August 4
St. John Vianney
Gospel: Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14
Today's Gospel: Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14 (That Which
Defiles)
Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came
to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition
of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” Jesus called the
crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into
someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth,
that is what defiles them.” Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you
know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” He
replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be
pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the
blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
Reflection:
The Pharisees came to Jesus worried about unwashed
hands. He answered them by talking about the heart. That's the gap Saint John
Vianney spent his whole priesthood trying to close, not the gap between clean
and dirty hands, but the gap between what people perform on the outside and
what's actually happening in their souls.
Vianney wasn't a brilliant student. He nearly failed out of seminary. He became
the pastor of Ars almost by accident, a tiny, forgotten village nobody wanted.
And he found a parish that had grown comfortable being blind leading the blind,
going through the motions, calling that religion. He didn't scold them into
holiness. He sat in a confessional for up to sixteen hours a day, for years,
until people traveled from all over France just to be heard and forgiven by
him. He rooted up what wasn't planted by the Father and replanted what was.
Our Lady never needed that kind of rooting up. Her whole life was already
planted in her Father's will from the moment she said yes. That's precisely why
the saints who loved her most, Vianney among them, could recognize a false root
so quickly; they'd seen what a true one looked like in her.
You can go through every religious motion there is
and still be a blind guide to yourself, if the heart underneath was never
planted right in the first place.
What is it in you that is going through the motions instead of actually
being planted? God wants us to invest our entire lives planted in Him, so that
everything we do reflects Him and draws others to Him.
Rosary Man
Jim 🌹
Freely
given. Freely shared.
