Daily Mass Gospel Reflection- Authentic, Inside And Out

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 8.30.23 | Bishop Robert Barron

[MurphsLaw]

Matthew 23:27-32

Friends, in today’s Gospel,
Jesus judges the Pharisees for their hypocrisy.
He says, “On the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.”

One of the greatest dangers in the spiritual life
is to fall into the trap of auto-salvation,
the conviction that one can save oneself through heroic moral effort.
The principal problem with such a strategy is that
it results in the strengthening of the very egotism
that one hopes to overcome.

What Jesus so vehemently critiqued in the Pharisees
was just this kind of egotism:
“You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones.”

Sin is not a weakness that we can overcome
but a condition from which we have to be saved.

This insight should allow us,
at an elemental psychological and spiritual level,
to relax and to surrender.
What happens often in the hearts of sinners
is a kind of tightening of the spirit as the mind
and will strive to break out of the prison of fear.
All of this stretching and straining serves only
to throw the ego back on itself in a misery of failure and self-reproach.

[MurphsLaw]

+++Jesus said,
"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.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with
hypocrisy and evildoing.

"Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You build the tombs of the prophets
and adorn the memorials of the righteous,
and you say, 'If we had lived in
the days of our ancestors,
we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood.'
Thus you bear witness against yourselves
that you are the children of
those who murdered the prophets;
now fill up what your ancestors
measured out!"+++