The commandment does not tell us to honor our parents just when we think they are right.

Friday, 7/20/12

The readings today bring up the matter of obeying church rules. We must be prepared to obey them, even when they are not the best they might be. After all, the Commandment just tells us to honor our parents. It doesn’t tell us to honor them when they are right, giving us the option of not honoring them when we think they might be wrong. In the old days when the Church told us not to eat meat on Friday it was sinful for us to eat meat, even though the rule was later done away with.

The readings let us see that church rules can be wrong when they go against human nature.

The Gospel has a story about the disciples on a Sabbath day rubbing the husks off a few grains of wheat.  Jesus saw it as wrong to take such natural behavior, blowing it up to where it was seen as a violation of the commandment about keeping holy the Sabbath.

The first reading presents us with a fable that demonstrated God’s power by having his servant Isaiah make the sun back up in the sky. In 1630 Rome used their literal interpretation of that story as grounds for condemning Galileo for saying said that the earth rotates around the sun. Galileo humbly accepted the condemnation, then the Church, after thinking it over for three hundred and fifty years, conceded that she had been wrong in arguing against the facts.