Righteous attitude

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving have always have been a holy troika of righteous deeds in Judaism, Islam, and other religions – and they remain so for us today as well.  We hear this passage from Matthew (Mt 6:1-6, 16-18) every year on Ash Wednesday as we emphasize these three practices during our Lenten journey.   Today, we hear Jesus’ teachings on them in the context of the Sermon of the Mount, from which we’ve drawn the daily Gospel reading for the past week and a half.

Throughout the Sermon, Jesus emphasizes that righteousness lies not in our deeds themselves, but rather in our attitudes and motives behind the deeds.  Our motivation for any work that we do should be to draw ourselves closer to God, the source of total happiness.  Thus, our attitudes must not be rooted in the finite, relativistic, and conditional world in which we live, but in the infinite, absolute, and unconditional love of the God with whom we aspire to live, the God who so loves and desires to live with us.

Oftentimes, I find that my behavior belies my faith in this infinite, unconditional, and absolute love of God.  My attitude and my motivations are askew.  My eyes are not on the prize.

I pray, fast, give alms and dutifully adhere to the commandments in the hope that perhaps God will love me more if I am more diligent in my righteous acts.  Yet, how can God love me more if his love for me is already infinite? 

I turn away from others who so obviously do not love God and obey God’s commands as well as I do.  I refuse to help them; refuse to love them; refuse to forgive them as God must love these ne’er-do-wells less than he loves me.  Yet, how can this be if God’s love is unconditional?

I work hard, yet I am still anxious that I can earn enough of earth’s treasures – wealth, power, respect and honor – that I will be happy forever, yet how can this be if I can only find the absolute and eternal in the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who will be, forever and ever, my God, my savior, my joy?

Today, Jesus reminds me to look behind my exterior acts, righteous though they may seem.  He insists that I set my interior disposition on the only thing that matters, the only thing that can save me, the only thing that can make me truly happy – being one with the infinite, unconditional, absolute and eternal love of God.