21st Sunday after Pentecost – November 6, 2011
Epistle: Ephesians 6: 10-17
Gospel: Matthew 18: 23-35
“And laying hold of him, he throttled him, saying: Pay what thou owest.”
The first servant in the parable was so little thankful and so little inclined to be lenient to others, that at first sight of the second servant who owed him a hundred pence, he flew into a rage demanding immediate payment, and not getting that, he threw him into prison until the debt was paid. Just before this at Matthew 18: 21, 22, Peter asked Jesus how often he must forgive those who wrong him, and Jesus told him seventy times seven, meaning we must always forgive those who trespass against us. How different we are from God, Who is willing to forgive all we owe to His justice. God forgives us in order to teach us to do the same to each other.
An irritable person is easily provoked to anger, often flying into a rage, such as the first servant in today’s parable. We are not concerned here with trivial expressions of impatience and irritability. These are not serious sins, even though we should confess them because they easily lead to serious sins. The anger we are talking about today is a violence in the soul which rejects everything and anything that is displeasing to it.
There is also a holy anger, which is better called zeal. Holy zeal is the turbulence in the soul that we feel when we stand up in defense of God and of our religion. In the Bible we have seen this in Moses when he came down from the mountain and found the people worshiping a golden calf, and we saw it in Jesus when He threw the merchants out of the Temple. As an aside: Jesus called all of them thieves. Were all of them thieves because they were cheating the people who bought from them? Maybe a few were, but certainly not all of them. But they all cheated God out of His House of Prayer by turning it into a commercial enterprise. That is what made them thieves.
Coming back to anger, the Prophet Isaias tells us that a man in anger is like water stirred up by a storm. Heaven can be pictured as a calm sea that reflects the beauty of the stars above. But a storm disturbs the water and the reflections disappear. If we are patient and gentle, we reflect the image of our Lord. But when anger and impatience disturb us, the image of God disappears and is replaced by the image of an evil spirit.
What comes out of an evil spirit? Quarreling, harshness, hatred, revenge - all the same emotions of an angry person. What come out of his mouth are curses, not blessings. In some homes neither husband nor wife will give in and there is continuous quarreling, anger and cursing. And what do their children learn growing up in such a home? Certainly not charity, patience or gentleness because the home they live in is hell on earth. Anger becomes hereditary in homes like that, because children who grow up with anger pass it down to their children.
Anger does not appear alone either. It is always accompanied by other sins like cursing, blasphemy and slander. Our tongues were given to us to praise God, and they are consecrated to him in Baptism and Holy Communion. Our tongues are not for cursing, blasphemy or slander.
How unfortunate is the person who gives himself over to anger and passion. He forces God to punish him. To avoid this punishment yourself, take a good look at the suffering in the world and let it remind you that it is only justice - that as we have revolted against God, so others will revolt against us and hurt us. Do not give others reason to curse and swear. If something happens contrary to what you want, don’t fly into a rage. Rather, say, “God bless you.” Read the Book of Job in the Bible and act like him. He felt all the effects of poverty, the pain of sickness and the anguish of sorrow over the deaths of his children. All this was sent to him to test him, but Job never revolted against God, Whom he loved above all things. As St. Paul put it in Ephesians 4: 26, “Be angry: and sin not.” Our emotions are part of our human makeup. They are neither good nor bad. Emotion become bad if we let them rule us. We are given dominion over the earth, and we are also given dominion or rule over our emotions. Controlling our emotions allows us to concentrate on why we were placed on earth, and that is to know, to love and to serve God.
In today’s Epistle, St. Paul says, “Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.” This armor of God is our religion, the Mass and the Sacraments and prayer. One of the great deceits of Satan is that when someone wrongs us we have a right to be angry. This temptation plays to our egos, which tell us that we are important and we should get our way. If this were true our lives would be intolerable because we often do not get our way. Remember, we are required to forgive seventy times seven times. So, do we have a right to be angry when we are wronged? No, but we do have a right and a duty to be zealous in defense of God. +++
We Celebrate the Traditional Tridentine Latin Mass
No comments:
Post a Comment