Following rules must lead to Jesus: Spend 5 with Jesus for Saturday, September 9, 2023
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Following rules must lead to Jesus
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Hello and welcome to Spend Five with Jesus for this Saturday, September 9th, 2023. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hopefully wherever you are, this is a great day.
In today’s readings, we get a little picture of rules, what their purpose is, why we have them, when should we follow them, are there times when we don’t have to follow them. That’s really what is at the heart of our gospel today. The Pharisees were very much about rules. The word that describes who they are literally means to set apart. And they were looking to set themselves apart because they wanted to reform Judaism.
It was not the case that they were horrible or bad people in and of themselves. But they really were strict in what they believed to be the important rules that must be followed. Certainly, it is the case that the Sabbath and not doing work on the Sabbath was a very important rule. It served a really good purpose. Maybe it is even more important today in terms of serving its purpose than it was at the time that God instituted it.
We need to rest. It’s important for us to take a break, to relax, to look at our lives, and to think about what it is that we need to do to be healthy. But there are instances where it may not be the best interpretation of the Sabbath.
I remember when I was in the seminary, there was a priest who was talking about this very point, about doing what was unlawful on the Sabbath, and he recounted the difficulty he had early in his priesthood because the thing that he found quite relaxing woodworking was not allowed to be done in the community where he lived. It was considered work. It was considered a violation of the Sabbath, even though for him this woodworking provided the wonderful opportunity to relax from his normal job of being a professor of graduate theology.
This is what Jesus is getting at in today’s gospel as well. Certainly rules are important and we need to follow rules. They help to guide our lives. They keep us “from going off the rails.” But the purpose of religious rules is always for us to be drawn closer to the Lord Jesus in a relationship. The purpose of the rule is far more important than the rule itself.
We must think about our own lives and think about the ways in which we are called to live a good life that brings us closer to Jesus and enters us into a powerful relationship. Today, think about the rules that you follow and ask yourself how is it that the rules of the spiritual life that you apply to yourself. Or, (how) the rules of the Church, in terms of how we should behave, and what we should do and what we should think, how is it that these rules lead you closer to the Lord Jesus.
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