“Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has
something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go your way. First be
reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23)
Nobody can accuse our loving Lord of ambiguity. He sets it all out before us clearly in the beginning of His ministry captured in the Sermon on the Mount. We may say like the servants of earlier centuries: “I hear and I obey,” but do we? Each year after Great Lent, having heard countless confessions, I have the feeling that so many difficulties that divide families and break apart longstanding friendships are the result of misunderstandings. Perhaps eighty or ninety percent of the traumas of the heart come from a word spoken in anger, a time of frustration, a misinterpretation, or a confusion. A phone call might have cleared it up with an apology, but it had not been made. A letter misaddressed and never delivered, a third party carrying gossip that had not been checked out, a comment misconstrued—those incidents last sometimes a lifetime.
They are all good people. They have the same basic values; they hear: “Let us love one another” demanded in every Divine Liturgy, yet the agony of separation remains. I’m convinced that some even rather enjoy the misery of alienation from others. Not only do they make no effort to heal the emotional wounds in their hearts, they take every opportunity to express the suffering they believe they are enduring. They feel it to be a status of victimization. They are among the insulted and injured, therefore, they are in their own eyes exempt from judgment, even by God. Only He understands the humiliation and suffering they are forced to endure by an insensitive relative or former friends who brought the agony on.
I had one of the most precious phrases from the Bible written on our temple ceiling near the altar for all to contemplate: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, and there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). The word for “wipe away” means to eradicate all remembrance of sorrow and the tears that accompany grief—not just to “X” them out, but to remove them from memory. They will be obliterated, no longer existing.
What could be more wonderful, except to look upon the Lord eternally? But I’m afraid those who cannot let go of hurt feelings may not want their tears wiped away. Their real or manufactured sufferings have become part of them, and they won’t let them go. Dante in his Divine Comedy has those who as they leave Purgatory for Paradise pass through two rivers. Beyond Lethe they lose all memory of past sins committed on earth, and after Eunoe they remember their good deeds. Those who felt themselves insulted and injured don’t want to let go of the memories of those who had offended them—but read the words of our Lord above once again. He said we are to make amends with the one who has something against you. That is, we are to make up with those who hurt us no matter whose fault caused the rupture in the relationship.
I hope it’s not heresy to consider if there might be a vestibule before the precious gates to God’s Kingdom where those who were not able or simply did not care to reconcile might meet and discuss what had happened to cause such anguish of apartness during this time on earth. If we cannot or will not find the humility and grace to love one another through the misunderstandings and hurt feelings we experience, there must be a way to clear the air before we share in the glory of the saints.