Faith That Costs Something

You can do everything right on paper and still miss God completely. Both of today’s readings put that in front of us and refuse to let us look away. Isaiah’s people weren’t skipping the temple. They showed up, burned the sacrifices, kept the feasts, said the prayers. And God tells them to stop. Their hands were full of blood, and no incense could cover it (Isaiah 1:15).

Then Jesus turns to his Apostles and says he came to bring a sword, that following him might set a son against his father and cost you peace in your own home (Matthew 10:34–36).

Both readings ask the same thing. What does your faith actually cost you, and what does it actually produce? Saint Henry, whose memorial the Church keeps today, was a Holy Roman Emperor with an empire to run and every excuse to keep religion decorative. He didn’t. He governed, fought his battles, backed the reform of the Church, and worked for a stable peace in Europe. He shows that the demanding faith these readings describe is possible in the busiest of lives. So here’s the question for today: does my faith cost me anything?

 

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 1:10–17

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats.

“When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.

Gospel: Matthew 10:34–11:1

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

“He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.”

And when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in their cities.

Scriptural Analysis

Start with Isaiah, because he sets the trap the Gospel later springs. This is the prophet’s opening oracle against Judah and Jerusalem in the eighth century before Christ. It’s built like a courtroom case, the kind of covenant lawsuit the prophets loved to use. The charge sheet runs through verses 10 to 15, the list of good works comes as verses 16 and 17, and the sentence lands in verses 18 to 20.¹

God opens by addressing the leaders as “rulers of Sodom” and the people as “Gomorrah” (Isaiah 1:10). That’s deliberate, and it’s meant to sting. Their corruption had made them look like the two cities God once wiped off the map. Aquinas notes that Isaiah calls the great to hear first and then the lowly to receive, because what the leaders take in gets handed down to everyone under them.² The rot at the top spreads.

Then comes the surprise. God rejects their worship. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” (Isaiah 1:11). He says he’s had enough of rams and fat and the blood of bulls. He goes further and says his soul hates their new moons and appointed feasts, that they’ve become a burden he’s tired of carrying (Isaiah 1:14). God commanded that whole sacrificial system himself. So how can he despise it now?

Aquinas gives the sharpest answer I’ve read. He walks the long history of sacrifice and marks off different seasons. The offerings of the patriarchs pleased God both for the devotion of the one offering and for what they pointed to. By the age of the prophets, though, the people’s sins had drained the offering of everything except its role as a sign, so the same worship no longer pleased God and offended him more.² The animals still burned. The trouble sat in the hands that lit the fire. The Catechism states the principle without the history: outward sacrifice, to be real, has to express the inner gift of a heart handed over to God.³ When the heart bends toward injustice, the incense turns into an insult.

The reason lands in one line: “your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15). So God hides his eyes and stops listening. He hears perfectly well. The prayer itself has gone hollow. Proverbs says it flat out, that the prayer of the man who turns his ear from the law becomes an abomination (Proverbs 28:9), and Aquinas quotes exactly that verse right here.²

Watch what God prescribes as the cure. It’s a pile of verbs, every one of them about how they live: wash, remove the evil, cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:16–17). Aquinas splits the remedy into two moves, fleeing evil and then following good, and he lingers on the three people God names at the end.² The oppressed are those crushed by violence. The fatherless are the young with no one to guide them. The widow has lost the man who gave her standing in the world. In ancient Israel each of them could give you nothing back, so defending them was the acid test of whether your religion was real. Saint Basil put the demand in one blunt line, that since none of us is born already knowing how to be good, we have to learn to do good through the study of sound doctrine.⁴ Faith and justice toward your neighbor come from the same cloth. Pull them apart and you’re left with the empty ritual God says he cannot bear.

Now the Gospel. We’re at the end of the missionary discourse in Matthew 10. Jesus has been instructing the Twelve and warning them about the persecution coming their way. Then he says something that unsettles anyone who pictures him as only gentle: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).

Take the sword for what it is. Mitch and Sri, in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, point out that Jesus is not brandishing a literal weapon here. Later in Matthew he tells Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52). This sword is the division the Gospel itself creates, an image the Old Testament used for the conflict at the end of the age.⁵ Jesus then quotes the prophet Micah almost word for word, the father against the son, the daughter against the mother, the in-law strife (compare Micah 7:6). Micah had painted a society coming apart, and those same commentators note that this kind of breakdown was expected to arrive right before the messianic age.⁵ What splits families is the range of responses to the message. Some believe. Some refuse. The line runs straight through the kitchen table.

