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Gospel Reflection for Friday, March 14, 2025
«On the Lenten journey, once again the day’s Liturgy invites us to penance, urges conversion. We ask the Lord for forgiveness and boldly pray that He does not keep count of our offenses. It is the moving Psalm 129 with which we cry out ‘from the depths’ begging the Lord to forgive our sins. We await Him like the watchman the dawn, we await copious redemption…
In the Gospel, in apparent contrast, Jesus sets conditions because we need to know, with full awareness and extreme rigor, our offenses: calling our brother ‘fool’ deserves condemnation to Gehenna… Various interpretations of this term indicate that it can refer to condemnation forever, hell or purgatory. In either case, fearful situations…
As we read in today’s text, insulting any neighbor is a sin that would deserve very strong punishment. But we often do it. Sometimes with very rude terms used without qualification and little scruple. I rely on the opinion of Don Luis Cencillo, priest and philosopher, who took a little iron out of the matter, with the expression ‘rhetorical exaggerations’. These exaggerations abounded in the preaching of Jesus collected in the Gospels and also in other texts of the Bible. For example, turning the other cheek can be understood more than as a physical action as a willingness not to respond to violence with violence. When Jesus was slapped, according to the Gospel account, he did not return the blow, but asked for explanations: ‘Why do you strike me?’
However, I believe that Jesus does not exaggerate when he asks us to be reconciled as an inexcusable condition if we want to present ourselves before Him with offerings. That is, for a Catholic to go to Mass without having sought reconciliation with their brother, asking for forgiveness and forgiving, is an unbearable contradiction. Prior reconciliation, the restoration of the fraternal bond, must occur before reaching the altar. It is no different from what we say in the Our Father: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. ‘If you do not love your brother whom you see, how can you love God whom you do not see?’ we read in the first epistle of John (4:20). Let us reconcile with those we see to present ourselves before Him whom we do not see and say we love.