5th Sunday after Pentecost 23.6.13 Unity in Christ
Be reconciled with your brother first, the Gospel tells us. Be reconciled, before we offer the sacrifice.
We cannot come in here offering love to God if we have hatred in our hearts.
We cannot offer the perfect sacrifice of Christ unless we are of one mind and heart with Him. There must be unity between the one offering and what is offered.
Of course we cannot immediately match the perfect charity of Christ, but we can at least remove the more obvious cases of uncharity.
Thus the epistle tells us to be compassionate to each other, to restrain the tongue from evil, and all similar points.
We must work on these points in between Masses so that when we come to offer sacrifice the next time we will be more ready than this time. And so on into the future.
There should be complete unity among any congregation gathered for the Mass. Yet we know how difficult that can be.
Arguments, resentments, jealousy, disagreements, prejudices... all sorts of things can divide us.
The quickest and best solution is for each person to converge on Christ. He is the one who unites us, who can make Jew and Gentile one, or male and female, or white and black, or any other way of distinguishing one person from another.
If each of us is united with Christ we must therefore be united with each other. We are all meeting at the same place. We converge on Him, taking on His mind and heart, being formed by Him. All that is improper in our hearts and minds is swept away by Him. He gives us His own way of thinking, His own power to love.
We cannot do literally what the Gospel says: go and be reconciled with every other person. There are too many people to consider and too many points of difference to be able to cover all of them. When we can reconcile a quarrel, certainly, let’s do that. But the Gospel is asking us at least in our hearts to forgive everyone who has offended us, and to pray that others will do the same for us.
We all have something wrong with us; we all have sins and faults. If we work on our own faults while encouraging others to do the same we become more Christ-like. We start to look like a united people.
Even one person fixing one fault will help the whole Body of Christ to heal; will make the Church more united.
What we cannot achieve before the Mass will be helped by the Mass itself. We come, all unworthy, to the Altar. Our own personal offering will be limited to some extent by whatever faults we still carry. But if we open our hearts and minds to Christ while the Mass is happening we will be healed. We will be helped to love one another by being here - provided always that we let Our Lord work in us.
If we consider that during Mass we are actually standing at the foot of the Cross - that we have Calvary made present for us – then at such a time we can hardly begrudge mercy to each other.
To maintain an unforgiving attitude to another person in the congregation is to be standing at Calvary and saying: Lord, have mercy on me, but not on this other person here!
We cannot stop the flow of God’s mercy, nor should we want to stop it.
We come to see each other as standing together rather than standing opposed. We are all on the same side here, all wanting the same outcome.
It is only the snares and wiles of the evil one that make us turn on each other in anger. A little reflection and prayer will help us see things the right way up.
Ut unum sint, as the Lord Himself prayed.
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