Overview:

Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

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. (Mt 23:27-28)

Find today’s readings here.

Anyone walking around New York City will see some litter on the street. While it usually registers as just another part of the streetscape, barely worth mentioning for an experienced citydweller, sometimes the litter is so abundant—or so absurd—that it provokes a question. 

How did someone manage to dump what seems to be two meals’ worth of food from a street cart in the middle of the sidewalk? And when I’m taking a Citi Bike from a dock, I wonder: Why was the bike’s basket a better option for trash than the trashcan 25 feet away? And—in a case that provokes not a question but incandescent righteous indignation—how do people conscientious enough to pick up after their dogs decide to deposit their bagged droppings into our house’s recycling bin put out for collection on the curb?

But beyond the indignation is the frustration of having to deal with—or at least of knowing that a better version of myself would be willing to deal with—someone else’s mess.

While picking up street litter was certainly not what Paul had in mind when he wrote “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat,” I think some of that same kind of frustration may have been at work. Anyone who lives in community or in a family has some experience of someone else not pulling their own weight and knows how poisonous even tiny examples of the entitlement of expecting someone else to take care of things can be.

The virtue that is called for by that experience is not only to be willing, when needed, to clean up someone else’s mess in order to live well together, but also to ask the question of where I left my own mess behind for others.

That is the shift in perspective with which Jesus challenges his interlocutors in today’s Gospel. Jesus’ critique of hypocrisy (which should be carefully distinguished from the all too common anti-Jewish trope of treating the word “Pharisee” as a synonym for “hypocrite”) is a summons to self-examination and repentance. It calls us to reject the seductive security of the appearance of righteousness.

By naming out loud the claim that “we would not have joined [our ancestors] in shedding the prophets’ blood,” Jesus asks us, by implication, where our self-congratulation is “bearing witness against ourselves.”

The hope of the Gospel is not that we would not have done the wrong that others did do, especially since we very often have done it. Instead, the hope of the Gospel is that we can cooperate with the grace God offers to see our own faults clearly and embrace the freedom of repentance and conversion. In Paul’s words, we hope for the peace that comes from “the Lord of peace himself…at all times and in every way.”

A small first step of that conversion is to meet our own indignation at what others have failed to do not only with annoyance and indignation, not only with a rejection of someone else’s hypocrisy, but with honesty about our own shortcomings, and a trust in God’s mercy especially there.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.