Wednesday -21st week in Ordinary Time

Gospel – Matthew23:27-32

The Interior Life

Mount of Olives Cemetery

I have a love/hate relationship with bananas!  Even though I eat them rarely, I generally tolerate their taste.  Please don’t tell Ginger – she thinks I hate banana bread!  The issue for me is simple.  The banana can look perfect on the outside, nice color and firmness.  But often all that disappears after I peel it and find the fruit inside is black-spotted and rotten.  Ugh!  It looked so nice on the outside and then the interior is a complete disappointment!

It reminds me of Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel!  And if you thought He was blunt in yesterday’s Gospel, today goes way beyond!  The Pharisees and Scribes are like “whitewashed tombs” with only dead men’s bones and filth inside.  The Jews believed that contact with the dead automatically made you unclean; so the tombs were painted white to warn the people away, to prevent them from touching the stones.  So the Pharisees only appear righteous but inwardly they are full of corruption and selfishness.

But why such harsh words?  Why does Jesus condemn the Pharisees so bluntly?  Maybe it’s because their supposedly ‘sincere’ words were leading others astray.  They care only about one thing – themselves – and about garnering applause from others.  Maybe Jesus was concerned with the effect of their words on others!  It’s bad enough that a person says one thing and does something completely different.  What’s worse is if they can convince others to follow their example.

At some point in our lives, we have all been swayed by the ‘honeyed’ words of another.  They said the right things, the things we wanted to hear, what we needed to hear at the time.  We were fooled and we learned a bitter lesson not only about whom to trust but how much our own words have an effect on others.

The lesson here is twofold: to value others not only for their words but for their actions AND not to fall into the same trap of being a hypocrite ourselves – saying things just for the admiration or applause of others!  Let this be a day when we really and faithfully practice what we preach!

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