Getting Clean

Gospel: Luke 11: 37-41

"Give alms, and behold, everything will be clean for you."

As Pope Leo XIV recently noted, almsgiving is a dying practice in modern Christianity.  Social justice types do not have any regard for charity at all, suggesting that justice alone will cure poverty.  More conservative types argue that the market will solve problems of poverty, and who are the deserving poor anyway?  But neither of these are Christian positions in any sense at all.  Almsgiving is the most fundamental act of the Christian life.

Most almsgiving, as early Church writers have noted, is really not charity at all but justice.  Most of us have way more than we need, and to stockpile possessions and money as we do is really a theft against the poor who lack what they need to just exist.  By giving away our excess we are evening the scales and providing for the poor what is their due as human beings.  Yet, we cannot even manage to do that easy piece of almsgiving, let alone practice actual charity.  

We think cleanliness is about physical dirt or sexual purity, but Jesus does not refer to these at all.  The cleanliness we must have is from self-interest, greed, and the hoarding of possessions through our selfishness.  That is what makes us unclean, and it is only through almsgiving, justice, and charity can we ever hope to be cleansed of that which makes us impure and unclean.  Let us strive to return to the ancient practice of almsgiving, for the care of others and the cleanliness of our souls.