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The Word Among Us had a nice perspective. "Sometimes we need cleaning up on the inside as well. We may exert all our energy in doing godly things, but we do them with the wrong attitude or disposition. For example, you might be serving the poor at a homeless shelter, but in your heart, you are judging how some of the people there got to such a low point. Or maybe you are attending daily Mass, but instead of listening to the readings, you find yourself criticizing the way the lector speaks. You don’t mean for these thoughts to rise up in you, but they sneak in anyway!” Pope Francis has this wisdom for us to consider. "You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. It is a concept, that Jesus “repeated many times in the Gospel”, offering certain people a clear warning: “Your interior is bad, it is not just, it is not free. You are slaves because you have not accepted the justice that comes from God”, which is the justice that Jesus gave us. It is an interior freedom, which leads to doing “good in secret, without sounding the trumpet”: indeed, “the way of true religion is the same way of Jesus: humility, humiliation”. And as Paul says to the Philippians, Jesus humiliates himself, empties himself. And, this is the only way to take selfishness, greed, arrogance, vanity and worldliness, away from us. Faced with this example we find instead the attitude of those whom Jesus reproaches: “people who follow the religion of makeup: the appearance, to appear, pretending to seem” a certain way “while inside...”. (…) Let us ask the Lord that we never tire of going down that path; that we never tire of rejecting this religion of appearances, this religion of seeming, of pretending.... We must instead be committed to proceed “quietly, doing good”, and doing so “freely as we have freely received our interior freedom”. May He guard this inner freedom for all of us. Let us ask for this grace.” (Santa Marta, 11 October 2016) By Dave Weber |
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