THE WORD IN LENT - Friday, First week of Lent
February 26, 2021: Ezekiel 18: 21-28; Matthew 5: 20-26
The "Scribes and the Pharisees"...we find this phrase very often in Jesus' words. What did he have against them? Was he then a sectarian too... dividing and categorising people by the group they belong to? No! Never! Jesus himself was a pharisee and he had disciples among pharisees, tax collectors and zealots. Then where is the justification for the usage of this phrase, 'the scribes and the pharisees'?
The phrase actually refers to, that category of people, need not be necessarily only the scribes and the pharisees, who consider the external signs and legalistic fulfillment more important or significant than the interior disposition. What we do is important, but why we do what we do, matters much more! The internal disposition with which something is carried out, truly determines the value of the act or the attitude.
Righteousness often can remain a matter of image building or opinion creation. There are those who hire the media, buy it up or throttle it to control, in order to project themselves as they wish to be seen - not exactly was they really are! Every one of us wishes to give a pleasing and desirable image of ourselves to the world - there is nothing much wrong in this wish per se. But the problem lies in the fact that I hide, how much I hide, to what extent I go in order to hide and what I want to gain by hiding what I really am! Can I still fall under the category of the 'righteous', after all this image creation?
Jesus, explains today his version of righteousness - the Right Righteousness. It consists of meekness and humility, openness (lack of judgments) and acceptance, endurance and perseverance, and endless hopefulness. It consists of accepting who I really am and working on myself without pretensions. It consists of accepting the other as he or she is and trying to live as brothers and sisters in peace!
Against these measures on the scale, where does my righteousness stand?