Angry?

Tell me, when you’ve “had words” with somebody, isn’t there usually a chance, before the next time you go to confession, of saying some kind word, doing some trifling service, which will obliterate the memory of your quarrel without the need of referring to it? That is what Jesus Christ wants you to do.

Pastoral Sermons, by Ronald Knox (524 pages, Cluny Media)

You have heard that it was said to them of old, Thou shalt not kill. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment. (Matt. 5:21)

Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was at every moment of his life fully conscious that he was the Son of God, and that he was, besides, the Mediator appointed between God and men, saw fit to order the circumstances of his earthly life that they should recall, now in this detail, now in that, the history of his chosen people, the Jews. For he was, as St Paul tells us, that true seed of Abraham to which the world looked forward, and the fortunes of the Jewish race, as we read of them in the Old Testament, were only the world’s preparation for his coming. Out of Egypt the people of Israel came, with Moses at their head, to claim a promised inheritance. Out of Egypt our Lord came in his Mother’s arms to establish his everlasting reign in the hearts of men. For forty years Israel tempted God in the wilderness; in that same wilderness for forty days our Lord was tempted by the Devil. It was on a mountain-top, the meeting place of earth with heaven, that the first imperfect law was delivered to Moses. It was on a mountain-top, too, that our Lord delivered to his Apostles those laws of perfection which we still call “The Sermon on the Mount.”

Do not think, he said, that I am come to destroy the law. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Hitherto—St Paul tells us again—the world has been like a schoolboy, who is kept under tutors and governors because he has not yet come of age. The schoolboy lives by rules, which he is invited to obey for fear of consequences. It is not asked of him that he should intelligently grasp or enthusiastically embrace the spirit of these rules which are laid down for him; enough that he should obey. Such was the principle of the Mosaic law; it threatened punishments, it held out promises of reward, but it did not explain itself or seek to commend itself; justice was satisfied if its precepts were observed to the letter. Now all that is to be changed. When our Lord Jesus Christ came on earth, mankind came of age. We Christians are called, not to the bondage of desk and schoolroom, but to the glorious liberty of the son in his father’s house. The law by which we are to live must be written, not on hard tablets of stone, external to ourselves, rigid, lifeless, but in our own hearts, plastic to its influence and responsive to its spirit. It is for the schoolboy to be summoned by bells, governed in his daily conduct by notices posted on a board. The man must live by principles to which the mind lends its appreciation, the heart its homage.

The fulfilment of the law does not mean, then, that the old law is to be expanded by a series of codicils, as lifeless, as uninspiring as the rest. It does not mean more commandments, it means commandments of a different kind. And when our Lord goes on to say: “Unless your justice abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” he does not mean that we are going to keep more rules than the Scribes and Pharisees did. He means, that whereas their tradition and their training led them to carry out God’s commandments in the letter, it is for us to carry them out in the spirit. It is for us to catch from the lips of our Master those eternal principles of which the Old Law was only a rough, inadequate expression; to make those principles our own and to serve God, not by obeying them simply, but by living them.

At that point it is open to any unfriendly critic of the Catholic Church to say: “Yes, but why should you set yourselves up as superior to the Jews? You Catholics, with your elaborate Codex of Canon Law, your vast tomes of moral theology, your interminable rubrics of the Mass—surely you are enslaved to the letter every bit as much as the Jews were before Christ came? Much liberty the Gospel has brought you! Don’t you spend labour and ink over determining exactly how great a sum constitutes a serious theft, exactly how much food a man may be allowed to eat on a fast day?” Well, I am afraid I have not time to enter into an apologetic argument here. For our present purpose it is enough to point out that moral theology is only necessary because Christians are not all good Christians: if they were, it would become a merely theoretical science. If we are followers of Christ, we Christians live not by laws but by the spirit of his Gospel. We do not spend our time calculating exactly how late we can be for Mass without missing it, or exactly how far we can go in saying unpleasant things about our neighbours without being guilty of the sin of detraction. Rather, the love of Christ constrains us; we would not, so far as in us lies, miss a single second of that short half-hour in which he gives us audience; our study is not to do our neighbour all the harm we can, but how to find in him, in spite of any natural dislike, the image of the Saviour who died for him and for us. Because the Catholic Church is so all-inclusive, unites so many different races, temperaments, stages of development, it is necessary for her to have codes and to legislate over details. But if you really want to find a good, practical text-book of moral theology for Catholics, I can tell you of quite a short one and quite a cheap one. It is called The Imitation of Christ.

