Daily Catholic Lectio
Tue, 15 October 2024
XXVIII Week in Ordinary Time, Tuesday
Galatians 5:1-6. Luke 11:37-41
Everything will be clean for you!
“A heart that empties itself in charity makes everything clean.”
Cleanliness could be defined as preparedness. A clean vessel is prepared for serving food. A clean dress is prepared for wearing. A clean person is prepared to welcome God.
Cleanliness is a relative word. What is clean to be may not be clean to someone else. There are different levels of cleanliness. It is highly impossible to achieve total cleanliness. Even Dettol and Lifebuoy could offer 99.9# cleanliness from germs!
Cleanliness is a relative value. Being unclean also is safe. The nomadic girls who sleep along the roadways choose to remain unclean, for being clean would be a threat to their lives.
A Pharisee invites Jesus home to dine with him (gospel reading). He is amazed to see Jesus sitting at the table without washing his hands. Jesus uses his amazement as a context to instruct on cleanliness.
The Pharisee and Jesus have different understandings about cleanliness.
The word ‘Pharisee’ comes from ‘pharissein’ (‘set apart’), which means ‘to keep oneself apart from others.’ They would take efforts to clean their houses, worship places, dresses, and bodies. They would take extra care when it comes to dietary cleanliness. For they thought that marketplaces are prone to pollution through the Gentiles. Their cleanliness was more religious than hygienic.
But, for Jesus, cleanliness was internal. It had to do with our relationship with God. It is not what goes within from without that makes the person defiled, but that which comes from within to without.
Jesus teaches the Pharisee two lessons: (a) To get rid of plunder and evil from the heart; (b) To be clean through almsgiving.
Almsgiving was one of the three religious duties of the Pharisees (the other two being prayer and fasting). Almsgiving primarily emerges as a thought or decision before it turns out to be an action. Only a heart that wishes to be self-empty can render itself in almsgiving.
It is easy to have our hands and utensils washed. It needs little water to do them.
It is very difficult to have our hearts washed through almsgiving. It needs the desire of the heart and constant action. Almsgiving cleanses our heart and mind.
In today’s first reading, Paul exhorts the Galatian church to manifest their faith in and through love.
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The ‘pilgrims of hope’ consider internal purity as more important than external purity. (Jubilee 2025 AD, bite 225)
Fr. Yesu Karunanidhi
Archdiocese of Madurai
Missionary of Mercy
Yesu Karunanidhi 
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