Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
The Pharisees were overly concerned with right behavior, right action; strict observance of the law was the only way to achieve righteousness. Yet the intention behind ones actions, ones observance, was of less concern; as long as you did no wrong, then you have followed the law. Thus if they see someone violating or ignoring the law, they conclude the person to be unrighteous and sinful: Jesus, for example, not observing the prescribed washings before a meal. But the law is not a prescription for changing behavior: it is meant to be a means by which God transforms the hearts of its observers. It is not meant to show you how to act justly, but to become just. Yet even truly wicked people do not murder, steal, and so on, yet they might avoid doing evil for evil purposes, or merely to convince people that they are a good person. Is a person good merely because they do no evil? Is a person holy because we never see them sinning?
Of course not, for we know too well that there are many sins we cannot see, sins of the mind and of the heart. Why then does Jesus prescribe yet another righteous deed as a prescription to cure the Pharisees of their own evil? Because almsgiving is not necessarily required by the law, and to give alms naturally requires one to be generous, to do something not required of them and, particularly with the Pharisees, it required letting go of something they value, giving it to someone they tended to look down upon as cursed by God for their sins. In giving alms one taps into the very righteousness of God, who constantly gives to the poor—us—and this is what the law is intended to do: to make of all who follow it more and more like the Lawgiver, inside and out.