On this Tuesday of the twenty-eighth week of Ordinary Time, the Church reads the letter of Paul, the apostle to the nations, to the Galatians, while the Gospel seats us at a Pharisee's table. Our difficulty is old: we wash the outside of the cup, and the inside stays full of what we would rather not see. The Word of God offers three steps: the freedom Christ gives, a host's silent surprise, and a gift.
And as he was speaking, a certain Pharisee asked him to eat with him. And going inside, he sat down to eat. But the Pharisee began to say, thinking within himself: "Why might it be that he has not washed before eating?" And the Lord said to him: "You Pharisees today clean what is outside the cup and the plate, but what is inside of you is full of plunder and iniquity. Fools! Did not he who made what is outside, indeed also make what is inside? Yet truly, give what is above as alms, and behold, all things are clean for you." (Lk 11:37-41)
The first reading takes us into the letter that Paul, the founder of these communities, wrote to the Galatians. He had evangelized them himself. Marked by his experience at Antioch in Syria, he had preached a faith freed from the Law, so that Jewish and pagan Christians might live in full communion. But after he had left, delegates of the mother Church of Jerusalem, led by James, the brother of the Lord, taught that one must first become a Jew to become a Christian. Doubt and confusion followed, and with them the question of what truly makes a believer free.
The apostle begins with a command, "Stand firm, and do not be willing to be again held by the yoke of servitude" (Gal 5:1). The yoke he means is the idea that the practice of the Law could set us free. But it is the Spirit, given by Christ, who frees us, and that is why the apostle writes that "in spirit, by faith, we await the hope of justice" (Gal 5:5). So we expect justice not from the sum of our observances, but from a gift.
Freed from the slavery of the Law and from our own selfishness, we are called to love and to serve our brothers as ourselves. The apostle says it in one line: in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision prevails, "but only faith which works through charity" (Gal 5:6). The psalmist, for his part, meditates on commandments he loves and lifts up his hands toward them. That is a religion which comes from the heart and pleases God.
A Pharisee invites Jesus to eat with him, and Jesus goes in and sits down without having washed first. Luke, the evangelist, lets us hear what the host is thinking within himself. Here the Galatian quarrel returns in another form, the same concern for outward rites. But Jesus answers that a religion which stays on the outside leads nowhere.
He does not mince his words when he tells them, "You Pharisees today clean what is outside the cup and the plate, but what is inside of you is full of plunder and iniquity." He calls them fools, because they see an outward stain and remain blind to the true impurity, the one of the heart. And yet he does not condemn the practice of washing. He condemns the hypocrisy that empties it of its meaning.
Then comes the question that settles everything: "Did not he who made what is outside, indeed also make what is inside?" (Lk 11:40). God made both, and he looks at the conscience, that secret place where each of us stands in truth before him. But the hardest task is to dare to look at the truth of our own heart. By fleeing it through many detours, we close ourselves to the light of God within us.
The remedy is not another ritual, but a gift, and Jesus names it in a single line, "give what is above as alms, and behold, all things are clean for you." Alms are more than money handed over. They are the opening of the heart, a gift of oneself to God and to others. A pure heart is turned toward others, and fraternal love, lived in selfless service, is what cleans it. So Paul, the apostle to the nations, and Jesus, the Lord who sat at that table, speak with one voice, and the faith that frees us is the faith that works through love.
In the spirituality of Bethlehem, purity is not a moral perfection but simplicity of heart: the gaze of someone who does not cheat, and who lets God dwell within. The Child of Bethlehem, in his poverty and his humility, is that pure heart in person, all welcome, all light, all truth. And so the saints, who accepted no compromise between what they believed and what they did, learned from him to live in the full light, and to give themselves without calculation.
Today the Word of God invites us to let the Father look into the inside of our cup, and to receive from the Spirit the freedom to love. Let us purify our motives, reread our gestures, and make our faith more true. Then the cup that we hold out to others, at home, in the parish and among strangers, will be clean within as well as without.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Lord Jesus, born in Bethlehem poor, humble and without disguise, you sat at the table of a Pharisee and told him the truth about his cup. Wash by your Spirit what lies within us, free us from every yoke of appearances, and teach us the faith that works through charity. Make our hearts simple and our hands open in alms, so that all things may be clean in us. Amen.
For Meditation
- Which part of our lives do we keep carefully clean for the eyes of others, while the inside of the cup stays unexamined?
- Where do we expect justice from our own observances, instead of receiving it from the Spirit, by faith?
- What could we give as alms from the heart, in concrete service to a brother or a sister, so that our inside becomes a gift?
