Friday of the First Week of Lent

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Today’s gospel reading comes from Matthew. Jesus has just preached his Beatitudes, addressed to the gathered crowds. In a world that celebrates wealth, acclaim, and influence, Jesus’s teaching upends widespread expectations, preferring the poor, those who mourn, the meek.

If that were not countercultural enough, Jesus goes on to address those few who, perhaps hearing him for the first time, would take up the challenge of his teaching. He warns potential converts, still scratching their heads about the promised victory of the meek, the persecuted, that his teaching’s new bar is to be set perilously high. He has a lot to say for the pure of heart, not so much for the faint of heart.

The structure of this portion of Matthew’s Gospel reminds me of Thomas Aquinas’s summas. Both follow a similar pattern. You may have heard x; but I say y. Rhetorically, the idea is to set up new concepts or norms by contrasting them to familiar old ones. In this first of six Antitheses, as they have come to be known, Jesus uses his audience’s understanding of the law to clarify his own teaching.

The newsflash is that he ratchets up moral standards.

Jewish law prohibits murder. Everyone knows the commandment not to kill. For Jesus, the prohibition is necessary but insufficient: not murdering is not enough. Jesus uses then-familiar Aramaic language and imagery to condemn also the intemperate feelings and rough words that motivate, enable, and rationalize violence. Sensitive to the connection between thinking and acting, he expands moral judgment to condemn more than offensive behavior. Our animating attitudes and words matter too and can, when we settle up in the hereafter, score against us just like bloodshed.

Hearing this new higher bar, many will predictably squirm and attempt to squeak excuses. But it’s not enough to keep one’s own hands clean, as if virtue were a gated, private affair. The reading calls us to think and to work together against the contagion of violence, and thus on behalf of peace. Peace is more than the absence of war. It is something we make, something fragile, something shared.

Near the end of this reading, Jesus acknowledges the high price of violence, incurred by those who suffer it and by the wider culture that fails to find effective ways to defuse hot tempers, fails to heal hurt feelings, and fails to love. It’s impossible not to hear Jesus attempt to square the tenet against violence with his own execution. He’s warning us against what will soon befall him with all the crackle of dramatic irony.

As I write this, headlines parade news of Russia’s illegal war and its resulting refugee crisis. May the peacemakers be fruitful, multiply, and prevail.

Clayton Shoppa

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

St. Francis College