The refrain of this Sunday’s responsorial psalm was a prayer in the form of a question: Who will be pleasing in your sight, O Lord?
Who will dwell on your holy mountain?
This question expresses a religious concern: How can I be worthy to be close to God?
The answer that first comes to mind is: “I will be pleasing to God if I do what pleases him”.
However, in trying to identify what pleases God, we often get it wrong, because we think in very human terms.
We think that to please God we must perform acts and utter words that acknowledge His majesty, greatness and glory.
We think that we will be pleasing to God if we worship him properly, if we pray prayers that praise him and acknowledge his majesty.
This attempt to please God can extend to devotion to people who are close to Him: the Virgin Mary, the angels and the saints.
Thus, we perform a variety of acts that honor the Virgin and the saints through the images that represent them.
The worship of the images, such as lighting candles before them, dressing and decorating them sumptuously, or taking them out in procession, are acts of piety with which we wish to please God.
“The only thing God wants, the thing that truly brings Him honor, is that we attain salvation.”
What can be disconcerting is that, although God is pleased with the worship given to him and the veneration of the saints, this is only pleasing to him if it is supported by an activity that pleases him even more: leading a morally upright life.
God does not need our worship or our liturgy; he does not need the lavishness with which we adorn the images of the Virgin and the saints.
God accepts these actions on the condition that those of us who perform them also strive to live righteously and to fulfill his will.
Because the only thing that God wants, what truly honors him, is that we attain salvation.
He grants it to us, but we respond to God’s salvation with obedience to his will.
The upright moral life builds us as persons; acting in an upright and ethical way we contribute to build our families and our community.
And that is what God is most interested in.
All other actions: the adornment of the church, the care and nobility of the rites, the beauty and dignity of the sacred vessels, the ornamentation of the altar and the space where divine worship takes place, and the veneration of the Virgin and the saints through the images that represent them, are for our benefit, for they stimulate us to adorn our own lives with a righteousness and holiness that is what God truly desires and expects of his faithful.
The Gospel passage we have heard today contains a criticism by Jesus of a practice of the Jews of his time that we can hardly understand.
Some Pharisees criticized Jesus’ disciples because they had not washed their hands before eating.
It seems to us that they are right and we are surprised that Jesus says that it is okay for his disciples to eat without washing their hands first.
We know that a basic rule of hygiene and health is to wash hands when entering the house from the street and before eating.
During the pandemic, frequent hand washing was a mandate.
Our practice is based on the knowledge that microbes, bacteria and germs that cause diseases abound everywhere, which we can prevent with a little hygiene.
In Jesus’ time, the reason for washing hands and arms when entering from the street and before eating responded to another logic.
For them, this hand washing was a rite that signified the effort for inner purity, which was often lacking in those who performed the rite.
Today, many ask for holy water on their heads and think that with that they are already sanctified, but holy water is only useful if there is interior conversion.
Jesus would say: holy water is good if it motivates you to change, because purity and holiness will not come to you through the holy water you receive from the outside, but through the eradication of the sins that spring from your heart.
“God created us free to build ourselves as people and build our society with morally upright actions.”
In the words of Jesus: What defiles a man is what comes from within.
For out of the heart of man proceed evil intentions: fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetousness, injustices, frauds, debaucheries, envy, slander, pride and frivolity.
All these and similar evils come from within and defile man.
Why does Jesus give so much importance to the moral quality of our actions?
Because immoral actions, such as those Jesus mentioned, are destructive, injurious, and degrade human dignity, the family and society.
God created us free to build ourselves as persons and to build our society with morally upright actions.
The moral quality of our actions has always been what God looks for in us and what primarily pleases him.
The refrain of the responsorial psalm asked the question: Who is pleasing in your sight, O Lord?
And the psalmist himself answered: The man who proceeds honestly and acts justly, who is sincere in his words and always speaks the truth and does no one wrong; who does not wrong his neighbor or slander his neighbor; who lends without usury and does not accept bribes to the detriment of the innocent; and who does all kinds of constructive works, he will be pleasing in the sight of God forever.
In our religion, we perform liturgies and rites, processions and devotions.
All acts of piety and devotion, of worship and sacrament, are pleasing to God when they are sustained by the offering of the moral effort that each one of us presents before Him.
We are sinners, but the moral effort to grow and improve is pleasing to God and is what gives value to the liturgies and processions with which we want to honor him.
Liturgical celebration is necessary, for not only do we worship God, but He communicates salvation to us through the sacraments.
Liturgy, devotions, and acts of piety are necessary and good; they please God if they are sustained by the inner worship of the moral effort of those who perform them.
As the apostle James says: Pure and blameless religion in the sight of God the Father consists in visiting orphans and widows in their affliction, in keeping oneself from this corrupt world, in keeping the commandments, and in offering to God the offering of a contrite heart.