A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. This is a continuation of this long passage in Saint Matthew where our blessed lord speaking to the scribes and the pharisees to their faces calls them frauds. Woe to you scribes and pharisees, frauds. Goes on for about two columns. So today, we have this passage.
Jesus said, woe to you scribes and pharisees, you frauds. You pay tithes on mint and herbs and seeds while neglecting the weightier matters of the law, of justice, of mercy, and above all, of good faith. It is these you should have practiced but without neglecting the others. Notice that. Blind guides.
You strain out the gnat, and you swallow a camel. Woe to you scribes and pharisees, frauds. You cleanse the outside of cup and of dish and leave the inside filled with loot and lust. Jesus of of Jesus word And We this. This.
Of the woes as they're called, is a constant emphasis upon the great truth that there's no substitute for personal integrity. That is that before god almighty, each one of us stands as an individual, autonomous, responsible human being. And that is how we have to be before him because that's how he God sees us. That's how we are before god no matter what kind of ornaments or sham or centrifuge or all the ornaments we might surround ourselves with. In the last analysis, it comes back to thou shalt love the lord thy god with thy whole heart, with thy whole mind, with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength.
Is that's the constant theme. Now if when you jump from the time of Christ to the sixteenth century, when you jump from Paul and the evangelists and you come to Lutherans, Wingley, and Calvin, whatever we may say in criticism of these reformers see, one of the main things that they were driving at was that true honest to God religion has to have God in it and absolutely completely prior up and above everything else. That you may surround your approach to god with all kinds of helps. That's when you get into the externals of religion, of language, of song, of dance, of architecture, of liturgy, of rite, of music, of incense, of vestments, of gestures, all of this. But you see, going to god with these things, and they are good things, And how else do we do go to god?
We're human beings. We're not disembodied spirits. That was the great mistake, you see, of Calvin and Luther and company. They were so platonic. We are human beings, but the difficulty, the danger is that we can lose ourselves in these instrumentalities which should be carrying us to god, should be helping us to worship god in knowledge and truth and in love and in contrition and penance.
These very things can captivate us. We can light a candle over there and think that the candle burning is an act of worship. Well, it isn't. It's a it's just a flame and a and a wick and some wax. If that's all it is because that's all that's over there.
And what can transform the act of lighting a candle before the blessed mother? What what transforms that into an act of religion? It's not the burning of the candle. It's not even a giving of alms. You don't have to be any kind of a believer in any god to give alms.
You don't have to believe in any god to be kind to your neighbor and to cherish dogs and cats and to be kind to pigs. You see, this is this is such a tremendously fundamental idea that whatever else we have to do in this life, we have got to acknowledge god and worship him and worship him, not to play games, not to use him as a means to an end. That you cannot do with god almighty. And Immanuel Kant said, you can't do it with any human being either because they are as he didn't say this, but I say it, that you can't do it with a human being. In other words, you cannot use any human being merely as a means to an end because they are made to the image and likeness of God almighty.
That is something Kant couldn't say, although he said the first part. That's one definition of his famous categorical imperative. And so our don't get the scribes and the pharisee, they weren't bad men. They were not evil men. They were not men who had disreputable reputations.
They were not ignorant men. They were not illiterate men. They were not men who lacked elegance of living, and I presume they were hygienic. They were at the top of the heap, and our blessed lord calls them frauds, hypocrites. We're all in this boat.
We are all there, and it is so easy to be one of them rather than to be one with Jesus Christ. In the name of the father, of the son, holy spirit. Amen.