6th Sunday Year A (Mt 5:17-37) If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven

Several years ago I heard a woman giving her testimony of how God had healed her from terrible abuse she had suffered from her father, from an early age. She said that her family knew nothing but abuse, incest, pornography. She was even sold to other men by her father and yet they went to mass every Sunday as a family. To outsiders, they looked like a perfectly normal family. Obviously the practicing of their faith didn’t mean an awful lot.

 Here’s another example: A man I met in a hospital in Ireland told me angrily that it was alright for the Archbishop of Armagh (the head of the Church in Ireland), to pray for priests who had done wrong and to spend the whole day praying for them if he wanted, but that he shouldn’t expect him or anyone else to have to pray for them. In fact how dare he even suggest that anyone else should have to pray for such people.

‘If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’  In modern English we would say, ‘If your faith is only outward signs, like going to mass, and saying religious things, you will never go to heaven.’ You will never get to heaven! That seems pretty strong coming from a God whom we say loves us so much. God takes us seriously, but He expects us to take him seriously as well. In fact He insists that we do.

This man I mentioned was obviously very angry and felt let down by priests who had done wrong. I don’t blame him for feeling angry, but the point is that he seemed to think that he could quite happily go on practicing his faith, on the outside, so long as he didn’t have to do anything like forgiving, or praying for others who have done wrong, the very things that our faith is all about. This is exactly what Jesus is talking about and it applies to every one of us, priests, Religious, all of us. The Lord is saying, ‘Go deeper than what you can just see. Live from your heart. Pray from the heart. Let your outward practice of faith, like praying at mass and doing novenas etc., be an outward sign of what is already happening on the inside.’ 

Jesus also says something quite shocking. ‘If your hand, or your eye, causes you to sin, cut it off... pluck it out! It is better to enter heaven missing one of your limbs, than to go to hell with all your limbs. What is He talking about? He is talking about the seriousness of sin. Today we have lost a sense of the seriousness of sin. Sin is the one thing that can prevent us from going to heaven when we die. If we do not repent of what we have done wrong, we may not enter heaven. If sin is not serious, then Jesus dying on the cross was meaningless. If sin is not serious, then the mass means nothing, because the mass, which is a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Jesus, is all about the forgiveness of sins. That means that sin is very serious.

Many of us have even lost an understanding of what sin is. You would be amazed at how many people come to confession and tell me they have no sins, or hardly any sins, even after several years. If you were to come before God for judgement right now, you would see something different. Does that mean we should be afraid? No, but we should be careful, because our actions have eternal consequences. The first words of the first reading say, ‘If you choose, you can keep the Commandments; they will save you.’ If you choose. All day every day, we are being given choices for good or for evil and we must choose. ‘Before man are life and death, good and evil. Whichever he chooses, he will have.’

Anything that offends God, is sin and we sin all the time. Sin is not just the big things, committing adultery, abortion, murder, stealing; it is also the everyday things that we do without even thinking about. We judge people: I mean we judge their heart. We see someone do something wrong, even minor things and we condemn them in our mind. That offends God. We speak badly of people—gossip—and that offends God. We lie and think it doesn’t matter and yet that is one of the commandments: ‘You shall not bear false witness.’ We get jealous, we lust, we refuse to forgive, we harbor bitterness and resentment, we use sharp words with people we have never even met. We neglect the people around us who need our help. We think that we are only obliged to look after our families. If God gave you enough money to be comfortable, be thankful, but don’t forget you have an obligation to use it properly, not just for yourself and the same goes for me.

Recently I read of several cases where people were given an illumination of conscience, that is, they were shown how they would be judged at that moment if they had died. More and more people seem to be experiencing it. The testimonies of those who have experienced it are quite shocking. Many of them are well educated professionals, doctors, lawyers and many others. They were shown everything they did in their whole life that offends God. Many of them were shown that if they had died at that time, they would have gone to hell, because they had pushed God so far away by the way they lived and in our world many of them would not be considered particularly sinful. Why did God grant them this shocking illumination of conscience? to help them to change, because He loves us and doesn’t want any of us to be lost. Their lives changed drastically after this experience. They are written about in a book called The Warning, by Christine Watkins. I would highly recommend it.

Maybe the language of being ‘lost’ and being ‘saved’ seems archaic, but it is what Jesus taught. It is real and the Lord constantly warns us to be careful of how we live. Our actions have eternal consequences.

To help us even more, God has given us the beautiful gift of confession, so that our souls can be made like new and we can be healed. This is an amazing gift, but so few people take advantage of it. ‘I don’t need to go. I can tell God I’m sorry myself.’ Who told you that? It wasn’t God and that is pride, because you are saying that you know better than the teachings of Jesus, who gave us this gift. ‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church. Whoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Whoever’s sins you retain are retained’ (Matt 16:18-19). We need to repent of what we have done wrong and the Lord warns us of this, many times.

‘Before man are life and death, good and evil. Whichever he chooses, he will have.’ (Sir 15:18)