Go first and be reconciled June 15

Piety

Jesus, you command us to love…at any and all cost as you did. To get your love, you only ask that we love.

Knowing that our petitions will not be heard by you or our Father unless we forgive others, please grant us the strength of spirit and faith for us to be reconciled first with our sisters and brothers. As you join forgiveness with our ability, may you also join our ability to be with you in the future to our present ability to give love before all else. Amen.

Study

http://www.usccb.org/nab/061506.shtml

“Go first and be reconciled.” Matthew 5:24

Jesus raises the bar and sets a new standard of behavior for the Christian disciple to follow.

Under Mosaic law, the commandment was “Thou shalt not kill.” Jesus raises that to, “Thou shalt not be angry.” Even if you don’t strike another, anger alone is not to be tolerated.

As a sacrament, Reconciliation imparts to us the love of God who does the reconciling. But it also gives us the duty to live by God’s merciful love and share that reconciliation with others. From the Sermon of the Mount onward, Jesus insists that prayer must include a conversion of the heart. This kind of conversion requires forgiveness as we forgive others.

This conversion also demands that the Christian leave individualism behind because the love we receive frees us from it. This is not about our salvation alone but rather the salvation of all the children of God. If we recite the “Our Father” sincerely, our divisions and opposition have to be overcome (Catechism 2792). God can be satisfied only by prayers that make peace. As St. Cyprian writes: “To God, the better offering is peace, brotherly concord and a people made one in the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Action
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201734.html

Forgiveness comes into play in real life. It is not just some theological construct.

Read (at the link above) a moving tribute to James Cameron, who died at 92 on Sunday, nearly 76 years after he survived a lynching attempt in Marion, Ind. In the article, Avis Thomas-Lester writes about how reconciliation provided the miraculous intervention that saved Cameron.

A rope was pulled so tightly that it left marks for the rest of his life. As the crowd screamed racial epithets, he prayed. "Lord, forgive me my sins," Cameron recalled saying, in an interview last year.

As he waited to die, a voice he did not recognize called out that Cameron had had nothing to do with the slaying. He was cut down, the only person known to have survived a lynching attempt. Many years later he was given a piece of the rope. He kept it at the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, which he founded to teach the history of African Americans, including the ugly story of lynching.

What sins do you need to ask Jesus to forgive? What anger do you need to bury first?
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Tune in to www.yourdailytripod.blogspot.com for continued inspiration on your post-Cursillo fourth day journey. Let me know if you would like to pick a day soon to offer the daily reflection.