Read the next part carefully. Jesus is naming a hard reality here. He never tells us to go pick fights with our relatives or treat them as enemies. What he demands is the right ordering of our loves. “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Matthew has already used that word “worthy” for the households that welcome the apostles, and now he turns it on the disciples themselves.⁵ We still honor father and mother. We simply refuse to let any love, however good, outrank the love we owe to God. The Catechism files that verse under the call to prefer Christ to everyone and everything else.⁶

Then the cross enters. “He who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38). This is the first time the cross shows up in Matthew, and here it points first at what the disciple must carry, before it ever points at what Jesus will suffer.⁵ We’ve worn that phrase smooth. We say “my cross to bear” about traffic and head colds. For a first-century Jew the image meant a condemned man hauling his own crossbeam through the streets while the crowd jeered, on his way to the cruelest death Rome could invent.⁵ That’s the picture Jesus holds up for the life of a worthy disciple. Most of us will never be asked to die for the faith. All of us are asked to die daily to our own will.⁵ The line that follows holds the whole paradox: “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Grab at your own life as the highest good and it runs through your fingers. Hand it over to Christ and you get it back whole.

After all that weight, Jesus opens the door wide. “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (Matthew 10:40). There’s a Jewish idea underneath this, the shaliah, the sent one who carries the full authority of the man who sent him. The old rule ran that a man’s emissary is like the man himself.⁵ So the Apostles carry Christ’s own authority, and Christ carries the Father’s. Then the reward drops to the smallest possible act. “Whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water” will not lose his reward (Matthew 10:42). A cup of water costs nothing and takes no skill. Christ counts it anyway, because what he weighs is the love behind the gift.

The passage ends with Jesus finishing his instructions and going on “to teach and preach in their cities” (Matthew 11:1). He does the very thing he’s sending the Twelve out to do. The setting is Galilee, the towns clustered around the lake, the same hills you can watch catch the light at dawn.

Put the two readings side by side and they press the same nerve. Isaiah exposes worship that costs a person nothing in how they actually live. Jesus describes a discipleship that can cost you everything and then rewards even the smallest honest act of love. God wants the whole person at the altar and out on the street, hands and heart together. That’s what he asked of Judah through Isaiah, and it’s what Christ asks of the Twelve.

Daily Application

Both readings put the same question to us, so let’s not dodge it. Is my faith real enough to cost me something and to change how I treat people?

Isaiah hands us an examination of conscience, and it’s a good one. Are my hands clean, or am I keeping up appearances at Mass on Sunday while cutting corners with people the rest of the week? Ask who the oppressed and the fatherless and the widow are in your life right now. The coworker everyone talks over. The aging parent who needs an hour you’d rather spend somewhere else. The person who can do nothing for you in return. Saint Basil’s point still stands. Nobody drifts into goodness by accident, so pick one concrete thing this week and learn to do it well for someone who can’t pay you back. That’s your cup of cold water, and Christ says he keeps track of it.

The Gospel carries a sharper edge, so sit with it. Has following Christ ever actually cost you anything? Saint Josemaría Escrivá said love gets proved by deeds and not by words, and he pointed to Saint John’s line that we love “in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18).⁷ If your faith has never made anyone uncomfortable, never cost you a friendship or an easy silence when the truth needed saying, it may be more decorative than any of us would like to admit. You don’t hunt for conflict. But when the choice comes down to comfort or Christ, be honest about which one usually wins.

This is where Saint Henry earns his place on the calendar. He found holiness in the middle of running an empire, appointing good bishops, backing the Church’s reform, and pushing for peace across Europe. Most of us won’t run a kingdom. We run a household, a shift, a classroom, a small shop. Holiness happens right there, in doing ordinary work for the Lord and refusing to let comfort quietly become our god.

So wash your hands and take up your cross. Do the small, hidden good today that nobody will see or applaud, and do it for Christ. He notices the cup of cold water. He forgets nothing.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), commentary on Isaiah 1:10–20.
2. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, chap. 1, lect. 3, no. 42, and lect. 4, nos. 49–54 (on Isaiah 1:10–17).
3. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2100.
4. ↑ Basil the Great, Commentary on Isaiah (Enarratio in Isaiam) 1.40, as quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, on Isaiah 1:17.
5. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 147–49.
6. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2544.
7. ↑ Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God (New York: Scepter Publishers, 1981), no. 91.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, Latin-English Opera Omnia vol. 30 (Emmaus Academic)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005