Jesus responded,
“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines human precepts.
You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”
With the recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, religious fundamentalism and its insidious intolerance is once again in the news. True religious belief invariably manifests itself in broadening the ‘tent’ of God’s mercy and love. False religious belief invariably reflects more about human pathologies than having anything to do with the God of light and love.
Down through the centuries, religious intolerance has marred and disfigured the true face of the living and eternal God, whether it was the Pharisees at the time of Jesus or our latter-day religious zealots who “kill in the name of God.”
We would be naïve if we were to believe that such backward thinking is solely relegated to the caves of Afghanistan. We need only peruse social media today to sadly realize that such attitudes are alive and well in our own country as its cancer metastasizes and attempts to strangle the meaning of true religion.
True religion manifests itself in the fruit of God’s Spirit: peace, patience, loving-kindness, a non-judgmental heart, forbearance and forgiveness and integrity. False religion glories in hypocrisy and in teaching as doctrines human precepts.
The antidote to religious fundamentalism and the hypocrisy that it nurtures is the virtue of humility. All that we are and have come from the loving hands of a gracious God, from whom all blessings flow. True religious sentiments are grounded in the humble recognition that, together with all our sisters and brothers in the human family, we stand in awe and reverence before the God of unfailing goodness and unconditional love. God is not made in our image, but we are fashioned in God’s divine image and are called to reflect that holy presence to the world. Let us pray for that grace this day and every day of our lives.