Inside and outside

In today's Gospel (Luke 11:37-41), our Lord once again chastises the Pharisees:

Ye Pharisees make clean
the outside of the cup and the platter;
but your inward part
is full of ravening and wickedness.

This recalls a similar albeit more dramatic expression in Matthew 23:27:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
for ye are like unto whited sepulchres,
which indeed appear beautiful outward,
but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Internal realities and external realities are also the focus of today's first reading (Galatians 5:1-6):

We through the Spirit
wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.

For in Jesus Christ
neither circumcision availeth anything,
nor uncircumcision;
but faith
which worketh by love.

"Faith which worketh by love" is what ties inside and outside together: the internal and the external in our relationship with God. Nor is it simply intellectual faith and emotional love, but a unified, concrete reality enabled by grace.

Rather give alms of such things as ye have;
and, behold, all things are clean unto you.

Our churches are full of people who are like "whited sepulchers", who boast of their adherence to moral law, while they "are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness".

Our world is also full of people who don't even bother to clean up their externals or whose faith "is dead" (cf James 2:14-26) and does not "worketh by love."

May the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ come within us and flow out from us, empowering within us the gift of faith that reaches beyond ourselves in love and truth.