PODCAST - Press sideways triangle below to listen
22ndSunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B
Mepkin Abbey
September 2, 2018
“Moving Our Hearts”: What does it take?
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
Hoola Hoop
I ran across a humorous little story in The Runners’ World magazine concerning an insurance executive.
Each day this businessman would jog to his office in the morning and then jog back home at night, a five-mile round trip each day.
But he had a problem. He found the exercise soon became too routine and boring.
A friend suggested that he find something to occupy his mind, like rolling a hoop along as he jogged. The young executive began doing this and he found that it did the trick.
Then, one evening he discovered that someone had stolen his hoop from the office. He called the police, but they weren’t very helpful.
“It’s just not that important for us to file a report,” the officer told him.
“That’s easy for you to say, officer”the upset runner replied, “But how am I going to get home tonight!”
Gospel
I use the humorous incident to make the same point that the Jesus is trying to make in today’s Gospel.
Just as the runner had gotten too attached to the hoop for his run, so the religious folks of Jesus’ day had grown too attached to certain customs of Jewish practice.
They were treating these rituals, such as the washing of their hands and their dishes in ritual ways, as more important than they really were.
And Jesus is tough on them, as he quotes Isaiah, "Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.You disregard God's commandment, but cling to human tradition."
Like the runner in my story, they’d forgotten that the practices were there only to help them in their relationship with God, that faith demanded much more of them than their traditions.
Faith’s Demand
Faith demands moving from your heart, when it comes to a brother or sister’s irritating behavior, or an oversight that has occurred on their part, or even an injustice they’ve inflicted upon us.
If what Jesus says of the religious folks of his time is true, that, “Their hearts are far from him,” two questions arise.
(1) How are we to move our hearts closer to him as he’s asked and
(2) What needs to issue forth from those hearts of ours, once they have moved closer to the Lord?
On the first account, “Moving Closer” involves really understanding Jesus’ teachings regarding the values he espoused. Those values were understanding, compassion, and forgiveness...
And we have to see them in action in his relationships with others and then appropriate them to ourselves.
So the understanding he shows tax collectors and prostitutes, is the same understanding he shows us. The compassion he shows the sick and handicapped is the same compassion he shows us. The forgiveness he shows debtors and tax collectors, again, is the same forgiveness he shows us.
Only when we become experientially the self-same recipients of his love and care will our hearts actually move closer to him.
And only then, grounded in his understanding, compassion and forgiveness, can we ever hope to have those same qualities flow from our own actions toward others in the monastery, home and workplace.
Conclusion
Without that (1) Knowledge and (2) Experience, our practice at best becomes only the mere keeping of rules and regulations, the mere clinging to customs and traditions.
And it doesn’t get us anywhere near, either literally or figuratively, to the heart of the matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment