Brother

“First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:26).

Saint Paul Holy Kiss (Icon)

It is no easy thing to exist in a family.

This is not to say that it is better to live outside of a family and be completely isolated – after all we are built as social creatures.  God created us in His image and His image is the Holy Trinity.  And as the Holy Trinity are a perfect relationship, so too are we supposed to be in relationship in our own families.

But the problem with family is that we become very familiar with each other.  We live together (at least for a period of time) and we work together in the affairs of the family and the house and we become a unit that is affected and continues to affect others.  And when people become familiar with each other, we begin to judge each other – not even on the sins of the present, but on a conglomeration of sins of the past.  We hold grudges – even those we do not realise that we hold – and an action today will be interpreted as the culmination of a million other actions that were badly handled or terribly misplaced.

Nd God understands that weakness in us.  And that is why Christ gave such clear instructions about our brother…  “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ Everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:20-26).I am imagining the sadness of the Divine Father in seeing our cruelty and unforgiveness of our brother.  And our brother can literally be our siblings, but more than that, our brother can be the people around us – our husbands and wives, our friends and neighbours, even our enemies.  And there I sit with all my pretention, and I judge them and be hurt by them and consider their words intentionally upsetting.  And we do that to distract ourselves from love.  When I fill my heart with hatred and misunderstanding of my brother, I am really filling my heart with things that distract me from my true purpose in life, which is to KNOW LOVE AND OBEY my God and to be with Him forever in Heaven…

And I have been thinking about that today as I have been thinking about my options and the ways that I can handle various things.  And it occurs to me that I spend far far far too much time, wasting energy on things that do not mean a thing…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.