Blessing yourself with holy water is not the same as being baptized, but both are useful. If someone was dying of thirst you wouldn’t take the last water available and say, “sorry, I need to bless some holy water.” Charity to God and charity toward others are the bedrock of every other thing we believe and do as believers. Our Lord in today’s Gospel is criticizing the Pharisees for focusing so much on the secondary and contingent things that they feel justified in neglecting the essential and necessary things. Ritual sprinklings of water outside the Temple were like today’s popular devotions; some people use holy water, and others don’t. The Pharisees were criticizing the disciples for not sprinkling water on themselves\u00a0while ignoring the fact that as\u00a0disciples of Jesus they were doing an even greater service to God by studying with a Rabbi.<\/p>\n
Our Lord condemns the Pharisees for\u00a0simply paying lip service to God out of their own interests. Even today when someone is consecrated to God their natural obligations toward family are not suspended–if their parents are in need, they support them. The Pharisees used a pretext of consecrating their wealth (which was not giving it away, but saying it could not be used for non-sacred things) as a reason for not providing\u00a0the material support for their parents, a practice that flew in the face of one of the Ten Commandments and dishonored their parents.<\/p>\n
It is good to\u00a0have religious practices beyond our religious obligations, but optional practices and obligatory ones should work together to ensure that love for God and love for neighbor are protected. Charity toward God and toward others is the best religious practice we can undertake.<\/p>\n
Readings:\u00a01 Kings 8:22\u201323, 27\u201330;\u00a0Psalm 84:3\u20135, 10\u201311;\u00a0Mark 7:1\u201313.<\/em> See also\u00a022nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blessing yourself with holy water is not the same as being baptized, but both are useful. If someone was dying of thirst you wouldn’t take the last water available and say, “sorry, I need to bless some holy water.” Charity to God and charity toward others are the bedrock of every other thing we believe … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,45,13,146],"class_list":["post-1078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fifth-week","tag-ordinary-time","tag-tuesday","tag-year-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p65qtw-ho","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}