We can sometimes get so caught up with our rites and rituals that we lose sight of the weightier and more important things. People spend hours on their knees in prayer but turn a deaf ear to the cries of the poor and the oppressed. There are those who spend money to beautify their places of worship and have nothing left to help feed the hungry or clothe the naked. We can indeed be so taken up by something good and forget all about the bigger picture.
The world today is driven by businesses and financial markets. The balance sheet and the quest for the bottom line drive most of the decisions of many in daily life. Such an obsession for profit and gain has created a situation where the upper 1% owns half of all the assets and resources in the world. The richest 85 persons own more than the bottom 50% of the population. Pope Francis laments such a situation, which is intrinsically evil, “Not paying a fair wage, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking to make a profit, that goes against God.”
My prayer today will be, “Lord, I will keep your Sabbath holy; but let me not be blind to the poor and needy around me.”
Then he said to them,
“The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
Mark 2:23-28