REFLECTION Sunday´s Gospel

Examine your conscience!

Fr. James McTavish, FMVD

Before entering religious life and being ordained as a missionary priest I worked as a medical doctor, specializing in surgery. During my medical school days I remember well my stint in the emergency room, that exciting locale of human drama, where one did not know what or who would come through the doors next. On my first day there I remember two patients being wheeled in on trolleys at break-neck speed. One caught my attention because she was screaming out, “Help! I’m going to die! My leg, will someone please look at my leg!” My attempt to review her immediately was curtailed by my boss grabbing the lapel of my white coat and restraining me firmly. “What are you doing?” he asked me. “It’s obvious,” I appealed, “I’m going to save this woman.” “And what about the other woman?” he asked. “She is fine because she is not saying anything.” I ventured. I learned that day that the patient who was not saying anything was silent not because all was well but because she had stopped breathing. For the conscience, not always a conscience that is undisturbed is the sign of a healthy conscience. A “good” Catholic may not be disturbed that they go to rest in a big mansion despite that the fact that many other brothers and sisters in Christ around them live in abject poverty. A silent conscience here may mean that the conscience is dying or nearly dead.

In the gospel today Jesus tears in to the Pharisees. He really challenges them to examine their conscience and their hearts because of the way they were living and treating others - “Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation “Rabbi”’” (see Matthew 23:1-12).

A long list of woes. If we are honest we can all spot our pharisaic tendencies! Once I was asking some younger missionaries to finish a project. It was quite late at night and they were under pressure. Another brother arrived and immediately started to help them finish the work. Later when it came up in a conversation he told me that it is always good not to just to ask of others but also be willing to lift a finger to help. I was converted! Even the way we present the moral truth to others can be burdensome if we are not careful. I always remember the teachings of St Alphonsus Liguori who emphasized that if the truth is not redemptive then it is not the truth. He meant that the truth should always be salvific and help to redeem the person because Jesus is the Redeemer (for this reason St Alphonsus named his order “the Redemptorists”).

It makes us realize that as Christians we should examine our lives regularly. Are we living a truly Christian life? How can we grow more?

In the first reading we hear the condemnation by the prophet Malachi of the Old Testament priests: “And now, O priests, this commandment is for you: If you do not listen, and if you do not lay it to heart, to give glory to my name, says the Lord of hosts, I will send a curse upon you and of your blessing I will make a curse…But you have turned aside from the way, and have caused many to falter by your instruction; You have made void the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts. I, therefore, have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways, but show partiality in your decisions” (see Malachi 2,1-2, 8-10). Strong words! Are we exempt from falling in the same way? If only it was so easy. Maybe at times I feel fine and my conscience does not disturb me. But in his encyclical Spe salvi, on Christian hope, Pope Benedict XVI noted “Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am culpable for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in me for what it is.”

Listening to the Word of God is a way of knowing ourselves more. In the second reading today (1 Thess 2, 7-9. 13) St Paul reminds us that the Word of God is powerful – “And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe.” Many Saints like St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Alphonsus talk about prayer as a mirror: “Mental prayer is like a mirror: this comparison pleases me much. If one has a stain on ones face and one looks in the mirror, one sees it and takes it away; without this mirror, the stain remains, and will always remain; as one does not see it, one does not take it away. So it is with mental prayer: if we have a defect, if we find ourselves in a dangerous occasion, when we go to mental prayer, as if going before the mirror, we see in our conscience this defect that we have, we see this danger of losing God; we see it and we take it away.”

Let us take the good advice of St Augustine: “Return to your conscience, question it...Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness.” Amen!