Leave there thy gift. — The words describe an act which would appear to men as a breach of liturgical propriety. To leave the gift and the priest, the act of sacrifice unfinished, would be strange and startling, yet that, our Lord teaches, were better than to sacrifice with the sense of a wrong unconfessed and unatoned for, and, à fortiori, better than the deeper evil of not being ready to forgive. The Talmud gives a curious rule, to which the words may perhaps allude: “If a man is on the point of offering the Passover, and remembers that there is any leaven left in the house, let him return to his house, and remove it, and then come and finish the Passover” (Pesachim, f. 49). What the scribes laid down as a duty in regard to the “leaven of bread,” our Lord applies to the leaven of malice and wickedness.
Be reconciled. — It is not enough to see in this only a command to remove ill-will and enmity from our own mind, though that, of course, is implied. There must be also confession of wrong and the endeavour to make amends, to bring about, as far as in us lies, reconciliation, or atonement.