Once again, we find Jesus at odds with the Pharisees, scholars and doctors of the law. Today he is particularly hard on the religious leaders and at the end of their encounter they decide to plot against him.
The key to the Law in the Old Testament was to draw the people of Israel into a deep relationship, a covenant, with God and a holiness of life that would proclaim God’s presence in the world to all the nations around them. Yet Israel through the guidance of its spiritual leaders lost contact with that key. Many of the religious leaders focused their life on other keys: prestige, rigid legalism, self-importance, and false, sanctimonious, external piety. As Jesus points out, this led them to the extreme of executing prophets, apostles, and holy people sent to them by God.
Today’s Gospel calls us all to look for the central key of our lives. In our society many manage their lives based on culturally accepted keys – norms of success and knowledge such as: self-pleasure, feeling good, egoism, self-protection, money, fame, family, or work. Probably the over-riding core value of our culture is self-centeredness. Many of those values are good and important. But if we don’t truly put God in the center as our primary key, we end up like the pharisees of Jesus’ days. At best we live out a false, sanctimonious piety that separates us and those around us from God and at worst we end up killing the holy ones sent to us by God and the innocent ones around us. Without realizing it we end up like the Pharisees at the end of today’s Gospel – we end up plotting against the action of God in our lives.
Christian life is a constant process of conversion. A constant process of revising the central key of our life. Take some time today to look at the principal keys in your life that guide how you make decisions and order your life.
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.
Image: https://thishelpedme.org/2024/04/07/the-key/