“Where sits our sullen, sulky dame, gathering her brows like a gathering storm, nursing her wrath to keep it warm” Robert Burns, “Tam O’Shanter” (1790)
It’s a powerful image that Burns creates here. A wife waiting up late at night for the return of her drunken husband in order to give him a piece of her mind. She keeps revisiting the anger she feels for him in order to keep it fresh. I suspect we’ve all been there. Something has happened to us that has made us angry and we’ve kept it in our minds going over and over it again getting angrier and angrier about the situation. It’s this sort of thing that we are warned against in our reading today
Jesus has told His disciples they are to model greater righteousness than the Pharisees and scribes. He then goes on to give six concrete examples of how disciples are meant to do this. We are covering the first four relating to prohibitions on getting angry, prohibitions on looking at another person with lustful thoughts, prohibitions on divorce for spurious reasons and prohibitions on lying. It seems like an impossible standard Jesus creates, we all get angry, we all get lustful thoughts, we all tell lies from time to time. But there is a common theme running through them all, and it concerns how we relate to one another.
God has given every person in the world a value and a dignity; they bear the image of God in themselves. When we get angry and call people names or wish them harm, we are stripping them of this. When we look at another person solely as a means to please us, we devalue their worth. When we treat our spouse as disposable, we treat them with contempt. When we lie to gain an advantage over someone we are trying to deceive them. In all cases we are substituting our value of the person for God’s value of them. It’s a theme that Matthew will return to in the judgment of the nations where we are asked how we have treated one another. Jesus asks us to put a stop to this behaviour where it begins. As soon as we feel anger we are to seek to resolve it. We are not to give impure thoughts time in our mind. We are to treat our spouses with respect and love and we are to be truthful in all we say and do, giving respect to others. No one (least of all Jesus) says this is easy. But it is what we are called to do as disciples. May God give us the strength to live out our call.