Friday of the 28th Week Integral 2025
One thing we can say about the Gospel writers’ style: they were working on expensive media like parchment or papyrus, so they did not waste words. Today Luke gives us what looks like a throw-away line at first: “So many people were crowding together that they were trampling one another underfoot.” But right after that we see Jesus giving a warning: “"Beware of the leaven–that is, the hypocrisy–of the Pharisees.” The Pharisees—that word means “separated ones” were so zealous for keeping Torah, or their interpretation of the Law, that they took no mind of the salvation of the common folk. In a real way, they were religiously trampling upon them. That word, katapateo, means trod under foot, stamping out the human dignity.
Jesus warned against hypocrisy. Pharisees were so zealous for the Law that they tended to ignore the two greatest commandments: love God above all things and love neighbor as yourself. Jesus pointed out what many probably noticed and said nothing about. The Pharisee loved being seen as pious and devoted but did not care to change their interior life, especially if it meant being poor in spirit, pure of heart, meek and the rest of the Beatitudes. Jesus told His disciples that nothing we hide will remain hidden. At the Last Judgement, all of us will need to admit to our shortcomings. No whispered secrets, no dark meetings.
And if our Christian testimony or our active sacramental life gets us arrested, tried by lawfare, and even imprisoned or executed, we cannot fear that. No, what we must be afraid of and avoid is the tempter who leads us into serious sin and thus imperils our spiritual life, so that if in the process we die our physical death, we cast ourselves by our own poor choices into hell.
“What can we say that Abraham found?” By carefully listening to the Word of God, the Word that led him out of Iraq, where his family had owned land, into the Holy Land before it was made holy by the work of Christ. There he was landless. He even had to pay the local chieftain for a burial place for his own family. What did Abraham find? By being faithful to God’s call, he found his vocation as father of many nations. He found his son Isaac, and the covenant made with God resulting in the Israelite nation, the Davidic kingdom, and ultimately in the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of His offspring, Jesus Christ. He found, I propose, the foundation of divinely-inspired faith, and his own righteousness.
Abraham’s less famous descendant gave us our psalm today, and it’s one that every forgiven sinner can pray with confidence: “I acknowledged my sin to you, [Lord] my guilt I covered not. I said, ‘I confess my faults to the LORD,’ and you took away the guilt of my sin.” Thus we can all be glad in the Lord and rejoice, because Christ has enabled us to be upright of heart. He has restored our lost human dignity by His eternal sacrifice.
