Memorial of St Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
1 Kgs 8:22-30; Mk 7:1-13
Sometimes we find it hard to understand each other. We all come from different backgrounds and different upbringings. We all have different ways of looking at things and of interpreting reality. Indeed, it takes a lifetime to know a person, even those very people in our own household. Perhaps it is almost as difficult, however, to know ourselves. We can spend years trying to know ourselves, why we think the way we do and why we act in this way and not the other.
"Know yourself." These words of wisdom have reached us from the time of the Greeks, hundreds of years ago, but they were also the words we find repeated over and over again in the spiritual journal of Pope John XXIII.
In a certain sense we can say that this is what Jesus is doing in yet another dispute he has with the Pharisees and which we read about in today's gospel. We can interpret Jesus as saying, "Know yourself. Know why you are doing the things that you do. Do not act on autopilot. Do not be afraid to analyse yourself and to be critical of your behaviour. You have very little merit if you do good things simply because you do them out of tradition. Good things come from the heart, from conviction, and from a desire to love God and others."
We have to be careful however: we cannot make the mistake of thinking that God is hard to please, and neither that anything goes. Indeed, Christian life is demanding, but God is merciful at the same time. Jesus' criticising of the traditions of the Pharisees is not a nod to our discarding the,. Rather, he wants to render them meaningful.
Perhaps today we can take some time to reflect on those things that we do without much thinking, almost out of habit or custom, but that our actual behaviour at other times of the day contradicts this particular action. It is like greeting another person warmly and then ill-speaking of him or her constantly behind his or her back, or like always being ready to give alms while evading taxes.
May our prayer therefore be the same prayer of Solomon in the first reading, that God may fill his temple with his presence, just as he filled the temple which Solomon had built for him. Obviously now there is no longer a temple make of stone, but a new temple, the community which received the Holy Spirit after Jesus' rising from the dead. We are his temple, and may the Lord continue to fill us with his presence which can be a fitting abode for God only if our actions are the fruit of our internal dispositions. That is why it is important us us to know ourselves.
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