Spiritual Harmony!

Monday, August 26, 2024

2 Thes 1:1-5,11-12; Mt 23:13-22

Today’s Gospel calls for Christian excellence in word and life. 

Just as Jesus inaugurated his public teaching by pronouncing eight benedictions in the sermon on the mount, he closed his ministry by prophesying eight woes on the perverse Pharisees. 

The first woe condemns the fact that the Pharisees became obstacles for others to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Their hypocrisy is revealed in the way they opposed Jesus, who came proclaiming the imminent coming of the Kingdom. 

The second woe concerns the Pharisees defrauding the widows through clever scheming. To make up for it, they hid behind the pretense of long prayers. While providing for the widows was a chief tenet of the Old Testament laws, the Pharisees were unfaithful to God’s laws and dealt with widows dishonestly. 

The third woe exposes the bad leadership of the Pharisees. They certainly worked on winning new converts to the religion. However, their destructive leadership could only push those new converts into hell instead of bringing them to light. The Pharisees were hopeless leaders. 

The fourth woe censures the Pharisees, who thrived on false and deceptive oaths. They distinguished between swearing by the temple and swearing by the gold that is in the temple. According to them, only the latter binds, not the former. The righteous anger of Jesus exposes their hypocrisy by asking what is more important between the gold and the Temple that sanctifies it.

Likewise, they made another distinction between swearing by the altar and swearing by the sacrifice given on the altar. According to their explanation, they were bound by the latter, not by the former. Jesus questions their explanation and reminds them that swearing by the altar includes all things thereon, just as swearing by the Temple includes swearing on God, who resides in it. 

The correctives that Jesus offers are a reminder that the Pharisaic attitude is vicious and dangerous.  

Real spirituality seeks to achieve harmony between words and life, eliminating the dichotomy between them. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar