Which Audience?

Wednesday of Week 21 in Ordinary Time

Matthew 23:27-32

We hear  ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites’ twice today.  There are seven all together.  In Luke there are four.  I really do like Luke better.  Four is enough for me.  It is too easy with a text like this to be satisfied with pointing a finger at the scribes and pharisees.  But lets be honest, being a hypocrite is sooo easy.

These woes, they are the flip side of the blessings/beatitudes of chapter 5.  And they are addressed to very different audiences.  The question for me is:  Which audience includes me?

My answer:  Not at the same time of course…but definitely both.

I love how vivid Jesus’ description is: 

You are whitewashed tombs…beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.

I don’t think I let it get me that deep in trouble…that is, my hypocrisy.  But it is there.  The evidence appears whenever my inside and my outside are like trains on opposite tracks…different directions.  I totally know it when I’m doing it.  It is like indigestion.

And it is in direct opposition to today’s collect prayer that asks:

Grant your people

to love what you command and to desire what you promise,

that, amid the uncertainties of this world,

our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found.

That is the answer to my inside/outside problem.  Put the heart in the lead.  Fix it on that place where true gladness is found and I might find myself, more often than not, in the blessing audience.