March 10/Second Tuesday of Lent
“Why do you recite my statutes, and profess my covenant with your mouth,
Though you hate discipline and cast my words behind you?
To him that goes the right way I will show the salvation of God.” ~ Ps 50.16-17, 23
Lives there a better exemplar of hypocrisy than Eddie Haskell of the old “Leave It to Beaver” television series? To Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver, he presents the radiant face of sincerity and goodness; left to his own devices, he is as conniving and duplicitous a young man as ever lived. Of course, the Cleavers were no more fooled by Eddie Haskell than God is fooled by us. And in today’s psalm, God takes us to task for our hypocrisy. The language is strong: twice God says, “I rebuke you.” The verbs are forceful: we are charged with “hating” discipline and “casting” (or more accurately, “flinging”) God’s words behind us while keeping up the appearance of piety and propriety. The rhetorical questions are unsparing: “Why,” God asks, “do you recite my statutes and profess my covenant with your mouth?” Like the people of Israel, or the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’s time, we pay lip service to the commandments while doing exactly as we please. We put on a show of goodness, but privately we resist obedience, eschewing any of God’s commands that might cramp our lifestyle or foreclose our options. Who among us truly honors the Sabbath? Who among us has not coveted what a neighbor has? Who among us has not “killed” with the sharp word or the over-critical eye? God sees through our hypocrisy; he is neither deaf nor blind to our transgressions. Today we are reminded that there is a right way and a wrong way. The “right way” is going to look a little bit different for each of us. But for all of us, it is the way and the truth of life in God.
Lord Jesus Christ, Help me find in you my way, my truth, and my life. Amen.
To hear the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, singing Thomas Attwood’s setting of Psalm 50, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddUlZbcBQ_s
For today’s readings, click here:
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/031020.cfm
