Worship and Works
From today's readings: "Seek good and not evil,
that you may live; Then truly will the LORD, the God of hosts, be with you as
you claim.... Why do you recite My statutes, and profess My covenant with your
mouth, though you hate discipline and cast My words behind you?... When Jesus
came to the territory of the Gadarenes, two demoniacs who were coming from the
tombs met Him."
Am 5: 14-15. 21-24/ Ps 49(50):
7. 8-9. 10-11. 12-13. 16bc-17/ Mt 8: 28-34
Hypocrisy in religion is probably the
worst kind, when one honors God with the lips, but spurns His rule as the guide
for life. Now, we must admit that almost everyone is guilty of this to some
degree, whenever our actions don't measure up to our baptismal promises to
utterly reject Satan and sin. That's precisely why we need a Savior, who not
only saved us in the past from sin, but continues to save us this day as we
reach out to Him whenever we fall.
So, it's one thing to fail occasionally
in living up to our faith, as long as one is striving mightily to follow Christ
and embrace all His teachings, and continually calling out to God for divine
assistance. But the complaint raised in the book of the prophet Amos is against
systemic religious hypocrisy, against the insidious belief that as long as one
performed the skeletal duty of divine worship, the everyday actions were less
consequential. So, people would come to offer sacrifice, to observe religious
feasts and rituals, to sing and praise God with music, and they presumptuously
figured that all that should be enough for God, that He would be distracted by
such offerings and so overlook habitual neglect of prayers, and everyday
injustices, and the wicked schemes that lurked in their hearts even as they were
making the offerings.
This systemic religious hypocrisy has
not vanished - it can clearly be seen in some people's approach to the
sacraments, for instance. Too many couples preparing for holy matrimony and
ranks of parents who present their infants for baptism do not pray much
together nor attend Church regularly, and they often have such a scanty
familiarity with their faith that one can legitimately question how much of it
they will be able to pass on to their children! The situation is all too often the
same when children begin preparation for First Communion or Confirmation.
Now, without judging such parents'
intentions (which may be quite noble, even if inadequate!), if they have no
plan of deepening their everyday faith commitment, it's obvious that their
approach to the sacraments is quite deficient! It is as if they concluded that
after immunizations, no further concern was needed to insure their child's
health, or as long as vitamins were set out, no other nourishment was required.
The same sorry syndrome is also found among those who regularly receive the
Eucharist without sacramental reconciliation, even after nonchalantly skipping
Holydays of obligation, or living in sin, or embracing moral viewpoints
incompatible with the faith, such as promiscuity or the support of abortion.
When such attitudes are stubbornly held,
it can reach the point that the celebration of the sacraments instituted by
Christ paradoxically and tragically becomes displeasing to God, as were the
hypocritical sacrifices offered in the days of Amos. This does not contradict
the Church's teaching that all the sacraments do guarantee the efficacious
presence and work of the Lord, even when there exists substantial lack of
preparation or intention - on the contrary, precisely because the sacraments do
indeed warrant God's real presence, the desire to celebrate them worthily must
logically include the practical commitment to recognize the absolute
sovereignty of God's moral law. In other words, when we worship and seek the
comfort of God in our lives, we have to conform our work and our lives
according to Him!
So sacred scripture does not at all
condemn the worship of sacrifice and religious ritual in itself, but only when
the worship has degenerated into hypocrisy and is contradicted by wicked works.
In our own day, we need to likewise preserve the integrity of the sacraments
and all the other means God gives us for approaching Him, so that whenever and
in whatever way we present to God ourselves and our worship and our works, "then
let justice surge like water, and goodness like an unfailing stream!"