Not everyone…will enter into the Kingdom

Faith is not easy today for any of us. To have real faith, an actual belief in God, requires something more than simply continuing to roll with the flow of our own particular faith communities.  Being born into a Christian family and worshipping within a Christian church can give us a relationship to a religion and to a community of worship; but these things, of themselves, are not the same thing as an actual faith in God.  Just as we have people who believe but do not practice, many of us practice but do not believe. To actually believe in God today, one must at some point in his or her life make a deep, private act of faith. To make an act of faith requires an inner journey, a journey into the deepest recesses of the soul where I must face my weakness, my sin, my infidelities, my lies, my rationalizations, my constant avoiding of the searing truth.  Ultimately, that is what each of us needs from God—someone who can console us and someone to be for us that trusted confessor, that person before whom “all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid”.  To relate to God in this way is to have faith.  And this means consistently sharing all of our secrets and fears in those lonely, private hours when there are just the two of us and nobody else is around.

Briefly, in the gospel today, Jesus warned us against the danger of a superficial worship; anonymous practice.  A life that is simply a repetition of rituals, instead of being a reflection on the rituals and their impact in our life.