Jesus is focussed on what is inside a person,                                              

The cleanliness of my heart is far more important than external cleanliness.

‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God’                           

 

 

＊＊＊ 1st Reading ＊＊＊

Galatians 5:1-6

 Christ freed us to make us really free.

So remain firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.   I, Paul, say this to you: if you receive circumcision, Christ can no longer help you.   Once more I say to whoever receives circumcision: you are now bound to keep the whole Law.  All you who pretend to become righteous through the observance of the Law have separated yourselves from Christ and have fallen away from grace.

As for us, through the Spirit and faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.   In Christ Jesus it is irrelevant whether we be circumcised or not; what matters is faith working through love.

 

Ps 119:41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48

Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.

 

＊＊＊＊ Gospel ＊＊＊＊

Luke 11:37-41

 As Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to have a meal with him. So he went and sat at table.  The Pharisee then wondered why Jesus did not first wash his hands before dinner.  But the Lord said to him, “So then, you Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside yourselves you are full of greed and evil.  Fools! He who made the outside, also made the inside.  But according to you, by the mere giving of alms everything is made clean.

 

Gospel Reflection：

Educating the Inside

Atheist Alain de Botton believes that “Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name,〔…〕the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.” But, do our present-day educational institutions live up to this expectation? Here is an exercise:

Visit the websites of a few catholic educational institutions in your country. Look through the curriculum of the courses offered. I am afraid that, using the gospel language of the day, our curricula are about cleaning the outside while neglecting the inside, by design or default. We need to recapture the object of education which is “to make capable and cultivated human beings”(John Stuart Mill)who will have “a love of our neighbor, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery”(Matthew Arnold) and love of God, to top it all.