Tuesday, August 25, 2015
21st Week
in Ordinary Time
1st reading:
1 Thessalonians 2.1-8
Gospel: Matthew 23:23-26
Jesus said, “Woe to you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You do not forget the mint, anise and cumin seeds when you pay the tenth of everything, but then you forget what is most fundamental in the Law: justice, mercy and faith. These you must practice, without neglecting the others. Blind guides! You strain out a mosquito, but swallow a camel.
“Woe to you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You fill the plate and the cup with theft and violence, and then pronounce a blessing over them. Blind Pharisee! Purify the inside first, then the outside too will be purified.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Hypocrite in Cebuano is a compound of the words “tigpaka”, “aron”, and “ingnon”. Literally this means a person in the habit of doing something but for a show in order to be taken for what he is not. Incidentally, the combination of the first letters of these words forms another word that we cannot spell out here because it refers to something really smelly. But the coincidence is instructive of how smelly a hypocrite appears to God. No wonder God will vomit the hypocrite for being neither hot nor cold. “So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
Jesus describes hypocrisy in today’s Gospel as straining out a mosquito yet swallowing a camel. It means being meticulous with negligible issues while being so permissive with big-time anomalies. It is really about putting up a fine figure, focusing on non-essentials to sanitize one’s reputation already rendered corrupt by bigger anomalies. The trouble with hypocrisy is that while the façade appears to indicate some treasures hidden within, that treasure is non-existent because what lies within is emptiness. If a doughnut can be described as “nothing surrounded by something”, hypocrites are like doughnuts. To make up for their emptiness, they build grand facades to put up appearances.
If you were in the shoes of Jesus as Eucharistic Bread, would you be comfortable at communion time being in the same tongue that a person had been using to malign innocent neighbors? Hypocrisy desecrates the truth that innocent people rely upon. Above all it desecrates God, for God is Truth par excellence. That is why hypocrisy is very repulsive to God. The bad news is that even if the “Tigpaka Aron Ingnon” can hide his foul smell for a while, he can never hide his true self from God. — Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM . Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website: www.frdan.org.
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