Masks and realities (Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Cycle A)

Today’s readings (Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time), tell us to go deeper than just avoiding occasions of sin. They tell us that God sees what is going on within us.  We have to do all we can to be sure that we treasure His presence within us. If there is evil in our minds, then evil actions will follow.  Let me be clear, I am not speaking about those things that flash through our minds, the things that we get rid of with a quick prayer. Those quick nasty flashes are part of being a human. They are not the problem. The real problem comes when we entertain evil thoughts. People, sadly, do this. People spend time plotting out how they can do this or that to or with another person. Men and women, guys and girls in high school and college, talk about people as sex objects. People entertain bad thoughts when they plot out what they want to happen during or after a party.  People entertain bad thoughts when they consider how they can get back at someone.  When people are malicious, their evil flows from within them. We cannot tolerate hypocrites. We are disgusted with hypocrites. And we are disgusted with ourselves when we are hypocrites. We cannot stand ourselves when we create an external personage that is very different than the person we really are.  We are repulsed by our thoughts when we give ourselves over to plotting sin. Jesus speaks about this in today's Gospel. He tells us to clean up our act on the inside so that our external actions are not hypocritical but a true reflection of whom we are. It is not enough to avoid hurting another person, we cannot hate anybody! Evil actions come from hate. Recently, some in our society have given credence to hate. We need to fight against this. We Christians are people of Jesus Christ, Love Become Flesh.  Those who foster hate are anti-Christ’s. How does this happen?  How does evil gain such power?  Evil gains power when people refuse to fight off hatred in their own lives. This is what Jesus means when he says that unless our holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees we will not enter the Kingdom of God.  We need to fight off any tendency we have to evil, be that hatred, or lust, or avarice, or jealousy. We cannot say that we are followers of Jesus Christ if we foster any kind of hatred within us. We cannot be two faced. We have to say what we mean. We shouldn’t need to take oaths to prove our righteousness. We just need to be honest with ourselves as well as with others. God peers into the depths of our souls.  He knows where evil lurks.  He also knows how hard we are trying to destroy evil within us. Every day we pray for His help that we might fight against evil.  That is what we mean when at the end of the Lord’s Prayer we say, “Deliver us from evil.” For the worst evil in the world is also the one evil that we can defeat. The worst evil in the world is the evil within us. Deliver us, Lord, from evil • AE