Servitude Trumps Corruption

Thirty-first Sunday in Course 2023

Today the Church gives us a snippet from St. Paul’s first letter to Thessalonika, and it echoes the sentiment of our psalm. The psalmist assumes an attitude we should all aspire to: “O Lord, my heart is not haughty, my eyes not lifted high; I busy myself not with great things, things too sublime for me.” The human heart is not the beating muscle in the left-center of our thoraxes. The term “heart” is really used, as the great Romano Guardini taught, to crunch into one word our whole evaluating faculty. With it, my mind, my experience, my understanding, and even my emotions work together to determine what for me is most and least important, what has value and what does not.

So Paul endeavored with the Thessalonians to steer their hearts toward the heart of Jesus Christ, our Lord and God. In sharing with them the good news of God in Christ, he poured out himself, not just in teaching, but in living with them and modeling the behavior, the prayer life, and the good works that Jesus taught the apostles. And because of his example, those new Christians not only received the word of God, accepted it as God’s word, as it were, God’s own values, and accepted the challenge of the Gospel to do good for others and spread the good news among a world in desperate need.

Since Paul always went to the Jews of any city as his first act in a new territory, he was constantly made aware that most of God’s chosen people were not choosing to follow God’s Son and His Church. There is nothing surprising about that, if we know the OT, especially the prophets. Our exemplar today is the late prophet Malachi, who ministered to the Jews who had returned from Babylonian exile and had built a new Temple in Jerusalem. In his day, the priest-teachers from the tribe of Levi, who ministered in that Temple, were not situating Torah within their hearts, and expressing it effectively to the people. Those people were not taught that only the best of their flocks should be offered in sacrifice to God, so they were bringing inferior produce and animals instead. For a priest or Levite, Malachi’s accusation that they had “corrupted the covenant of Levi” was just about the worst word he could throw at them.

The Gospel certainly implies that hundreds of years later, after the Jews had been oppressed by Seleucid Greece and then conquered by Rome, the teachers and priests in Jerusalem hadn’t made any progress in respecting God’s Law. They would teach, but not follow up with practicing what they taught, or helping the people to follow the Law. Jesus chastised them for these habits, but then, for our benefit as much as His listeners, gave us the secret to improving both our actions and their results. We must follow the example Jesus set best. We must be servants of anyone we lead. As Paul later taught, we must think of others as being more important than ourselves, and treat them as Paul treated the Thessalonians–with kindness, with gentleness.