Daily Virtue

One of the first stories of humanity in scripture is one of resentfulness and depression. Cain was envious of Abel and felt slighted by God. Envy is one of the classic seven deadly sins. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that envy shows itself as bitterness, hypercriticalness, and incapacity to praise someone else or feel the same empathy for the fortunate as for the unfortunate. This can be a substantial spiritual challenge, for in heaven, scripture tells us that we will “offer unending praise” to God. For many, then, one of the significant spiritual tasks is to come to grips with the bitterness that comes from envy to move from criticism to praise, from anger to mellowness, and from the desire to possess to the desire to admire. Fr. Rolheiser notes the most important thing is learning how to forgive ourselves, our parents, our culture, our church, our teachers, our mentors, those who have wounded us, life itself, and God for the state of things and the state of our lives. To fail at this is to die in bitterness, having never known the true happiness God had always desired for us.

Throughout the Old Testament, we read stories about how self-absorption, hatred, and jealousy have destroyed the peace and unity of God’s people. The wisdom books like Sirach were the balance the faithful needed for the often-difficult challenges the Old Testament placed in people’s lives. God, who sees everything, is neither the cause nor the occasion of sin. We have the power to choose our behavior and are responsible for the good and the evil we do. In the Gospel reading today, Jesus presents the teachings of the Old Testament but now through the lens of love – the love that his mission on earth was all about. Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be extremely difficult, but it is never impossible. As with so many other things, the key lies in our relationship with God. Knowing his love, and experiencing it in our hearts, can help us put away the selfishness that is at the root of sin and division. Let us pray that God’s love might soften our hearts and melt away any self-centeredness or divisive thoughts that may direct our actions.

Bishop Robert Barron notes that many modern theologians and scripture commentators downplay this story’s miraculous nature as a “spiritual symbol” or “a miracle of charity.” He says, “I think it’s hard to deny that the first Christians were intensely interested in the miracles of Jesus and that they didn’t see them as mere literary symbols. They saw them for what they really were, actions of God, breaking into our world.” This miracle shows how Christ rewards people who persevere in following him. The crowd had been hanging on his words, forgetful of everything else. We should be like them, attentive and ready to do what he commands, without any vain concern about the future, for that would amount to distrusting divine providence.

What type of wisdom was Eve seeking? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes about a young girl he met, just 18 years old, who was suffering from cancer and weighing less than 100 pounds because of the treatments. The long-range prognosis was iffy, at best, and her body and spirit didn’t belie that, though friends and family did. She was surrounded on every side by attention, affection, concern, and the sense that everyone cared. She was very ill, but she was loved. I got to know her a little that day and somewhat more in the months and years that followed. Her family and others prayed hard for her, storming heaven for a cure. Those prayers, along with the medical treatments, did their work. Her new health is more than physical. It’s too a thing of soul, a color, a depth, a wisdom. Asked publicly by her friends if, given a choice, would she give the illness back to have the life she could have had without it, she replied: “No, I wouldn’t give it back. Through it, I learned about love.” The wisdom gained by her was that ordinary life is best seen against a bigger horizon, that life is deeper and more joy-filled when it isn’t taken for granted, and that love is more important even than health and life itself. This is a wisdom we should pray fills our hearts and souls.  

Bishop Robert Barron writes, “What’s going on here is interesting and provocative. In her plea to Jesus and his apparent refusal, he is inviting the Syrophoenician woman into the life of discipleship, into following him. She is resisted, not because Jesus is having a bad day, but because he wants the strength of her faith to show itself. This story has become a model of persistence. The woman will not be the last person in this world who will come to Jesus with an urgent petition only to encounter what seems to be a brick wall. Dr. Mary Healy writes, “The clear lesson is that the Lord does hear our prayers, and even his apparent refusals are meant to awaken in us a yet deeper faith, which opens us to receive the gift that he has for us.”

It is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them. It is what comes out of the mouth. What comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, which is precisely where God seeks to reside inside us, for through the heart, he can touch our very souls. In virtually every circle, liberal and conservative alike, we see hardness, cynicism, the tendency to demonize and slander others, and a blunt, angry, rationalized refusal to look honestly at the truth without inflations, ideologies, denial, and distortion. Lying and rationalization form the root of bitterness, the root of slander, and the root of the unhappy hardness of heart. Have our hearts become so hardened that God cannot get in? Is there a deep resistance in us to God’s grace?

Jesus himself was an observant Jew, and the themes and images of the Holy Scriptures were elemental to him. He presented himself as the one who would not undermine the Law and the Prophets but fulfill them. In our Gospel reading from Mark, Jesus quotes a passage from Isaiah to call out those whose worship practice was superficial and routine. Jesus spoke about an attitude toward God that he saw as the tendency to substitute religiosity for genuine obedience to God and his word. In today’s vernacular, we would call that giving “lip service.” Jesus came “to do the will of the one who sent me.” Is that our daily mission, to do “the will of God” in our life? We cannot do it alone. We can do nothing without God. Only through a steadfast commitment to the Lord can we find that deep transformation of our hearts, minds, and souls that will change everything.

God sits on a chair of darkness in my soul.
He is God alone, supreme in His majesty.
I sit at His feet, a child in the dark beside Him;
my joy is aware of His glance, and my sorrow is tempted,
to nest on the thought that His face is turned from me.

He is clothed in the robes of His mercy, voluminous garments,
not velvet or silk and affable to the touch,
but fabric strong for a frantic hand to clutch,
and I hold to it fast with the fingers of my will.

Here is my cry of faith, my deep avowal
to the Divinity that I am dust.
Here is the loud profession of my trust.
I need not go abroad,
to the hills of speech or the hinterlands of music,
for a crier to walk in my soul where all is still.
I have this potent prayer through good or ill:
here in the dark, I clutch the garments of God.

– Jessica Powers, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers

Jesus calls his followers to be the salt and light of the world. As his followers, being salt effectively preserves and enhances what is best in the society around us. We can undermine what is dysfunctional in the surrounding culture. We are also light by which people around us come to see what is worth seeing. By the quality and integrity of our lives, we shed light, illumining what is beautiful and revealing what is ugly. The clear implication is that, without vibrant Christians, the world is a much worse place. Mother Teresa of Calcutta would never have achieved much for the poor if she hadn’t lived authentic discipleship. People can see through false words and self-promotion. That is the sense of the Arab proverb: “Three things cannot be hidden: a mountain, a man riding on a camel, and love.” Mother Teresa embodied the love of Christ that all disciples are called to be.

Today’s reflection verse from Hebrews links Christian teaching on grace with man’s response to that grace. Commenting on this passage, St Thomas Aquinas explains that the words “equip you with everything good that you may do his will” is the same as saying “may God make you desire everything good” because it is God’s will that we act of our own free will. If we did not act freely, our will would not be good; if we do God’s will, we will always do what is good for us. God has disposed man’s will to choose to do what is right. It is up to man to respond to God’s design. In this sense, God “equips us with everything good that you may do his will.” We can do nothing to add or remove the grace God bestows on us, but we can affect how that grace will impact our lives and vocations through our actions.