Digging for gold

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11:37-41) sees Jesus dining with a Pharisee whose heart is full of judgement on his neighbour. Jesus, the reader of souls, does not let the challenge pass but piles up criticism upon criticism in return: this Pharisee is greedy, wicked and foolish. Then, comes the lesson of the giver of the New Law: give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

Like so many of these brief vignettes given to us by the gospel writers, there is a world of movement and consequence in these few lines. The Pharisees were the religious purists of the day, the most accomplished in their observances, at least outwardly speaking. But already, here we can discern a lesson of the gospel that provides the most practical of workaday truths: that things or rather people are rarely what they claim to be about. Why should that be? We humans are not singular in heart; rather, we are laminated instead. If one could take a cross section of our souls, the horizontal seams would expose complex layers, the paths in which our personalities have been laid down over the years by many experiences; by the formation of our educators and the unwitting deformation of others. We like to think that we know what drives us, but even the Psalmist prays to be cleansed of his secret sins. So too should we.

Worse still, we struggle to recognise this in ourselves, believing or thanking God in this age of individualism that we are not like other men. And yet we are, man being the imitative biped par excellence. The difference between the Pharisee and us is twofold, at least if we are not Pharisees: first, he has learned to master his exterior actions, and second, his ideology has shifted the burden of the law onto externalist conformity with minutiae, culminating in a confirmation bias of his own design and making. I thank you Lord that I am not like this publican. The Pharisees thus set and mark their own homework. No wonder this Pharisee ends up at the top of the class, at least in the inner movie of his own self-regard. We may ourselves sneer at the Pharisee, but who among us is not complacent in some way, as if God’s assessment of us should corroborate our own secret and oh-so-swift self-congratulation?

The Pharisee would probably have deeply resented being called to order by one whose claims included the power to dismantle the public status of Pharisaic legalism. Notice the nature of the accusations that Jesus makes: none of them can be judged from the exterior. Humans may be greedy and wicked in their heads and still appear generous and good to the world. Humans may pose as wise and sagacious and yet be full of foolishness. The Pharisees had so focused on the exterior that their inner compass was awry. Now came the Pharisees’ nemesis, and all the more powerfully as they must have felt the acuteness of His judgement on them. Did he run from the light, this Pharisee, as we often do? Or was he prepared to take a risk and look into the mirror that the Lord had held up to his soul?

Jesus does two things in the conclusion of this extract. First, he makes the Pharisee feel the weight of his judgement. Imagine sitting down to eat with a guest who has just labelled you ‘greedy’, ‘wicked’ and foolish. Yet, second, Jesus offers the Pharisee a route out of his vices, and it is not necessarily the one the Pharisee was expecting: Make alms of those things that are within. Here the Light of Life invites us to share our inner light; the lover of souls asks us to pour ourselves out in affection and service for others; the bearer of truth commands us not to hide our light under a bushel but dare to brave the darkness in the heart of our neighbour.  Make alms of those things that are within.

And in this, we are only following Him who made alms of all those things in His own heart. The entire gospel is indeed in a sense the alms of the beneficent generosity of the heart of our God, revealed in the incarnate Son who has visited His people from on high.  

For Jesus to contradict the Pharisee, therefore, is not just for Him to dismantle the corroding influence of the hypocrite. It is to reestablish the true form of all goodness which lies not in the human comfort blanket of skin-deep conformism but in allowing the all-powerful God to dig through the seams of our souls, and to craft out of the raw material He finds deep down in us the very likeness of His blessed Son.