Homily: 5th Week of Ordinary Time - Tuesday - Lip Service

“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”.  Rebuking the Pharisees for valuing the human tradition of ritual purification prior to eating, Jesus quotes to them that passage from the Prophet Isaiah.  Another translations puts it, “This people pays Me lip service but their heart is far from Me. Empty is the reverence they do Me."

From time to time a parishioner explains that when they come to Mass, they feel like they are just giving God lip service, or as they put it they are “just going through the motions”. 

There is a vast difference between coming to Mass and wanting to offer God true worship of the heart and feeling a sort of emptiness, and this sort of lip service Jesus is condemning today.

Coming to Mass, and “going through the motions” but fully desiring to honor God is a virtue.  That spiritual dryness is not a reason to stop coming to Church, in fact, just the opposite.  God can use that spiritual dryness to purify us, and to teach us, and to help us desire Him and Him alone all the more.

Rather this lip service of the Pharisees is a form of self-deception.  They honored God with words, but dishonored him in practice. Again, they honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from me.   We might think of many of our Catholic politicians who are Catholic-in-name-only.  They claim to be Catholic, but work to undermine Jesus’ teaching by enacting legislation abhorrent to God’s laws.  Or the cafeteria Catholic who picks and chooses which of the Church’s teachings they feel like following on any given day…If we are not obeying God’s commandments we must repent.

Rather the saint seeks to honor God with his lips and his heart and his actions.  He seeks to conform himself fully to God’s commandments, heart, mind, body and soul. 

One of my seminary professors warned us against, “ worshiping in vain”: saying the words without meaning the words and wanting to be changed by the words.  When we come to Mass, we must want to be changed, sanctified, healed, purified—we must desire to become more like Jesus Christ in his selfless self-giving to God.   

As we celebrate this Eucharist may we give God true worship of the heart, desiring evermore to be conformed to his Son—for His glory and the salvation of souls.