Holyrood Church 715 West 179 Street, Upper West side Manhattan, USA, 212-923-3770

Before we can change, we need our hearts to change.

Good morning, happy Wednesday, and many blessings.
 
In this earthy passage (Mark 7:14-23) Jesus is teaching me that what matters is the state of my heart. Is my heart in good shape? Doctors may worry about an enlarging of my heart, but from a Christian point of view, the enlarging of my heart is the best thing that can happen me! This is because God’s chosen task is to make me grow in love, until my capacity for loving matches that of Jesus. God, don’t let me instead suffer cardiac arrest!
Mark is making clear to his gentile (non-Jewish) Christian community that to be a follower of Jesus Christ does not require the observance of a multiplicity of Jewish ritual ablutions. For Jesus, the battlefield between good and evil is the human heart, and my heart is included! How clean is my heart? In Psalm 51 I ask God to create in me a clean heart. It is not something I can do on my own, much as I try to be respectable before I meet with God in prayer.
 
What comes out of my heart? Am I seen as warm-hearted, forgiving, compassionate, and large-hearted? Is the world better for my being around? Jesus again warns us against performing actions for the sake of keeping up appearances. On the contrary, what always counts is the inner motivation: often not the external ‘good act’ – but the reason that prompts me to do it.
 
The actions in themselves are just as irrelevant as the body’s eliminations. But what matters by comparison is - what movement of heart is directing them? It is the intention behind them, that I must always be ready to examine.
 
It seems that in the days of Jesus, there were people who could be scrupulous about which foods were ‘kosher’ – but who could fail to examine urges of their wayward heart towards crime, deviousness, pride.
 
This lesson about the heart has to be repeated and stressed. Good manners and proper behaviour vary from group to group. But the underlying goodness or badness crosses all social divides. That is what we look to.
 
Having a clear understanding of God’s law can help us avoid the trap of legalism. The heart of our problems are deeper than superficial behaviors. Before we can change, we need our hearts to be changed.
 
Here Jesus focuses in on the heart. Now in the Bible the heart is the center of the person, the control center of life. The heart isn’t just your emotions in the Bible, but it’s your whole inner person, who you are on the inside. Jesus identifies the human heart as the location of true uncleanness because it’s from the human heart that human evil flows.
 
Blessings,
 
Fr. Luis+

Date news: 
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 - 12:15

Ministry at the time of Coronavirus (Covid 19): Prevent, cure and accompany

Now we have to shape what some have started calling; The Church at Home. Although I keep asking myself; What do those who do not have a home do? For this reason, at the same time, I am declaring today in our Holyrood Church a Lenten day of prayer, fasting and reading the Bible in the Time of the Coronavirus.

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