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By Father Jerry Pokorsky
Special to the Rappahannock News
It is all too easy to become a pious fraud. The chief pnests and elders in the time of Christ were not unlike the clergy of every age. They were highly trained in religious matters and the people looked to them as the experts in the Law. But the parable of the two sons in the vineyard indicts them for not practicing what they preached.
The parable drives home the point that interior dispositions and actual responses are more important than pious externals. One son refuses to work the vineyards, but later changes his mind and does his duty. The other son — the pious fraud — pays lip service to his father, promising to work, but fails to carry through with his promise. Christ’s message to the chief priests and elders is clear. Their fixation on the appearances of religious devotion and their presumed religious “expertise” blinded them to John the Baptist’s call to conversion. In their unbelief, they were pious frauds.
In the meantime, the hated tax collectors and even the prostitutes followed John “in the way of righteousness,” because they believed. Therefore, Christ tells us, they “are entering the kingdom of God” before the professional religious (cf. Mt 21:28-32).
A person becomes a “pious fraud” when religious externals — verbal expressions, clothing, articles, practices — become more important in themselves than a responsive interior religious devotion. Christ warns of certain pious frauds: “Beware of the scribes, who like to go about in long robes, and to have salutations in the market places and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who
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