Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In English, we have this term WASP: a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And whatever else it means, one of its connotations is this kind of merger of religion and culture.

When you hear the term, you picture someone who dresses a certain way, has a particular set of manners, and whose life looks like a particular American ideal. It’s the kind of person for whom using the wrong fork for your salad is probably an equal sin to breaking the commandments. Everything gets merged together.

Then trivial things like manners begin to take on excessive importance and even get treated like sins. Eventually, the faith itself begins to disappear, and the cultural norms are all that really remain. To be a good WASP, you don’t have to believe in Christ. But you do have to have manners.

That’s always where this sort of thing ends, because it’s so much easier to focus on those external elements. It’s far easier to spend my life cultivating manners, looking the part, and dressing sharply than it is to be authentically converted and to live the faith. And that same tendency we’ve seen played out over and over again in our own culture is a tendency the Pharisees themselves had.

Jesus isn’t criticizing them for washing their hands or washing the outside of a cup. The law of Moses prescribes many different sorts of washings. His criticism is that they focus on the washing, and that is it. They wash their hands, wash the cup, and do all those things, but it never reaches their heart. What good is it to have a clean cup and clean hands if your heart is filled with wickedness?

If you’re sitting here at this dinner with me, and everything on the outside of you is clean, but you hate me, what have you achieved? So his command to them is to change their hearts: give alms and find purity within yourselves. Give something away. Do penance before the Lord and actually change who you are within your heart. He doesn’t tell them, “Stop washing your hands.” He tells them, “Change your heart.” And that is the key for us.

While we aren’t WASPs—we don’t fit the P in that—we nonetheless have those same tendencies in our lives. It’s easy to focus on appearances, and we’re very visual. We can look at someone and ask: Are they dressed nicely or appropriately, according to my definition? Do I see them carrying their rosary? Do I see them doing this, that, and the other? Those things are so obvious to us that it’s easy to make them our focus.

But we can’t look into someone’s heart and see who they really are. We don’t know their struggles. We don’t know whether, despite all the niceness on the outside, they hate us. We don’t know any of those things, so we focus on what we can know.

Christ is calling us to let that go. We’ll never stop making those little judgments. We see someone at a distance, and our minds immediately ask: Are they safe or unsafe? Are they like me or different from me? That’s part of our nature. But we get to choose what we do with it. Do I act on that first impression? Do I decide who this person is based solely on those things? Or do I give them an opportunity? Do I acknowledge that I cannot see their heart and allow them to express what is truly within?

And we have to ask the same thing of ourselves. When we’re preparing for mass on Sunday morning, what is really our priority? Is it making sure our hair is done right, or making sure our heart is prepared?

It’s so easy for us to get focused on all that external stuff and neglect to prepare our hearts. It would be far better for us to show up half-dressed, with one shoe on, but with a heart ready to encounter Christ, than to show up looking perfect while our minds and our hearts are somewhere else completely.

So we have to keep struggling with that. We have to keep fighting the impulse to do everything on the outside while leaving the inside in the same place it’s always been. We have to work on purifying our hearts and opening ourselves to that real encounter with the Lord, so that we can experience all the graces he wishes to give us, be truly transformed, and live like God himself.