Liturgy, Love, and Hypocrisy
A Short Reflection on the Gospel for Wednesday, the 28th Week in Ordinary Time.
Deacon Douglas McManaman
The Lord said: “Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb,
but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others. Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, “Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too.” And he said, “Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.”
The good news of the gospel is not a heavy burden, for Christ said it: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yolk is easy, my burden is light”. We know the gospel has been corrupted when it becomes burdensome. Life itself is filled with burdens, but the gospel is the good news of the kingdom of God, the redemptive presence of God through the power of his reconciling Spirit. Participating in that kingdom (participating in the risen Christ) does not remove life’s burdens, but it does give us the power to carry them with joy and added strength, in order to rise above them.
That kingdom is within you, we are told, (Lk 17, 20-21), and so the joy of participating in that kingdom is to begin today. Joy, however, is very different from pleasure, as Merton so famously pointed out.[1] I spent the first fifteen years of my teaching career making difficult thought easy for my students to grasp. Germain Grisez is one moral philosopher that I spent much time re-formulating, since his work is highly structured, and adolescents need and appreciate structure. One of the more interesting moral principles formulated by Grisez is that “One should not choose on the basis of emotions which bear upon empirical aspects of intelligible goods (or bads) in a way which interferes with a more perfect sharing in the good or avoidance of the bad.” [2] This is not an easy principle to understand, but Grisez explains it thus: “Violating this mode means sacrificing reality to appearance, as is done, typically, by someone more interested in the conscious experience of enjoying a good or avoiding an evil than the reality.” An example of this might be drug use: a person opts for the “feeling” of having his life all together (integration) by getting high, but without the reality of that integration or integrity, which takes time and effort to achieve.
Now, there are certain “empirical aspects” to the liturgy, such as ambiance, lighting, incense, beautiful vestments, colors, the smell of flowers, art, stained glass, choral music, chant, silence, etc. But the intelligible human good pursued and expressed in the liturgy is, or is supposed to be, the good of “religion”, which is, in short, “relationship with God”. But just as it is possible to be motivated by the “empirical”, that is, the sensual, without a proper interest for the intelligible human good of which the empirical is only an aspect, it is very possible to love the empirical aspects of the liturgy without a corresponding love for all that the liturgy is supposed to represent, namely the love and worship of God and, by extension, the love of neighbour. In other words, it is very possible for a condescending, arrogant, envious, controlling, indifferent, self-centered, narcissistic, misogynistic cleric to “love the liturgy”.
Pious devotions, orthodoxy (being right), liturgical choreography, the love of vestments, etc., are not the same thing as holiness. The former can and often do amount to sanctimony. But holiness is love, and sacrifice is the language of love, and love bears upon concrete human beings, especially those who struggle, who are burdened by life’s challenges. Love does not separate oneself from the mess of broken human lives, but is a willingness to enter into the sufferings of others for their sake and for Christ’s sake, because love sees beyond the superficial and changeable characteristics of a human person to the very core of the person who may not be able to say “I am a physician”, or “I am a teacher”, or “I am a highly talented musician”, or “I am a writer”, “a renowned actor”, etc., but can say “I am”, along with everyone else. It is in this that a person exists in the image and likeness of God, who revealed Himself to Moses as “I AM”.
Notes
- “Never seek rest in pleasure, for you were not created for pleasure; you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy, you have not yet begun to live”.
- The Way of the Lord Jesus: Christian Moral Principles, Vol. 1. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983. P. 214.