Saturday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/110511.cfm

Toutle River Valley
Washington State

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters
is also trustworthy in great ones;
and the person who is dishonest in very small matters
is also dishonest in great ones.

Today’s gospel seems to say something to the political processes of our democracy. Our news media and the public subject candidates for public office to intense scrutiny, digging up every suspicious bone that might suggest a skeleton in the closet. As Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark (All the King’s Men) said,

“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something…”

The public wants to know if the candidate has been trustworthy in small things before they entrust him or her with responsibility for great matters. There is no stone unturned in their search, especially since women identified themselves as a minority with particular interests in the 1970’s. They don’t trust men who do wrong to women. Because Americans want their president to act as speaker, moral standard and high priest of this nation with the soul of a church, a candidate should be more than competent; he should be squeaky clean.

The Pharisees, who loved money,
heard all these things and sneered at him.

Some realists suggest there are “boundaries” between private and public morality. They suppose what a man does in private is nobody’s business; and he should be judged only by his public behavior. But I suspect these “realists” are idealists; they would say, “Ideally, the private idiosyncrasies of this candidate will not affect his public behavior in public office.” But few can buy that reasoning anymore; sin ignores every boundary; it seeps into everything we do. 

Despite what many have tried to do to him, Jesus was never an idealist. He does not describe his disciples as they should be but as they are. When he taught us on Tuesday, “Blessed are poor in spirit…” he simply told us the way it is. In today’s gospel he speaks to his opponents as the judge who has the last word:

You justify yourselves in the sight of others,
but God knows your hearts;
for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God."