Today's reflection

No offense to our friend Conor, who was an English major in college, I hated my literature classes. I’m a math-minded guy, and literature never was my thing. I could never really free my mind enough to get past the literal meaning of the words I was reading. Symbolism, foreshadowing, similes, metaphors. All that stuff escaped me. And a lot of times, Jesus does the same things in his preaching. He tells parables and stories to portray his message. A lot of the time, that stuff escapes me too.

Today is a totally different situation though. Today I get the symbolism, Jesus didn’t slip a fast one on me in these readings. He says woe to those who “cleanse the outside of cup and dish, and leave the inside filled with loot and lust.” First off all, it just doesn’t make sense. Imagine if we only cleaned the outside of our pots and pans in the kitchen here. Wednesday’s beans would be Saturday’s goulash and Sunday’s rice would be in Tuesday’s spaghetti. It just doesn’t work that way. It is the same way with us. It just doesn’t make sense to outwardly cleanse ourselves and make no effort to cleanse ourselves inwardly. Woe to the man who makes every effort to make others think he is holy or morally straight or ethically sound, but goes home at night and lives an alternate life and does exactly what he speaks out against or works against. It’s hypocritical. It’s just plain wrong. And as the Psalm reminds us, “you have searched me and you know me, Lord.” We may be able to fool each other by our actions, but God knows what our true motivations are. He knows us in a very intimate way.

Jesus says, “first cleanse the inside of the cup so that its outside may be clean.” This is again where Jesus can’t slip his symbolism by me. We must be inwardly holy, inwardly morally straight, inwardly ethically sound before we make an effort to be outwardly so. We must internalize the things we read about in the Bible, the things we reflect on. We must make an effort to first transform ourselves on the inside. There is an added bonus to all this. Once we truly and completely internalize the message of Jesus Christ, our actions will follow suit. If our actions to not follow, we have not truly internalized the message. If we believe we must work for peace but make no effort to do so, we do not truly believe in working for peace. This is where the true challenge in today’s Gospel comes. We can read about and talk about all sorts of great things that should be done in our world, but we must make an effort to bring those things to fruition. And I’m not calling anyone out here, because we are doing just that in our work here.