A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you, unless your holiness surpasses that of the scribes and the pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of God. You have heard the commandment imposed on your fathers. You shall not commit murder. Every murderer shall be liable to judgment.
What I say to you is, everyone who grows angry with his brother shall be liable to judge it. Any man who uses abusive language toward his brother shall be answerable to the Sanadrin. And if he holds his brother in contempt, he risks the fires of Gehenna. If you bring your gift to the altar and there you recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift at the altar. Go first to be reconciled with your brother and then come and offer your gift.
Lose no time. Settle with your opponent while you are on your way to court with him. Otherwise, your opponent may hand you over to the judge will hand you over to the guard who will throw you into prison. I warn you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. In reading this first book of kings, it it seems to be foreign to us, and indeed it is. The names are strange, and I was going to say so are the localities, but they're not as strange and as foreign as they used to be. Now, there's whatever you get or do not get out of these readings from the book of Kings, there's one thing that comes to the surface very clearly, and that is the role that almighty god plays in human events.
Now that's speaking in generalities. The book of Kings brings it down to the individual persons so that each person seems to be acting from hour to hour with a direct line to god almighty who's telling him what to do. Sometimes we wish it were that way. Now I'd like to put together this first reading and the second reading because the whole import of the first reading is that it should be our earnest endeavor to do god's will. And if you say you believe in god and that god is running the universe, he's running the show, although we are not puppets, that's the we Always keep that in mind.
You're dealing with responsible, autonomous human beings. At the same time, we we have to insist and we believe that God is lord of the universe, including us. So then the next thing, which is you can't escape it. It's inescapable if you admit the first two, is that it should be our concern to do God's will. Now the great question is, what is God's will?
And so many people today find that very difficult concept. Well, of course, for many people, it's not even a concept because the only kind of fulfillment they know is self fulfillment. Self fulfillment. You even hear that as with reference to priests in the priesthood. I have heard it that men left the priesthood because they weren't experiencing the kind of self fulfillment they wanted.
This is absolutely incredible because who in god's name ever said a man becomes a priest for himself? Who ever said that? Where does such an idea come from? And and remember, what I've said for the priest is true of all of us. This concept of self fulfillment, as we use that concept in the world today, as a standard of life, as a criterion of what I should do or what I should not do, first of all, we have to admit, if we are aware of what's going on, that it's extremely operational.
I'm sure you have met people, know I have, any number of them, whose whole lives are based upon this matter of self fulfillment, which in another sense becomes trying to find yourself. Not long ago, I read a book on marriage, and the very first sentence in there at the very first sentence of the book, it was a concept expressed the concept that the aim of life is self fulfillment, and you're supposed to find that in holy matrimony. Will you? What are you looking for? Now in the second reading today, our blessed Lord is talking about anger.
Talking about anger. That's what he's talking about. He's say he's saying, you look. You've been told in the Decalogue that you can't murder. You can't go around murdering people.
But I'm telling you, you can't even be angry with your brother. Now, we don't think of anger generally as a tremendous fault or a great immorality or a heinous crime. I've heard plenty of people say publicly, in trying to refute what I was trying to say, that anger is a good thing, that anger is a safety valve, the kind of a safety valve you have on a steam boiler so that when you get up too much pressure in the boiler, the steam valve blows and you save the boiler. And if you've ever been around a boiler when the steam valve blows, you certainly know that there's a steam valve blowing. Seems like all hell's breaking loose.
Well, just remember this. When that steam valve blows on a steam boiler, somebody's been negligent, willfully or not, because that means they haven't been taking care of their boiler. It means they had they've been stoking it up too high. They haven't been watching the the gauge. You see the point?
That idea that anger is good because it lets me vent my emotions that are pent up, that's absurd. That's assuming that those pent up emotions are good and valid, all in all. No more than the steam valve on a boiler indicates that the person's been very careful in handling their boiler. That steam valve when it blows is a tremendous sign, a sign for whole the whole neighborhood to hear that somebody was extremely negligent in taking care of their boiler. And so with anger.
So with anger. It is something to be avoided in its beginnings, and it can be avoided. Christ never asked us to do the impossible. It can be avoided if people want to, but some people cultivate it. I'm not exaggerating this at all.
Now when we put what I'm trying to say is when we think, what am I supposed to do? Can I expect to hear God's voice telling me every hour of the day what I'm supposed to be doing? Of course not. I don't know what actually took place in this account of the book of Kings when they say God said this and God said that. I have no idea what it was.
But I know this for sure, that this problem that people say they have of knowing what God's will for them is, is not as difficult as they make it out to be. Because in most instances, when we say I don't know God's will but I want to do it, the reason I don't know it is I don't want to look. I don't really want to know it. It may be repulsive. For example, if a man or a woman has committed himself or herself to the married state to being a father or a mother, that immediately commits you to certain propositions.
Whether you like it or not, whether you feel good about it or not, whether you interpret it as self fulfillment or not, putting those terms in quotation marks. From day in and day out, from the time you get up in the morning even to the hour you go to bed at night, can be dictated by your obligations, by your responsibilities as being in this particular state of life. You don't have to look around for it, it's there, it's on your doorstep in many instances. But we don't want to look at it. For example, today you have so I don't want to exaggerate, but you have many young people trying to find themselves.
They're trying to find a job which will give them fulfillment, which won't be a dead end job, as they say.