Matthew 5:23-26

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

This passage clearly presupposes a temple still being used by Jesus' followers. Does this help us with the sticky problem of the commands not being anulled but fulfilled? Does it mean that we can sigh with releif and say that only goes for Jewish followers during the temple period? Woulld be nice and it would work if the earlier passage didn't say 'Until heaven and earth pass away'. So no help here on that question.

Anyway, more to the point: this is, in terms more transferable to our life-circumstances, an example of the kind of thing that is involved in doing God's will more righteously than the scribes and pharisees. Not only do we need to learn to deal with 'murderous' anger and contempt, we ned to be prepared to be proactive in putting things right -and we can't let so-called religious duties be used as excuses to put off doing that. It seems to me that in putting altar-work at the heart of this example, Jesus is saying that the formalities of religious practice take second place to the importance of reconciliation and love. Actually this is no surprise but it is interesting to note how easy it is for us to imagine that formal religiosity takes precedence; as if God is more interested in our church attendance than in our being right with others in as far as it lies with us [see Paul's appropriation of this in Romoans 12].

I think that the 'coming to terms' thing is saying that we should deal with things quickly before they become hardened into situations where there is no going back. We all know that there are situations where. if things go to the next level there is no going back and reconciliation is going to be a whole lot harder.

In personal terms: if I manage to effect reconciliation with you before you start telling friends about what has happened and so developing a public narrative of opposition, hurt, betrayal and righteous anger which makes it harder for you to step back from your 'official' version of events [because it involves eating some of your own words] or me to discover how to mend fences without having to eat humble pie more publically, then it is going to be a lot easier. If it goes public and we satart playing to our own galleries, then it gets so much harder to reconcile because we also start to get entangled in maintaining our own public image and bound up with our own supporters and the whole thing has begun to take on a life of its own.

To given an example of the kind of thing in church history: the Roman Catholic church has, over a lot of things, largely recognised that the protestant reformers had a lot of right on their side. Not in so many words but in practice. Many inheritors of the Reformation have recognised that there are things that used routinely to be condemned as papist superstition that have some sense to them and biblical roots. It's a shame on both sides, then, that the differences had been hardened into institutional terms of mutual opprobrium so that now pulling the body of Christ back together is so much harder. I know that there will be people on both sides who will shoot me down for that but I hope it will at least illustrate what I mean.

More controversially still we can see the danger in Anglican terms now: if the divisions over gay practice in Christian discipleship are hardened institutionally then we will have two bodies somewhat at enmity whereas if we can find ways not to institutionalise the division it may be that in 50 years, when it won't [?] be an issue, we may still be on the same side and not looking at a way to heal yet a further division made harder by fifty years of doing things differently.

It seems to me that Jesus is commending a way of doing things that involves making peacemaking a priority even over formal religious acts -in fact peacemaking as worship?- and of dealing with things in such a way as to make future reconciliation more and not less likely. He is telling us that if we have wronged others it is up to us to do what we can to put things right.

I wonder how much our churches teach to this end and act accordingly; I think that it an area of huge weakness in much contemporary Christian discipleship.