30th Sunday Ordinary Time – Loving God with Divided Hearts…

Every day I intend to love God and neighbor.  Every day I slip back into the Spiritual Alzheimer’s that characterizes my comfort zone.  I spend the rest of the day thinking about what I have to do, about whom I ought impress, about old resentments, and the like.  So much for good intentions, eh?

The author of Matthew’s gospel understands our divided hearts and where we come from.  Jesus offers us both ideals and challenges.  Pure in heart; treasure.  Dull & distant hearts that spew evil intentions, etc…

This is the way it is.  Our human condition.  Perhaps our divided hearts are wounded hearts…

I resolve today to give thanks for moments of purity in heart, finding my treasure in God.  I resolve today to notice the way things are – dull & distant & divided heart and give thanks that Christ has opened a path to new life.

Matthew 5:8            “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Matthew 6:19–21             “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 13:14f            With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn— and I would heal them.’

Matthew 15:7–9             You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: 8 ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 9 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ ”

Matthew 15:17–19             Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?  But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.  For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.