Icky Sticky

Reading: MT 23:27-32

 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’  Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets.  Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors.”

Reflection 

This frying pan may never be the same. As I scrubbed the pan that my 10 year old used to make scrambled eggs, I felt no amount of soaking and scraping would salvage this plan. Two days of rotating soaking and chemical reactions finally loosened the scorched eggs’ hold on the non-stick coating. The only thing I hate more than staring down a pan in the sink for days, is pulling something out of the cabinet only to find it unusable… Not truly clean.   

Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being “whitewashed tombs,” full of death and uncleanliness. How often am I walking around, still coated in pain, resentment and anger? Without responding to the radical love that Christ calls forth in me, I am no better than the Pharisees. I am a whitewashed tomb, a perpetually icky, sticky pan.

Is there anything within me in need of God’s cleansing love? 

Prayer Slicing potatoes

It helps
putting my hands on a pot,
on a broom,
in a wash pail.

I tried painting,
but it was easier to fly
slicing potatoes.

Rabia of Basria (c.717-801)
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky in Love Poems from God

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