“THE RIGHTEOUS ONE HAS PAID THE UTTERMOST FARTHING”
Saint Matthew 5: 41-46
6th Sunday After Trinity: 11 July Anno Domini 2021
Fr Jay Watson, SSP
The problem with man, with you, is that he sins all the time. You sin because you are a sinner. You are heirs of Adam and your spiritual DNA is diseased. It was Adam’s fault but it’s also your fault. When your first parents were created “perfect” in Edenic Peace and Concord, they had God’s righteousness—His harmony and “rightness.” It was not theirs by Essence, for only God is God, but rather by Grace—Gift. Adam and Eve had the ability to NOT sin. They chose with perfect “free-will” to turn against their loving Father. And now you, who are in their “image and likeness” rather than The Blessed Trinity’s, have the character that you cannot not sin. You will sin. But even now, due to God’s Grace and the Power of The Word, and Counsel of The Holy Spirit, you can fight sin, the devil, and the world, you can refrain from sinning in many ways and at many times. You should so fight. You should aim to do good. The Paraclete always constrains you to love God and to serve your neighbor. Fight that fight.
But there is no one that does good says Christ Jesus. He has Esaias write: “but we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags” [Is. 64.16].
How can you possibly think that by trying harder (which you naturally do “do” because you are a Christian) and being more obedient, you can be righteous as The Lord first made Adam. Moses, the greatest man of the Old Covenant, knew he was a man of unclean lips, as Isaiah would later also confess. Moses had The Law in his very hands and could no more obey it than the Children of Israel.
Those that think their works participate in pleasing God and in making righteousness a reality are scribes and Pharisees, i.e. people who have memorized the letter without understanding where, and to Whom, the words were pointing (Christ Jesus); and those who were hypocrites—accusing their neighbors of law-breaking but not themselves.
The Lord’s words recorded by Saint Matthew are that “type of speech” that indicate that what Christ is “suggesting” can in fact, NOT BE DONE. “For I say unto you, that except your righteousness (your status-balance sheet-rightness-and report card) before God shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The Lord makes it perfectly clear that scribes and Pharisees are “white washed tombs” a brood of vipers—children of their father the devil, and will be cast out of the wedding feast into outer darkness. He is saying to you, to His Church, that by trying to “out do” hypocrites in hypocrisy and scribes in scribbling, you too will wind up “cast into prison” i.e. in “hell fire.”
You are Saints. You are holy because The Holy One, The God/Man says so; and as done so; and has His Evangelists preach and write to that you would continue to hear so! “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by The Word of God” [Rom. 10.17].
You are holy, sainted, because you hear the Word of God; you hear Jesus when He speaks to you through His words and through His words attached to earthly elements (The Sacramental Word). That is your righteousness. Jesus is The Righteous One. Jesus is pure, holy, perfect, God of God, righteousness—righteousness in the flesh—righteousness “extra nos” (outside of you) that is given and credited to you as He “words” you with Himself.
You do get angry every day with you brother, much more so that huge category that you denominate as your adversary or enemy. You are murderers. Sin is murder. You do call others, those who don’t comport to your wishes and demands, fools; and worse.
Who will save you from this body of death? Thanks be to Christ Jesus.
Jesus did not hate anyone. Jesus loved his enemies. Jesus prayed for those who persecuted Him and who Crucified Him. Jesus did not murder but allowed Himself, as the passive Lamb of God, to be murdered, to be bled and slain for the sins of all of us “murderers” and malingerers, and gossips, and cheats, and whore-mongers.
There is no better “good news” than that God in the flesh put His gift before the altar, His Body and Blood upon the Cross then, and His Body and Blood upon the New Testament Altar of Forgiveness NOW. There is no greater Gospel than that Jesus suffered prison and hell-fire upon Calvary—the spite of the adversary and the just-judgment of The Judge “for you.”
Jesus paid the “uttermost farthing,” “not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting RIGHTEOUSNESS, innocence, and blessedness, even as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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