In this weekend's gospel, Jesus draws an even deeper and very clear line in the sand between Himself and the Pharisees - Christ is very opposed to hypocrisy and spiritual barrenness! In fact, this passage in the gospel follows the cleansing of the Temple and the cursing of the fig tree - a parable that speaks of judgment coming upon those who feign goodness but fail to bear the fruit of righteousness.

We all know these folks who talk about doing good deeds but never seem to do any. They never show up on the workday when everybody else is rolling up their sleeves and feeding the poor or cleaning up the community or lending a
helping hand to a neighbor in need?but they can always talk a good talk. In fact, many times in homilies I mention a phrase that I really believe in: Everybody doesn't have to do everything, but everybody has to do something! Our Youth Ministry has taken that idea as their theme this year and weaved it into their T-Shirts they sport at their events.

The point that Christ is making in this Sunday's gospel is that words are much less important than actions (remember what St. Francis of Assisi said, "preach often and sometimes use words"). We can look at the first son in the gospel reading who told his father "no" but eventually did what he was asked to do and the second son who told his father what he thought he wanted to hear but did not follow through.

Our Catholic faith is an active one. It is active with deep study by the mind, like St. Thomas Aquinas; it is active in the heart with great devotion, like St. Teresa of Avila; it is active in the hands and feet, like Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Whatever direction our personal faith takes, it must be active for if our faith is simply a personal relationship with God without an interaction with the community in which we live, then what fullness does it possess? Christ believed in an active faith evidenced by the way He Himself rolled up His sleeves and dove into the messiness of human life - with His hands and feet He fed the hungry, cured the sick and dying, comforted the lonely and depressed; with His heart He had pity for the lost and the forgotten, He was devoted to the Father and showed that devotion in His love for others; with His mind He empowered the Church to carry on His mission for ages to come by preaching, caring, praying, feeding and comforting all in need. This is done in love for God by being present for those in need. In Eucharistic Prayer II we hear this wonderful command as we say, therefore, as we celebrate the memorial of his Death and resurrection, We offer you, Lord, the Bread of life and the chalice of salvation, giving thanks that you have held us worthy to be in your presence and minister to you.

It is in His presence that we minister to Him by being present to those around us - the hungry, the lost, and the forgot-ten. We are ministering to God in our prayers (our mind), in our hearts (our devotion to Him), and with our hands and feet (as we care for others).

The failure in faith that we must work hard toward is an intentional blindness to caring, to not doing good deeds because "I am too busy or too overwhelmed." Jesus points to the primacy of deeds over words. The greatest crime of the Pharisees is not their hypocrisy but the failure to teach, their unwillingness to un-derstand that physicians heal the sick, not those who are well.

The Pharisees turn their backs on the sick - even after John called the most reviled to genuine conversion. Can we do any less? So the headline of this little gospel summary begins with "Getting into Heaven" but we have to be careful not to think that we "win" or "earn" entrance into heaven and eternal life with God. We don't - no matter how many good deeds we do all life-long. Heaven and the gift of being in the presence of God is just that, a gift - freely given to us by God. The actual point of doing good deeds is to align our human will to the Will of God. In doing that, we don't do good deeds in order to earn chits for heaven, but rather we come to see the world and all in it as God sees the world - and we then react as Christ would by caring and sharing our gifts and talents with those in need. Like the second son in this Gospel of Matthew who changed his mind and went, when we see our community with its needs, do we change our minds and believe - and act?