Parveniences: empty

(Mt 23:27-32)

John Chrysostom writes in his Commentary on the Gospel of Mt:

"If one could open the conscience of each one, how many worms, how much rottenness and what unimaginable filth we would find in it. Filthy and perverse desires, filthier than the worms themselves" (73:2).

Perhaps we were taken aback by the Pope's stern commitment against cheerful, casual and ambiguous forms of property management, and in the field of morality within the Catholic Church - a veritable clerical reclamation, which went as far as the reopening of prisons.

But by taking a stand against the system of grand parveniences [hypocrisy and incoherent extrinsicism] Jesus increases the dose.

He does so against the ancient authorities, religious leaders and traders in the sacred - leaders who save their robes, ideas and image, but who are radically unfaithful.

He pities their fictitious and correct appearance, while inside they are a total denial of the respect for God that they showcase.

Thus they stagnate the dark side of the world, instead of helping us to remove it.

The ostentatious pity for the great ancestors denounces a guilt complex (vv.29-32), not a profoundly intimate figure - a unifying ambit of being and acting.

Hysteria that exorcises the vice of the 'chosen ones' of all time: getting out of the way of those who unmask their empty existence; as well as their well-adorned, cerebral or legalistic ascendancy, which still forces the lives of so many people into the tombs.

Spiritual teachers are in the field not to show off - nor to incarnate themselves as threatening guides.

They must act to benefit, to give colour, new lifeblood; to promote authentic situations and new, cheering and creative content.

In his timely Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, St Jerome writes:

"The sepulchres on the outside are white with lime, adorned with marble and gold, resplendent in their colours; but inside they are full of the bones of the dead. So also the perverse teachers, who say one thing and do another: in dress they show purity and in speech humility; but inside they are full of all decay and impure desire" (4).

The Lord proposes a renewal that reaches deep within, more intimate than epidermal agitation; that touches the place and dimension of the encounter with the Father.

He is not content with 'monuments' with a little surprise inside.

We are always tempted to remain on the plane of an embellished surface, in search of easy and immediate satisfaction, esteem, honour - especially we priests, who not infrequently like to lull ourselves in futile accolades.

And our various theatres of conspicuous but deaf religiosity are largely willing to make up with spiritual rank the membership of the great priests in the civilisation of fictions - clean and ornate.

We satisfy ourselves with epidermal things, why? Meeting oneself, others and reality requires a heavy commitment: that of questioning oneself; stepping out of forms, and external fashions.

But good manners are not enough, to cover so many bad habits.

The false security of presenting our soap opera façade is no longer enough: a figure set up by the even religious and pious rank one wishes to display.

The hypocrisy of accommodated interpretations or blatant characterisations is a not infrequently disguised and even criminal attitude.

It is blithely leading us to the dark evil of the most decadent vacuity, and widespread sadness.

The whitewashed tombs of our early graveyard appear sacred and gracious, but one knows what they sometimes contain.

Not always crystal-clear diamonds; not always expressions of a direct line with others and with God.

So the surprising commitment of today's hierarchies to internal purification remains a fixed point, entirely appropriate.

It is life that counts and must be promoted, not the papery appearance of all that is unknown or covered up in our homes.

On the contrary, it is precisely the mannerists or modernists, the facade moralisers, the most vain protagonists of ritual or à la page beauty... that turn out to be the worst people - with a double life; lovers of a satrap style [perhaps for social redemption].

Here is the confusing of ideas even to oneself, and the paradoxical work of disidentification.

In short, the gaudiness of pomp and paraphernalia, or of patinas that always wink, is a kind of projection.

It is an artifice that does not allow thoughts to be processed; it only drives away tiring nightmares - in the most puerile way.

Love, on the other hand, lives on real sparks - it does not cross them unscathed by settling for self-representation in decorative signs, or in ideology that lures the naive.

Screens of incredible emptiness.

While recognising the facets of great artistic expressions and differing opinions as legitimate, Jesus would have subscribed to the principle of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan laity: 'The greater the ceremonies, the lesser the Truth'.To internalise and live the message:

What clerical hypocrisies [or adherence-scapegoats] bother you, despite their pomp?