Several years ago I heard
a woman giving her testimony of how God had healed her from terrible
abuse she had suffered from her father from an early age. She said
that her family knew nothing but abuse, incest, pornography. She was
even sold to other men by her father and yet they went to mass every
Sunday as a family. To outsiders, they looked like a perfectly normal
family. Obviously the practicing of their faith didn’t mean an
awful lot.
Here’s another example:
A man I met in a hospital in Ireland told me angrily that it was
alright for the Archbishop of Armagh (the head of the Church in
Ireland), to pray for priests who had done wrong and to spend the
whole day praying for them if he wanted, but that he shouldn’t
expect him or anyone else to have to pray for them. In fact how dare
he even suggest that anyone else should have to pray for such people.
‘If your virtue goes no
deeper than that of the Scribes or Pharisees, you will never
enter the kingdom of heaven.’ In modern English we would say,
‘If your faith is only outward signs, like going to mass,
and doing religious things, you will never go to heaven.’
You will never get to heaven! That seems pretty strong coming from a
God who is supposed to love us so much. God takes us seriously, but
He expects us to take him seriously as well. In fact He insists
that we do.
This man I mentioned was
obviously very angry and felt let down by priests who had done wrong.
I don’t blame him for feeling angry, but the point is that he
seemed to think that he could quite happily go on practicing his
faith, on the outside, so long as he didn’t have to do anything
like forgiving, or praying for others who have done wrong, the very
things that our faith is all about. This is exactly what Jesus is
talking about and it applies to every one of us, priests, Religious,
all of us. The Lord is saying, ‘Go deeper than what you can just
see. Live from your heart. Pray from the heart. Let your outward
practice of faith, like praying at mass and doing novenas etc., be an
outward sign of what is already happening on the inside.’
People often say to me that it’s awful
not to see young people going to mass and ‘If we could just get
them to go.’ I know what they mean and it is sad, but I would also
say that I think it would be better that young people didn’t go to
mass at all, if it meant they were just doing something on the
outside. If it is not something real on the inside, an encounter with
God a desire to deepen our relationship with God and to acknowledge
and worship God, then it means nothing. I am sure that many of our
young people have a sense of needing to find something real. Their
faith needs to be something alive, something lived from the heart and
they are searching. If their only experience of mass so far has been
that it’s just a ‘thing’ that you do, then I don’t blame them
at all. They need to discover God themselves and then hopefully the
mass will come alive for them and they will see that it is a place
where they can encounter the living God, but they won’t go near the
mass or anything else if they don’t see it as being something real
for us, something that we live from the heart and not just
something we ‘do’. It is so important that we live our faith at a
deep level. In the same way, my talking to you about God is a waste
of time, unless I’m trying to live it myself. This is one reason
why Jesus was so angry with the religious professionals of his day.
They were experts at doing the ‘required’ thing, the equivalent
of going to mass and saying your prayers, but they were only doing it
at a surface level. That is why Jesus is saying, ‘Choose life, and
choose to live your faith from the heart’.
In the Gospel Jesus speaks in a very
shocking way, because He quotes the Law, which was God’s teaching
through Moses and He says, ‘You have heard that it was said… but
I say to you…’ He is saying that his teaching is now more
important, which to many must have sounded very arrogant. But what
Jesus is challenging us to do is to live our faith from the heart and
not just in a minimal way. We would not live a relationship with a
spouse or a dear friend doing the absolute minimum. If we did it
would just dissolve. We try to live it at an ever deeper level, from
the heart so that we will grow. God is inviting us to do the same, to
respond to him with generous hearts, to live our faith in the fullest
way, but this is something that we can only do by our own choice.
If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you;
if you trust in God, you too shall live;
he has set before you fire and water
to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.
Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.
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