July 16, 2010
Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
By Melanie Rigney
When Hezekiah was mortally ill, the prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, came and said to him: "Thus says the LORD: Put your house in order, for you are about to die; you shall not recover." (Isaiah 38:1)
You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die. (Isaiah 38:17b)
(When the Pharisees criticized the disciples for picking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath, Jesus responded:) “I say to you, something greater than the temple is here. If you knew what this meant, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned these innocent men. For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath." (Matthew 12:6-8)
Piety
Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself. (Excerpted from the Chaplet of Divine Mercy)
Study
Those crazy Pharisees. So concerned with the letter of the law, rather than the spirit. Notice they never even got to the issue of whether the disciples should have been foraging in a field owned by someone else. No, they were even more tightly wound than that: picking grain was the same as reaping, and the law simply didn’t allow that on the Sabbath. It didn’t matter to them that David’s men had broken the law when they were without food.
“Something greater than the temple is here,” Jesus tells them.
Building temples comes easily to us. Maybe it’s the temple of being on time or of driving the speed limit or of crossing the street only when the light’s on walk. Or maybe it’s about people who come to the United States without documentation or unwed mothers or gays and lesbians. We all have temples, places in which we are 100 percent sure we can judge, rather than leaving that to our merciful Lord.
Isaiah advises mortally ill Hezekiah that the Lord wants him to put his house in order. And sometimes, putting a house in order means tearing down a self-made temple.
Action
Think about your own house. Is it in order? Where are you judging instead of loving, condemning rather than being merciful?
