Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and be no longer
stiff-necked. For the LORD, your
God, is the God of gods, the LORD of lords, the great God, mighty and
awesome, who has no favorites, accepts no bribes; who executes
justice for the orphan and the widow, and befriends the alien, feeding
and clothing him. So you too must
befriend the alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of
Egypt. Deuteronomy
10:16-19
But that we may not offend them, go to the sea, drop in a
hook, and take the first fish that comes up. Open its mouth and you will
find a coin worth twice the temple tax.
Give that to them for me and for you.” Matthew 7:27
Piety
Tend the tiny seeds in the garden of
your life today if you want flowers to bloom in the springtime of tomorrow. (By
St. Therese of Lisieux in The Little Way)
Study
The theme of change gets a double underline today. Moses is not just resorting the words which
would be used by Jesus and John the Baptist.
He could have just said, “Repent.”
But no. Moses has to be even more
explicit about the need for us to change.
“Circumcise your heart.” Cut out of your heart anything which keeps
you from respecting the awesome power of God, following his ways exactly,
and loving and serving Him all our days.
Jesus steps up his efforts to differentiate between His
disciples and the subjects of the belligerent Roman rulers. To avoid even so much as the appearance of divided
loyalty, he tells Simon how to pay the tax as a foreigner so that Simon and
Jesus would not be seen as royal subjects of the king. In this way, Simon
befriends the alien by becoming like a foreigner.
At this stage in Matthew’s Good News, I can not imagine
Simon Peter not going out to retrieve that coin from the bottom of the stomach
of the fish at the bottom of the sea.
That is the coin of freedom. Just
as Jonah was borne anew when he emerged from the belly of the whale, this coin
will free Simon from the temple tax so he can fully rely upon God.
Action
How are you being asked to act according to the ways of
God and not the ways of the world?
“The primary duty of every disciple is to listen to the
word of God and to put it into practice,” writes Theodore Cardinal McCarrick in
the foreword to “The Sant’ Egidio Book of Prayer.” He goes on to quote a Russian writer who
observed: “Faith without works is dead, and prayer is the first work and
principle of every true action; in it we approach God and God works in us. This is already the principle of a new
spiritual life.”
How is today’s Good News asking you to look at life in
a different way?
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