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Yesterday Jesus told us that we need to be more concerned about judgment and the love of God than the finer nuances of tithing. He told us that simply doing things that appear religious on the outside is not enough if our hearts are far from God.
Today he warns again about the risk of hypocrisy, specifically celebrating the prophets while still rejecting the repentance for which they called. For us as Christians this means that we must avoid decorating our lives with the trappings of Christianity, of decorating our world with even the most beautiful exterior manifestations of Christianity, if we are unwilling to listen to the call of Jesus to love God with all our beings and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
‘I will send to them prophets and Apostles;
some of them they will kill and persecute’
It is a risk that we use the externalities of religion to shield ourselves from areas where we are being called to change. We resist those prophetic words in a way not entirely different from the way the generation of Jesus resisted him. They were able to point toward memorials of prophets and to their own religious actions to try to make the case for their standing before God. But their hearts were in fact far from him. This was revealed in the prideful way they approached God and also in their lack of concern for the poor.
Woe to you, scholars of the law!
You have taken away the key of knowledge.
You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.
Knowledge is meant to be a key to open a lock so that we can enter into the presence of God. That lock is within our minds and hearts. The word of God has the power to break down barriers to the presence of God manifesting itself in us (see first Thessalonians 2:13). But knowledge can be used as a distraction. People can point to it as a way to simply reinforce their own authority. They can rouse our curiosity so that we will be willing to seek after knowledge even if it is not of the sort that can open the lock. The whole point of the knowledge God wants us to have is to open that lock and so we rightly privilege it. But by sleight of hand we find ourselves seeking after all sorts of unhelpful ideas as if they were of the same weight as that knowledge.
Sometimes we ourselves are at fault for the way we offer knowledge to others. We have experienced something of the sort of knowledge that can open hearts to the presence of God. Yet we offer it instead as something that is merely interesting. It is not wrong to make our messages entertaining. But it is wrong if we use Godly knowledge solely for the purpose of entertainment. This empties the word of God of its power.
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power (see First Corinthians 1:17).
This is why Augustine says that "the key of knowledge is also the humility of Christ, which they would neither themselves understand, nor let be understood by others." As the key Christ himself made known the wisdom and insight that truly mattered.
In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us
the mystery of his will in accord with his favor
that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times,
to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.
The key of knowledge we receive in Christ can only be held by the humble. Others go off to look for more impressive looking keys to doors that, although they may look important, ultimately go nowhere.
Because of the inheritance we have in Christ we don't have to cover hardened hearts by the appearances of religiosity. We don't have to distract ourselves by seeking every kind of knowledge but the knowledge of God. Jesus himself has chosen us and given us everything we need. In him we have the real key of the Spirit that opens our lives to the presence of God.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who has blessed us in Christ
with every spiritual blessing in the heavens,
as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him.
St. Teresa of Avila, pray for us!
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