You are like whitewashed tombs

27 AUGUST (Mt 23,27-32)

Jesus reveals what the true spiritual condition of the Pharisees and scribes is. They are like whitewashed sepulchres. They are beautiful on the outside. Instead they are full of dead men’s bones and rot inside. There is no God in their hearts. No divine truth reigns in them. There is only an appearance and a facade. If they expressed the void of religion and faith, it would already be a great thing. One can even live without faith and without religion. If he leads an honest, serious and committed life following his own conscience, he is always acceptable to the Lord. The conscience is the true moral law for whoever has no faith.

The Pharisees and scribes instead go far beyond that. They live a corrupt and rotting religion. But everything is plastered with an outward ritual in which the forms become substance. The truth, the faith and the same moral conscience are cleared and in their place stands a great monument of hypocrisy, made of exclusive appearance in search of themselves. They do not work for the glory of God, but for their own. They cultivate only the worship of themselves. They ousted the Lord and enthroned themselves in his place. This is the religion and faith of scribes and Pharisees.

What Jesus says to the Pharisees of his time, he also says it to every one of his disciples. It is easy to transform the most pure truth of the Gospel into an empty ritual, in some ceremonies with external glittering pomp. The Lord asked for none of these things. He gave us only one thing: his Word. He wants it to be observed, to be put into practice. He asks a man only for one thing: to walk humbly, submitting to a perfect, immediate obedience of listening to his every will. Either you live the faith as pure obedience, or the risk can always rise of building a man-made, sinful religion, the result of corrupt minds and hearts of stone.

The Lord has always revolted against this religion in the course of the Old Testament. He always asked for the purification of worship. God has always asked his people for only one thing: the observance of his word. Never was everything else asked by him. It was always the man the one to think of it, but as a replacement for God’s will. After all, it is always one of the dangers of the true faith and the true religion: the substitution of the will of God, of his commandments with the will of men, with the their external pomp, with their cult of things. From the cult of obedience to that of doing things.

“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! You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you flee from the judgment of Gehenna?

God does not want things. He wants a man’s heart, his will, his submission to his Law, his Word, his Gospel. True religion is not giving things to the Lord, but the personal heart and mind in a pure submission to the heart and mind of God. We give heart and mind, accepting his Word, denying ourselves, living his every command, always remaining anchored to the Gospel. For this reason, it is urgent to free the heart from all hypocrisy, all iniquity, all immorality and every transgression of the Holy Law. This a journey never fulfilled and always to be realized; never finished and always at its start. Every day we are called to the denial of ourselves and to carry the cross of obedience on our shoulders. Turning into Pharisees and scribes hypocrites is always possible. Suffices a moment of inattention. A distraction from the will of God, from his word and one is already a whitewashed sepulchre. This risk is avoided through an intense prayer to God so that we always remain in his will.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints make us true disciples of Jesus.