Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Sometimes our Daily Office lectionary provides us with a real embarrassment of scriptural riches! I hope you’ll read all of the readings assigned for today, but for this missive to you, my Friend, I’m going to lean into the Gospel.

The central section of our reading from Matthew is an impassioned exhortation from Our Lord for folks to understand value and meaning aright. One of the many dolorous results of the fall is that we get things upside-down and backwards. So often we have a deficient understanding of what’s really valuable or meaningful—we think it might have something to do with what a thing can do for us, or with its convertibility into some form of capital, be it social, financial, political…. And there’s something about those estimations of value that speaks truth: value is indeed determined by relationship to something we can recognize as good. Our difficulty, though, is in our serial misapprehension of which sorts of relationships are or ought to be primary in our assessment of value. And Jesus is clear: closeness to God is the relationship that makes a thing precious; a likeness to Love is what makes something meaningful. And here’s the thing—this closeness, this likeness, it doesn’t make precious or meaningful at the expense of the close thing or the like thing: it more clearly reveals the thing in its truth and beauty and goodness. It makes it more itself; it reveals its rootedness in a logos, in a word, in an ordering principle that is itself rooted in the Logos, the Word, the Principle by and through which all things were and are ordered and come to be: Jesus Christ. It’s not an abstract relationship we’re talking about here, but a real relationship which forms the root of a thing and conditions both its being and its becoming.

I think this is why Jesus eventually pivots to talk about interiority, and he’s doing a lot more than just championing the interior life here. On its surface, when Jesus tells his hearers that they ought to focus on cleaning the inside of the cup rather than the outside, it sounds like all he’s saying is we need to pay attention to our interior lives. And, yes, it’s absolutely true that our inner life is important—but we ought not pay attention to it as if it had nothing to do with our exterior life. In fact, Jesus goes on to say that the cleansing of the inside of the cup makes it possible for the whole cup to be clean. In a similar way, paying attention to our inner life ensures that our outer life can be rightly ordered, rightly lived: because the outer is rooted in the inner and will indefatigably bear the fruit of our interior disposition, of the ordering principle of our lives, whatever it might be. Again, we’re talking about relationship.

And it’s no accident that Jesus talks about a cup, here. A cup is meant to receive, a cup is meant to hold whatever is given it. A cup is meant to filled…and if we are the cup (and, Friend, we are) it is the Love of God that is meant to fill us. It’s our relationship to this Love that fills our lives with meaning, it’s our likeness to this Love that not only saturates our lives with value, but which allows us to see and to receive the world as valuable for the sake of this Love.

It can often be the case that we don’t feel particularly close to God nor particularly embarked on an adventure of deepening love-likeness. But God is never far from us. Never. It sometimes happens that we depart from our root, our Logos, our Word, the Principle of our lives and we find ourselves feeling mournfully adrift, lost, thin-spread, empty. But God is never far from us. Never. In fact, one of the things we celebrate when we celebrate the Incarnation at Christmas (and in very Eucharist!) is that God loves us and desires us so completely that God Godself was not willing that we should be uprooted by sin, but chose to assume our humanity to root us completely in God’s own divinity.

What’s needed, now and every day of our lives, dear Friend, is to allow ourselves to be so rooted. To empty ourselves of anything that might obstruct or compete with the Love of God; to allow ourselves, through prayer, through the Eucharist, through God’s indwelling grace, to be so filled with the Love of God that all we see and do and are is a living image of this Love, that the world and everything in it may come alive to us as beloved, as charged with the glory and majesty and inexplicably wonderful loveliness of God.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+