Woe to you, you Scribes and Pharisees, woe to you, you hypocrites. Jesus sees people who are pious and whitewashed on the outside, but who don’t care much about what is going on in the inside. Jesus saw past the exterior of the Pharisees. He saw past their empty rituals. He saw what was lacking on their inside.
The Pharisees thought they had all the answers. They thought they had figured it out. Today, as we hear this Gospel message, we celebrate the feast day of St Augustine. He was a very intellectual boy growing up in a wealthy household in North Africa in the middle of the 4th century. Although he had a pagan father, he had a great Christian example in his mother, St Monica. Yet, as much as Augustine was on a search for God, his search for the fulfillment of his earthly desires and earthly pleasures consumed his life as a youth and young adult. He founded his own school of philosophy in Rome, but knew that he had not yet found the final destination of his search for God. The letters of St Paul and his search for spiritual fulfillment finally led him to Christianity at the age of 32. Augustine’s teacher, St Ambrose, baptized him during the Easter Vigil celebration. Augustine would later advise the Christian faithful: “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
St Augustine was very aware what we going on in his interior and knew that the emptiness he was feeling would only be fulfilled by his relationship with God. St Augustine - we unite our prayers to yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment