What is inside you
What really matters for us, what makes us what we should be, is faith. “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Faith will make us live. But for Paul, faith is not just a belief in tenets. Faith expresses itself in deeds.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus reacts against pious Jews who stress the observance of the externals – laws, rules, customs – without inspiration and motivation from inside. Most probably, the Pharisees were sincere in practicing these outward regulations, but they easily gave the ones practicing them the conviction of saving themselves through them. In fact, in today’s world too, externals count heavily. People buy things for their wrappings. Appearances are often all that matters... It is not the shining cup that matters but the contents. Indeed, the contents must be first-rate.
Reading: Romans 1:16-25
It’s news I’m most proud to proclaim, this extraordinary Message of God’s powerful plan to rescue everyone who trusts him, starting with Jews and then right on to everyone else! God’s way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith, confirming what Scripture has said all along: “The person in right standing before God by trusting him really lives.”
But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.
So God said, in effect, “If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.” It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes!
Gospel: Luke 11:37-41
When he finished that talk, a Pharisee asked him to dinner. He entered his house and sat right down at the table. The Pharisee was shocked and somewhat offended when he saw that Jesus didn’t wash up before the meal. But the Master said to him, “I know you Pharisees burnish the surface of your cups and plates so they sparkle in the sun, but I also know your insides are maggoty with greed and secret evil. Stupid Pharisees! Didn’t the One who made the outside also make the inside? Turn both your pockets and your hearts inside out and give generously to the poor; then your lives will be clean, not just your dishes and your hands.
Prayer
Lord our God,
Jesus touched the dead and unclean lepers
to raise them to life and to heal them.
Let us not be afraid
of dirtying our hands to help people
but of soiling our tongues to tell lies
and to besmear the good name
of our brothers and sisters,
to quarrel with them and to hurt them.
We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
