Daily Mass Readings 08/27/2014 or Look at those evil guys over there! HAHAHA, oh wait a minute, that's a mirror!

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth." -MT 23:27

08/27/2014 Memorial of St. Monica

So after telling his followers to do as the scribes and Pharisees say and not as they do, Jesus admonishes the scribes and Pharisees for keeping the appearance of righteousness, but being filled with "dead men's bones and every kind of filth".

It sounds harsh, but in a way, I feel like all of us live up to this description sometimes. On the outside we may be smiling and being nice when we talk to that one person who really gets to us, but inside we are pushing down seething anger and aggravation.

I know for me it happened when we got the mortgage for the place where we live now. We were in the middle of all the legwork to get the documents in order for the underwriters (most, okay, ALL of which was being done by my wife, with my two young daughters in tow) and things kept getting pushed back. Not very far, mind you, but in the midst of a high pressure situation and having started a new job and seeing the runaround my wife was doing to pull everything together, I was very angry with our mortgage broker and the anonymous, faceless 'underwriters'. After everything was settled I would find myself refraining from the Eucharist until I went to Reconciliation and confessed a deadly sin that I had never truly felt until that time. I had felt wrath. I wanted there to be severe and painful retribution for the people causing this stress and anxiety to my family when we were just trying to get a place to live.

It was not just, it was not charitable and it was not healthy that I felt that way. There was evil and dead men's bones rattling inside me. And that's not the only example I could site of when I have felt like a scribe or a Pharisee. So we may look at them with disdain in the gospel story, but let's not discount the idea that they are there as an example of what evil, hypocrisy and filth we can be capable of. They are a warning for all of us.

God bless,
P.D.O.