Do not fall prey to the temptation to follow Jesus out of self-interest. In the customary morning Mass in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Martahe, Pope Francis highlights the temptation to follow Jesus out of self-interest, and that then from the temptation of power to hypocrisy the step is very short. He concludes: "May the Lord give us this grace of the wonder of encounter and also help us not to fall into the spirit of worldliness, that spirit that behind or under a veneer of Christianity will lead us to live like pagans."
The Gospel passage of the day speaks of the crowd that follows Jesus after he has multiplied the loaves and fishes, and "not out of religious amazement that leads you to worship God," but out of "material interest," and that this is an attitude repeated in the Gospels, where there are "many who follow Jesus out of interest."
The Pope recalls that even among his apostles there were the "sons of Zebedee who wanted to be prime minister and the other minister of economy, to have power. That anointing of bringing glad tidings to the poor, deliverance to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and proclaiming a year of grace, as it becomes dark, is lost and transformed into something of power".
It is about the temptation, always present, to "pass from the religious amazement that Jesus gives us in his encounter with us, to profiting from it," the same temptation proposed in the devil's temptations to Jesus in the desert. "One on bread, precisely," the Pope recalls, "the other on the spectacle: 'But let us make a good show so that all the people will believe in you'. And the third, apostasy: that is, the worship of idols."
It is the temptation of worldly power, which is not the temptation of power itself, it is something that makes you fall into that "religious warmth to which worldliness leads you, that warmth that ends, when it grows, grows, in that attitude that Jesus calls hypocrisy."
There is, in short, the risk of becoming "a Christian in name, in outward attitude, but the heart is in interest", as Jesus says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye seek me, not because ye have seen signs, but because ye have eaten of the loaves, and were filled. It is a temptation that weakens "faith and mission," and in a word, weakens the Church.
The witness of the saints and martyrs helps us not to fall into that temptation, that "every day they announce to us that to go on the way of Jesus is the way of his mission: to announce the year of grace. The people understood Jesus' rebuke and said to him: 'But what must we do to do the works of God?' Jesus answered them: 'This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent', that is, faith in him, in him alone, trust in him and not in other things that will ultimately lead us away from him. This is the work of God: that you believe in Him whom He has sent, in Him'.
Hence the Pope's plea not to fall into the spirit of worldliness that "behind or under a veneer of Christianity will lead us to live like pagans."
[From acistampa.com. https://www.acistampa.com/story/papa-francesco-non-usate-lincontro-con-gesu-per-il-potere-0305]
