Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. There’s only so much repair work that can be done on an object before you have to buy a new one. Patching it together eventually does not work. As kids, when we would get a hole in the knees of our school uniform pants, mom or grandma would patch it up. But if the patch got a hole in it, or if the stitching kept coming undone, mom and dad would break down and buy new navy blue pants. Or maybe you had something that was duct taped together, until the adhesive started to wear out, and you had to finally get a new whatever rather than just taping it up again and again.
When we talk about the human person and following Christ, we’re not talking about a simple repair. We need a comprehensive overhaul. We may think we just need a few tweaks here and there, but in reality, what Christ desires of His followers is not possible except by His grace. In order for our righteousness to surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, to live the deeper law that Christ gave in the Beatitudes, we can’t just muscle through ourselves. The new law requires grace. In order to exhibit the virtues St. Peter enumerates in the epistle, we cannot simply struggle hard enough in order to live that way. We need Christ’s grace to transform us.
When we talk about conversion, we often use the Greek word, metanoia. That word comes from two Greek words, 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼, meaning change, and 𝜈𝜊𝜐𝜍, meaning mind. But, perhaps better than mind is the idea of seeing the world differently. Conversion, from the Latin words cum and versio, meaning to turn towards something, means that we see the world differently because we have turned ourselves towards Christ and have taken on His mind. But it even goes beyond the intellect. Conversion–metanoia–means that even our hearts are changed so that we re-direct our loves to the way that Christ loves.
And only when we love the way that Christ loves and see the way that Christ sees can return a blessing for a curse. Only when we allow the grace of God to change us can we not only avoid murdering others, as the commandment prescribes, but also avoid hatred towards the other in our heart, the deeper meaning of the word “anger” that St. Matthew uses in the Gospel.
We don’t have it in this passage, but our Lord raises the bar for the sixth commandment as well as the fifth commandment. Only when we allow the grace of God to change us so that we love as He loves can we not only avoid committing adultery and fornication, but we go deeper and avoid even using someone in our hearts and minds. And for the eighth commandment, not only do we not swear by anything–not by heaven, not by Jerusalem, not by our head–but we let our yes mean yes and our no mean no. We speak straightforwardly.
Too often we try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and then get frustrated when we cannot live up to the standard that we want, or the standard to which Christ calls us. But we have to recognize that we are broken, and that Christ alone can repair us. This is not to say that we are totally depraved, as some Protestants hold. God still made us good, and that goodness exists in us no matter what. However, that goodness does not always operate in us because of sin and our draw towards it. And the healing that we need, the repair, only comes by what Christ has done for us. Only He can heal what has wounded us. It would be like trying to heal our own compound fracture without having any medical knowledge beyond a basic grasp of the body. We might get some things right, but we will never be able to heal ourselves as we need to be healed to be whole again without the help of the Divine Physician.
And this should give us hope. Our salvation does not rest on us alone. We do have to cooperate in it, and Christ gives us many opportunities to work with Him in going to heaven, but if we could save ourselves, all that Christ did and taught would be wholly unnecessary, which means that Abraham would have been able to go to heaven without a redeemer. But that would make the sacrifice of Christ unnecessary, at least for some, which would be cruel to make a Son go through if it were not truly necessary.
This is the great battle between Christ and the Pharisees. They complained about the Lord always spending time with sinners, but the sinners were the ones who knew they were broken and couldn’t fix themselves. The Pharisees thought they were fine, that they could live the Old Law perfectly on their own, and so did not need a redeemer, which made many of them miss out on the salvation Christ was offering.
