Sincere & Grounded Faith
(Matthew 23:1-12)
The warnings against the leaders conclude this week. This is the final part of this series of readings in which Jesus strongly criticises various groups of leaders who have failed to grasp what religion and faith in God are really about.
The problem centres around the belief that religious practice is all that is necessary to be justified in God’s eyes. According to Jesus, however, it is really about conversion, the continual process of turning oneself towards God. Bit by bit as our hearts are changed by the Holy Spirit we come to see with God’s eyes and feel with God’s heart. That is why Jesus insists that it is what is within one’s heart that is important, not how many religious laws one fulfils.
The Scribes and Pharisees have a ‘one-dimensional’, narrow view of religion and faith. Jesus’ view embraces the whole person in the journey of faith. As St Paul puts it in the Letter to the Romans: faith is a journey of being remade in the image and likeness of Christ. It changes and transforms every part of us.
No true believer can live as though faith and life are separate. Often contemporary civil leaders wish that the Church would confine its comments only to ‘religious’ things. For us, all the dimensions of life are part of our religious framework – social, political, economic, physical, psychological, mental and spiritual.
All these are viewed from the perspective of our faith. As Pope John Paul II said, “The light of the Gospel must be brought to bear on every aspect of human life.” Our moral sense of what is right and wrong develops as we reflect on the issues of human life inthe light of the Gospel.
Ours is never an attitude of “all’s fair in love and war”. No matter what the issue, or what sphere of human endeavour in which we are involved, our words and actions must always be true to the values of our Christian life.
With Christ as our only teacher we learn the ways of wisdom and love. We learn how to live, not by the values of the world, but by the values of the Spirit.
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