The Unleavened Lifestyle of a Christian

WORD 2day: Monday 23rd week in Ordinary time

September 7, 2020: 1 Corinthians 5: 1-8; Luke 6: 6-11

The Word today speaks to us of the ills in Christian living...which St. Paul calls the yeast of evil and wickedness. We consider, almost universally, that acts like adultery and fornication are serious faults, and rightly so. But we consider habits like gossiping, judging others and criticising as less grave and so, go on with it as if they do not matter. A bit of compromise here and a bit of adjustment there, seems alright for the daily normal living, in the common parlance. 

That can never be an authentic Christian way of thinking...Christ would say looking with lust is equally evil as adultery; speaking ill of the other is equally brutal as assaulting the other physically; character assassination is as criminal as killing a person! It is not exactly in what we do that the seriousness of the matter consists, but in what we are aiming to do through our actions or words or disposition.

St. Paul deals with a more concrete situation of impurity and sin in the first reading today...but does not stop with a do or a don't. He transcends them all and instructs the community to be careful about the yeast of evil and wickedness which enters as a stray thought, continues as a practical convention and gets ratified as something acceptable! How many things have followed this path of ratification in history of humanity! 

Jesus gives a valid and eternal alternative to this yeast of evil - the unleavened life style of a Christian - Love. Love alone can make a Christian. Love is the typical disposition of a true Christian. Love is patient and kind, but rejoices in nothing but good! Hence we are called to love and not judge, to love and not use others, to love and not to bloat in our egocentric achievements! Let us be filled with compassion for the suffering and the weak, for the oppressed and the exploited, for the marginalised and the forgotten in the society - that will make us truly Christian, with an unleavened lifestyle!