Richard McMahon, a member of the team supporting our Parish’s Season of Renewal, will present our Gospel Reflections for the rest of this week. Today, Richard reads from the Gospel of Luke (11: 47-54) in which Jesus says, “Alas for you lawyers who have taken away the key to knowledge. You have not gone in yourselves, and you have prevented others going in who wanted to.” Richards says, what we hear very clearly today is that the Pharisees and scribes, everyone is very upset with Jesus. They are really attacking him hard after this powerful exchange. And yet for us, Richard notes, it is a bit lost in translation… some of the text gives us this idea that Jesus is very critical of the leadership, particularly, because they seem to be putting blockages up in front of people. This idea that they have put this tomb, almost as a cover up or as a way of affirming past tragedies and horrible acts. In the same way the scribes lock the door, so to speak, on people. They don’t go in themselves and nor will they let others in. We have this idea of ‘stop, go away… you are not to have any way of engaging with what is happening’. The people have been shut out in the dark. Richards says when he applies this to his life, he thinks very much of what he is creating in terms of blockages in my own life. It reminds him of those three monkeys: speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. He says, sometimes there are little niggles about things going on inside of him, but he might prefer to just look the other way or maybe to not listen to it all and, certainly, doesn’t want to talk about it. Yet, is that really what the Christian life is? Here, we have an echo of what Jesus is saying in the Gospel….it is not good enough… it’s not good enough when we simply want to turn the other way. In fact, the invitation is to always move into that place where we might have to die to a current way of seeing or hearing things because Jesus is always offering us that fullness of life. In closing, Richard asks that we may be open to that knocking on the door of our heart by the Holy Spirit, who is inviting us to new ways of seeing, of hearing of speaking.