At a time when Americans are reeling from a succession of scandals involving the abuse of power by government officials, Pope Francis’ homily could not have been more appropriate as he warns Christians not to use “socially mannered language” which is prone to hypocrisy, but to speak the truth with the transparency of a child.
Stressing the fact that there is no truth without love because love is the first truth, he noted how the Pharisees approached Jesus with the intention of making him “fall into a trap.” Their question about whether it was lawful or not to pay taxes to Caesar is made “with soft words, with beautiful words, with overly sweet words. They try to show themselves as his friends.”
But this is all false because, “they do not love the truth” but only themselves, “and so they try to deceive, to involve others in their deceit, their lies. They have a lying heart, they cannot tell the truth.”
He continued: “Hypocrisy is the very language of corruption. And when Jesus speaks to his disciples, he says: ‘let your language be,’ Yes, yes! No, no ‘. Hypocrisy is not a language of truth, because the truth is never given alone. Never! It is always given with love! There is no truth without love. Love is the first truth. If there is no love, there is no truth. They want a truth enslaved to their interests. There is a love, of sorts: it is love of self, love for oneself. That narcissist idolatry that leads them to betray others, that leads them to abuse of trust.”
What might look like “persuasive language” too often leads to “errors, to lies,” he said, noting that the very people who seem so amiable in their questioning of Jesus are the same ones who will arrest him and put him to death.
Instead, Jesus asks the exact opposite of those who follow him, a language of “yes is yes, no is no,” a “language of truth and love,” he said.
“And the meekness that Jesus wants us to have, has nothing, has nothing of this adulation, this sickly sweet way of going on. Nothing! Meekness is simple, it is like that of a child. And a child is not hypocritical, because it is not corrupt. When Jesus says to us: ‘Let your speech be’ Yes is yes! No, is no! ‘with the soul of a child’, he means the exact opposite to the speech of these [hypocrites]”.
He also called attention to a “certain inner weakness” stimulated by vanity that makes us “like people to say good things about us.”
The “corrupt know this well,” he said, and ” are trying to weaken us with this language”.
He concluded: “Let us think closely today: What is our language? Do we speak in truth, with love, or do we speak with that social language to be polite, even say nice things, which we do not feel? Let our language be evangelical brothers and sisters! Then these hypocrites that start out with flattery, adulation and all of that, end up, through false witnesses, with accusing the very ones they had flattered. Let us ask the Lord today that our language be the language of the simple, the language of a child, the language of the children of God, the language of truth in love. ”
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