Friday of the First Week of Lent
“Our brother is none other than he who has one and the same Father as we have.”
– St. Jerome
The Sermon on the Mount teaches us how to embrace the momentary desert of patience so as to avoid a lasting desert of alienation from others. “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, Raqa, will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” (Mt 5:21-22) The wrath fostered in the heart and given expression in what we may call others is marked by the New Law of Jesus as so deadly because it both eats away at the relationship of brotherhood that Our Father in heaven is establishing in Christ, and because it distorts the mind’s ability to see our neighbor properly. Christ sees our neighbors properly as our brothers and sisters because He properly sees that we share a single Father in heaven.
Yet, we can be tempted to see one another (and to call one another) as something other than children of the same God. That temptation may take many forms. We may think simply of the number of names that we have used (or silently and consentingly heard others use) to deride others and to set them apart from ourselves (even if only in our minds and hearts). We may recall the last person who made us angry, who made us think (accurately or inaccurately) that we had been done an injustice by this person. This Lent, when such passion or such speech becomes an excuse for us to turn away from another, to delete him from our list of contacts, to avoid the places where we would be brought face to face with her; let us acknowledge our neediness, our weakness, before the Lord in prayer, and before our brothers and sisters in humility. Let us ask for the grace to see and be seen as God looks upon all His children, and never to let our eyes waver from Christ’s gaze which shall transform our eyes and our hearts to be like His own.