Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
In the gospel for today we see one of the most familiar themes of the New Testament. And to be honest, my first reaction in reading the passage was whether we needed yet another reminder that the Pharisees’ spiritual approach was incorrect. But then I started thinking about why we might need this reminder. One reason seems to be that living out the gospel is a process of learning new habits of thinking, acting, and believing, and that we need to repeatedly focus on lessons from Jesus life and ministry in order to integrate his teachings more deeply into who we are as people. Another reason is that the Bible never speaks to us in exactly the same way on each reading, because our situation and the state of the world in which we find ourselves is constantly changing. Although it is easy to write off the passage for today as too familiar, if we pay attention to it, it will have something to teach us.
Looking at the details of the passage, it seems incorrect to take it to be saying that there is no longer any need to live righteously. As Jesus himself states, he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5: 17). It seems that the point of the passage is that the Pharisees are mistaking outward religious observance with inward conversion of the heart. And they fail to see that this inward conversion will lead to and is in fact intertwined with acts of discipleship that are motivated by love for God and neighbor. It is not wrong to observe religious ceremonies and customs.
However, the value of such actions is their ability to help us transform into different people—people who love God and our neighbor. The conversion to which Jesus calls people is holistic and entire – it is a conversion of the whole person and not just one aspect of our lives. And as Paul says in first reading for today, if we choose to live according to what we take to be the law, as Christians we set ourselves up for a kind of perfectionism that presupposes that we can earn our righteousness or our salvation through our own merits; but it is impossible to achieve righteousness on our own without help from God and other people (Galatians 5: 3-4).
This reminds me again of what Jesus says in Matthew: “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5: 20). In the end it is not the desire to live righteously that is a problem but rather the thought that we can achieve favor with God simply through external observance and through our own merits and without divine grace. So we are reminded here that we should be asking God on a daily basis for help in doing what God requires of us.
- Joel Schickel