whichever we want, we can have. In the words of Ben Sirach which we heard in our first reading today, the choice set before us is between fire and water, or between life or death. So the stakes involved here could not be higher. One the one hand, perfect happiness without end, or on the other, eternal punishment in the fire of hell.
We monks are fortunate to inherit a rich tradition of practical wisdom handed on by our monastic forebears, especially from the 4th and 5th centuries. The desert Fathers and Mothers confronted head on the thoughts, or the demons, of lust and anger. They knew well enough that all of us have two fundamental appetites, the irascible and the concupiscent, which are God given, and necessary for life. But these appetites, infected and perverted by sin, easily become enslaving vices. Lust and anger blind our eyes, darken our minds, separate us from God, from all that is good, from others and from ourselves. From long and bitter experience the monks of old knew that both lust and anger kill prayer stone dead. Both compromise life in the Spirit, and the following of Christ, and purity of heart. If indulged they will unsettle a monk from his vocation, turn him aside from his goal, destroy his interior peace, blight his life.
How though can we deal with the thoughts, or the demons, which press in on us unbidden, and sometimes seem impossible to drive away? How to deal with temptations that are relentless and persistent over years and even decades? Through dozens of anecdotes and isolated little sayings, the desert fathers teach us how to win the victory: through firm determination, through ceaseless prayer, through heroic ascetic practice, through incessant physical toil, through taking spiritual counsel, through the encouragement of good example, and through the help of Angels. Temptation we know is not sin. The desert fathers bear witness that we never have to give in to it, even in thought.
Lent is coming our way: a time to focus with heightened determination on countering our sinful passions, and abstaining from our disordered desires. But above all lent urges us to look, with ever renewed intensity, at Jesus: especially as he appears in his Passion, and as he hangs before us on the Cross. There we see a perfect model of gentleness, patience, forgiveness, purity of heart, self-giving love in its fullness to the end. We see there also the one whom we love, who is desirable above all other things whatever; for whom we can joyfully renounce anything at all: Jesus, who is our Saviour and our Lord; who always gives far more than he asks; Jesus, our teacher and model, our supreme good, our last end, our life.
So now in this Holy Eucharist, as we offer ourselves to God through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus, we beg also his help to live as he would have us live. Then as we receive the divine Gift, we ask also for every virtue that comes with that: so that we may inherit at last all the blessings he has promised.