They Lift Not a Finger!

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Is 1:10, 16-20; Mt 23:1-12

Today’s Gospel highlights the fact that the best sermon is preached through our lives. 

Jesus tells his listeners that they have been abandoned without any examples to follow because the Scribes and the Pharisees are good at giving rules without following them. 

Because they have been ‘spiritually orphaned,’ Jesus wants his listeners to ignore the example of the hypocritical religious leaders. To put it differently, Jesus tells them, ‘You have only rules but have no examples.’ 

However, from what Jesus critiques, we can distill what we need to improve our spiritual lives. 

There are three lessons from Jesus’ criticism of the scribes and the Pharisees. 

1.Preach Through Your Life: Having exposed the hypocrisy of the religious leaders, Jesus wants his listeners to live out the religious truths they profess their faith in. The sentence, ‘They will not lift a finger to move them,’ summarizes Jesus’ criticism of those religious leaders. Words of Jesus remind us of the advice of St. Francis of Assisi: ‘Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.’

2. Worship Through Your Heart: The Pharisees and Scribes made their lives distant from the precepts of God. In addition, they who made a living out of religion wanted to equate themselves with God by clinging on to titles and ranks and the robes that distinguished each of them accordingly. Jesus exposed the irony of their lives and showed people that the titles that they wanted to be identified with only belonged to God and no one else. By this, Jesus shows that true worship is internal and not external. 

3. Humility as True Religion: In his explanation, Jesus shows that true religion consists of humbling oneself in the presence of the Lord. Jesus’ life offers us the needed example. Jesus became our Master because he became a servant first. Now Jesus wants us to understand the truth that animated his life. Christian discipleship is best explained by ‘humility in service.’ Our spiritual growth depends not only on embracing this truth but also on giving life to it in practice. 

Let us pray that we may be moved by what true religion consists of and always practice it in our lives. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar