How
do you get yourself to do something you need to do, but you just
don’t want to do it? Sure, there is always good ol’ will-power
where you just make yourself do it, but that doesn’t necessarily
make it any easier. You still have to do those tasks, but no matter
how good you are at ignoring them, they just never seem to go away.
These
tasks I am talking about might be the household chores that no one
likes to do. Maybe it’s those last few things on the “to-do”
list that have managed to survive all your best attempts at
procrastination. Perhaps it’s the least popular job at work. It
may even involve having to deal with people you would rather not have
to deal with. The tasks themselves might not be all that difficult
or all that unpleasant, but we could probably think of a long list of
things we would rather be doing than that. The point is they need to
be done.
When
I was growing up, one of my household chores was cleaning the toilets
and sinks in the two bathrooms in my parent’s house. Now for the
most part, I really didn’t mind doing this chore. In fact,
sometimes it even felt good to know I was helping keep our house
clean. However, one thing became very clear early on. I could be
doing absolutely nothing at the time, but as soon as my parents told
me to go clean the bathrooms or do my chores, all I could think of
was about a hundred different things I would rather be doing than
cleaning a toilet. I eventually figured out that the chore itself
was not that bad, but I hated being told I
had to do it. I
found that it was actually much easier for me to do it if I took some
initiative and actually chose to do the chore before I was told to do
it. Somehow making my own choice of when I was doing it made all the
difference in the world. I think it allowed me to take ownership of
the job I was doing, rather than feeling like I was being forced to
do it when my parents told me to.
That
being said, my own human imperfections still got in the way. I would
still forget to do my chores before doing the fun things that I
wanted to do. My parents still had to remind me to do my chores
sometimes. I still complained about having to do them and would
think of my hundreds of things I would much rather be doing than
scrubbing toilets and sinks. It was those times I could get it done
without being told, without being forced into it that I felt like it
was something I had chosen to do, and therefore, something I actually
wanted to do.
As
Catholics, it can be very easy to get bogged down in all the rules
that we have to follow. We have all those rules that are in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. We have the hundreds of laws in
the Code of Canon Law. We have liturgical law that tells us how we
are to worship and pray. Within moral theology we have different
morals and ethics we have to follow, and we even talk about a thing
called “Natural Law”, which God established when He made the
world and no human being can change. And of course, we have the Ten
Commandments as they are listed out in our First Reading today. This
Decalogue, as it is sometimes called, is really the basis for how God
wants His people to live a morally good life. All the other laws
that are in the Bible and all the other rules that the Church and
civil authorities have established throughout history, all stem from
these Ten Commandments. Instead of getting bogged down in all the
many rules and laws we have today, it is good to start by looking at
these first ten.
Some
of the commandments are easier to follow than others. We know that
it is wrong to kill; we know that it is wrong to commit adultery; and
we know that it is wrong to steal. However, it is much easier to
covet someone else’s goods. It’s easy to disrespect our parents
when we disagree with what we are talking about. We would never
dream of murdering a person, but it is easy to stay angry with a
person over an argument. We don’t steal from a bank or shoplift at
a store, but it can be easy to justify wasting time at work, thus
stealing from work. However hard it might be to follow any of these
Commandments, they all point back to the very first Commandment that
God established and that we are all called to follow: “I the LORD
am your God… you shall not have other gods besides me”. God goes
on from there to elaborate: we are not to carve any idols for
ourselves. God, we are told, is a jealous God, meaning that if we
turn from Him and make other things in our life more important than
Him, He is not going to be happy. He wants all our focus to be on
Him. Isn’t that what all the Commandments and the laws and all the
rules are all about? The LORD God is our God. We are to serve Him
and honor Him and love Him for our whole lives.
When
we sin, we make other things more important than God. We essentially
make idols to replace our one true God. Jesus gives us a very
profound image to reflect on about this when we read the story of the
cleansing of the Temple today. Jesus comes to the Temple and sees
all the money changers and all the people selling animals to be
sacrificed in the Temple. In a sense all these people served a
useful purpose at the Temple. People needed to exchange currencies
and they needed to buy animals to sacrifice. Those individuals were
also there to make a profit, however, and that is why Jesus takes
offense. God is supposed to be the center of our lives, yet in the
Temple (God’s own house, of all places) you have people who are
more interested in taking advantage of others through monetary gain.
So He turns the tables over and drives them out. “Stop making my
Father’s house a marketplace!”
We
know what we need to do. We know we must keep God first in our
lives. It’s hard. We have many other things in our lives and we
are tempted to make those things the most important. How do we get
ourselves to do the things we need to do, when we don’t want to?
God is telling us what to do with the Commandments, but we need to
choose it for ourselves. We need to choose to make God first in our
lives. Only then will we no longer worry about doing the right
thing. Because by choosing God, how can we go wrong?
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