Word to the Wise
Thursday, June 28, 2012 - Thursday in the 12th Week in Ordinary Time
[2 Kgs 24:8-17 and Matt 7:21-29]Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.....Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.
There is a slang expression in American English nowadays that refers to putting one's words into action: "He/she walks the talk." I think this expression captures the essence of Jesus' closing lines in the Sermon on the Mount. The disciples are bluntly warned that they have to do more than listen or claim to be disciples. They must put their faith into action. This admonition extended even to Jesus' family! His own kin had no special status!
The challenge of the Sermon on the Mount is often frustrated by the thousands of "What if....?" questions that people can raise. There are no footnotes in the original! Cultural relativism that seeks to make the demands in the Sermon on the Mount irrelevant to our "modern times" is not the kind of "rock" on which solid discipleship can be built! The famous Catholic author, G. K. Chesterton, wrote: "The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." It can be a hard exercise to go over the Sermon on the Mount and ask oneself how much of it one has actually "tried!" We can't just "talk the talk." We have to "walk the talk!" AMEN