(Audio)
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
In vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines human precepts.
The temptation to retreat into mere externalities is ever present. The reason is that it is to manage them under our own control. To observe ceremonial washings requires no great virtue. No change of heart is needed. Yet just by the fact of their being things that we can do they make us feel religious. They give us a sense of accomplishment. They result in the dangerous illusion that we are more dedicated to God than our hearts truly are. Even the greatest Catholic devotions can become merely external if we don't engage them with the heart.
Yet you say,
‘If someone says to father or mother,
“Any support you might have had from me is qorban”’
The risk we face is that we use the excuse of religion to seal us off from the genuine challenges that love sets before us in the world. Do we go to adoration just so that we are less available to others? Or do we rather go to adoration to find the strength to love others? These are hugely different motives and they make all the difference.
Solomon built the temple. But the temple itself, he knew, would be meaningless without the LORD dwelling in it and watching over it. So too any works of religion we perform.
May your eyes watch night and day over this temple,
the place where you have decreed you shall be honored;
may you heed the prayer which I, your servant, offer in this place.
Let us seek the LORD from the heart, not for our image of ourselves as religious people, but out of love.
I had rather one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I had rather lie at the threshold of the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
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