Our Lord chose stupid people for his apostles, and he knew that his followers in later ages would be stupid people, like you and me. He was not content, therefore, to break out into short, enigmatic utterances, and leave us to interpret them for ourselves. He would give us instances, illustrations to show us the bearing of the principles which he was laying down. So, after telling us that our justice must abound more than the justice of the Scribes and Pharisees, he gives us twenty-eight verses of explanation as to how we are to make sure of this. And those twenty-eight verses are arranged in an ordered plan: they are divided into six separate sections; and at the beginning of each he says: “You have heard that it was said of them of old,” giving a quotation from the Old Testament; then he adds: “But I say to you,” and gives us his own version of the same law, a version suited to the needs of those who want to be real Christians. He takes some old refrain from the Law of Moses, and sets it anew, writing celestial harmonies for it.

Let us examine another of these emphatic utterances of Christ this month. Our reflections will be very seasonable while Lent is yet with us.

“You have heard that it was said to them of old, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.” That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? That sounds, doesn’t it, as if our Lord was fulminating from the Mount of the Beatitudes a law far more strict and far more searching than any precept of the decalogue. I can still remember how uncomfortable it used to make me when I was small to be told: “Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Because I’m afraid I did sometimes call my brother a fool; and this text seemed to say that I’d done something quite as bad as if I’d murdered him. Are we really to understand our Lord as saying that under the New Dispensation every sin will be a mortal sin? If so, surely, the Gospel will bring no liberty to human consciences; rather the Christian life will be a life of servile terror for us all.

But, you see, our Lord only puts it in these legal terms as a kind of satire on the legalistic way in which the Jews regarded their religion; on the legalistic way in which you and I sometimes regard our religion, when we forget what Master it is we serve. The point is, not that an angry word is as culpable as a mortal blow, but that the source of either is a disposition of the human heart; and such a disposition as ought not to be found at all in the Christian heart, or if it finds a harbour there, should be harboured only for a moment. It is not always wrong to kill; it is not wrong to kill in war, or in self-defence. But it is always wrong to be angry; wrong, especially, to feel angry against a human being. And the real reason why Christians ought not to commit murder is not the fact that murder is against the Ten Commandments. Such motives as that ought to lie in the far background, the very horizon of their thoughts. The reason why Christians ought not to commit murder is that murder arises out of anger, and anger itself is something altogether out of the picture, if we really mean to be disciples of the Sermon on the Mount.

What did the priest say to us on Ash Wednesday? “Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and wilt return to dust.” We have to be reminded of that; Almighty God does not have to be reminded of anything: “He remembers,” says King David, “that we are dust.” He remembers, therefore, the frailty of our nature; and he knows that we shall be angry in spite of ourselves, even with our Lord’s own words ringing in our ears to prevent us. So he goes on to tell us the next best thing; if sudden irritation does get the better of us for a moment, and we say something we regret afterwards, we are to make it right as soon as possible. If you are offering your gift at the altar, and remember that your brother has some cause of offence against you, run back and be reconciled to him before you offer your gift. Do we remember that as often as we should, when we bring to the altar of the Christian sacrifice the poor gift of our unworthy devotion? We are careful to make our peace with God by confession; are we equally careful to make sure that we are at peace with our fellow men? That does not mean that we should always be going about apologizing to one another; a person who is always apologizing is very often a nuisance. But tell me, when you’ve “had words” with somebody, isn’t there usually a chance, before the next time you go to confession, of saying some kind word, doing some trifling service, which will obliterate the memory of your quarrel without the need of referring to it? That is what Jesus Christ wants you to do. “Agree with thy adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him” (Matt. 5:25). You start a quarrel; how do you know that death will not intervene before it can be put right? And that means purgatory: “Thou shalt not go out from thence until thou hast paid the last mite” (Luke 12:59). And our Lord does not want us to have any purgatory, he wants us to come straight to him. He wants us to be his children; and how can we be his children if we are not like our Father?

This sermon is taken from Pastoral Sermons, by Ronald Knox.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “The Angry Father or The Discovery of the Clandestine Correspondence” (between 1801 and 1802), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.