Ezekiel 18:21-28
Matthew 5:20-26
Sin harms our relationships with God and our neighbor. Sometimes it even destroys them. It creates "structures of sin" that hurts the community. Even in this destruction, however, there is a message of hope.
God rejoices when the wicked repent and change their ways of living. What you did yesterday cannot be undone, what you might do tomorrow is yet to be determined.
What you are doing right now, however, is where your free will cooperates with God's grace to produce repentance and metanoia -- a fundamental change in the way you live.
Jesus talks to us about violence and as usual he goes directly to the heart of the problem. Don't kill -- and beware of your interior anger, because that's where murder begins. Go and be reconciled.
Active verbs are used, this is not a message suggesting "be a couch potato." The life of conversion in Christ Jesus goes on forever, it does not stop.
Paul Tillich has written:
“There is a section of life which is nearer to us than any other and often the most estranged from us: other human beings. We all know about the regions of the human soul in which things look quite different from the way they look on its benevolent surface.
“In these regions we can find hidden hostilities against those with whom we are in love. We can find envy and torturing doubt about whether we are really accepted by them.
“And this hostility and anxiety about being rejected by those who are nearest to us can hide itself under the various forms of love: friendship, sensual love, conjugal and family love.
“But if we have experienced ultimate acceptance this anxiety is conquered, though not removed. We can love without being sure of the answering love of the other one.”
Jacques Maritain has written:
“The conviction each of us has, rightly or wrongly, regarding the limitations, deficiencies, or errors of others does not prevent friendship between minds.
“In such a fraternal dialogue, there must be a kind of forgiveness and remission, not with regard to ideas—ideas deserve no forgiveness if they are false—but with regard to the condition of one who travels the road at our side.
“Every believer knows very well that all will be judged—both oneself and all others. But neither one nor another is God, able to pass judgment. What each one is before God, neither the one nor the other knows.
“Here the 'judge not' of the gospels applies with its full force. We can render judgment concerning ideas, truths, or errors; good or bad actions; character, temperament, and what appears to us of a person's interior disposition.
But we are utterly forbidden to judge the innermost heart, that inaccessible center where the person day after day weaves his or her own fate and ties the bonds binding him or her to God. When it comes to that, there is only one thing to do, and that is to trust in God.
“And that is precisely what love for our neighbor prompts us to do.”
Posted by John
at 12:01 AM CST
