Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee;
Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift (Matthew 5:23-24).
Indignation, resentment, the desire to punish other people, the desire to “get even,” the feeling “it serves him right”; all these things form a quite impenetrable barrier to spiritual power. Jesus says that if you are bringing a gift to the altar, and you remember that your brother has anything against you, you must put down your gift and go make peace with your brother; when you have done that, your offering will be acceptable.
Jesus builds up this tremendous lesson in the Oriental tradition. He says first that whoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger; second that to be hostile to another, is to be in grave danger; and finally that to hold so low an opinion about a fellow creature as to consider him outside the pale, is to shut ourselves off from any hope of spiritual fruit while we remain in this state of mind.
Note carefully that the King James version of the Bible here makes a serious error, which has been corrected in the revised version. It interpolates a phrase not in the earliest manuscripts and makes Jesus say, “Whoever is angry without a cause”; which is a manifest absurdity. No sane person gets angry without what he deems to be a cause. What Jesus said was that whoever is angry with his brother under any circumstances is in danger.
The road to the Kingdom of God is blocked by negative emotion and attitude. To clear this blockage, one must simply avoid such emotions, or replace them with good thoughts. Then the path to our gardens is clear.
Clearing the road,
Z gardener
This comment from a fellow gardener. Z.
The play Cyrano d’ Bergerac (Edmond Rostand) is worth revisiting in this regard.
So is the business of Jesus among the commercial enterprises (the “money changers”) in the temple.
Jesus and Cyrano bypass the entire matter of the worth of the adversary in God’s eyes, for that is God’s affair. Each reacts toward the behavior of the person(s) confronted.
Jesus (and of course Cyrano, created by a pen wielding human along the same lines) showed humility in their anger. On the one hand, they acted as humans and no more. On the other hand, they acted out of unselfish love of God. They did not presume divine right.
Thus God is realized.