Tuesday – 21st Week in Ordinary Time

Gospel - Matthew 23:23-26

Rotten on the Inside

I’m A Little Teacup!

 

All in all, I think I do a reasonably decent job cleaning around the house.  Regularly cleaning and scraping the grill, washing the floors, windexing the windows, swiffering the floors, and washing the pots and pans (all the dishes that don’t fit in the dishwasher)!  But the absolute worst things to clean are dirty teacups!  You can’t always just stick them in the dishwasher, and it takes more than just soaking them in the sink.  It takes time and effort and some creative ingredients.  And I have tried them all – baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice, denture tablets, magic erasers, salt, even hydrogen peroxide, you name it!

In the end, for me, it’s a simple Rescue pad and lots of elbow grease that does the trick!  And you have to do this after every use; you can’t just let it go; otherwise, the stain builds up and becomes harder, if not impossible, to remove!  I daresay we all have a teacup somewhere with a nice brown patina on the inside😊

Jesus uses extremely harsh language in today’s Gospel for the Pharisees and Scribes, accusing them of being so clean and perfect on the outside, but utterly rotten within.  He chastises them for being too concerned about collecting tithes on herbs like cumin and dill and yet not caring at all about the welfare of the people. Lawful on the outside but rotten within!  They paid more attention to the outward appearance of the cup and not to the stain inside (their soul), more attention to crops and herbs and not to justice and mercy and compassion for others.

Maybe this is our wake-up calGospl – to look deep inside ourselves.  Does our outward appearance match our inner attitude?  Do we put up a good front but are stained inside?  Do we worry too much about ourselves and not enough about others?  Do I do the right thing but for selfish reasons?  We all make mistakes; we are all, at times, blind to the needs of others. 

We all have our own personal teacup stains! What can we do today to clean those stains?  What can we do so that our daily life reflects the Spirit within? I know it will take time and elbow grease but the effort is worth it!

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