Morning Devotional

July 3, 2003

“By Any Other Name”  

by Don Emmitte

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How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy--full of greed and self-indulgence! Blind Pharisees! First wash the inside of the cup, and then the outside will become clean, too. How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs--beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. You try to look like upright people outwardly, but inside your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Matthew 23:25-28 NLV). 

The old proverb goes “a rose by any other name is still a rose.” It reminds us that no matter how you try to disguise something, the truth usually comes out. The following story is reported as being true. Whether it is or not, it does remind us that appearances may be deceiving. 

A woman from La Mesa, California went to Tijuana, Mexico, to do some shopping. As any visitor to this border town knows, the streets near the shopping areas are populated with stray dogs. The woman took pity on one little stray and offered it a few bites of her lunch, after which it followed her around for the rest of the afternoon. When it came time to return home, the woman had become so attached to her little friend that she couldn't bear to leave him behind. Knowing that it was illegal to bring a dog across the international border, she hid him among some packages on the seat of her car and managed to pass through the border checkpoint without incident. After arriving home, she gave the dog a bath, brushed his fur, and then retired for the night with her newfound pet curled up at the foot of her bed. When she awoke the next morning, the woman noticed that there was oozing mucus around the dog's eyes and a slight foaming at the mouth. Afraid that the dog might be sick, she rushed him to a nearby veterinarian and returned home to await word on her pet's condition. The call soon came. "I have just one question," said the vet. "Where did you get this dog?" The woman didn't want to get into trouble, so she told the vet that she had found the dog running loose in the street near her home in La Mesa. But the vet didn't buy it. "You did not find this dog in La Mesa. Where did you get the dog?" The woman nervously admitted having brought the dog across the border from Tijuana. "But tell me, doctor," she said. "What is wrong with my dog?" His reply was brief and to the point. "First of all, it's not a dog -- it's a Mexican sewer rat. And second, it's dying."  

In our reading this morning Jesus warns the religious leaders of their hypocrisy. He was not fooled by their religion then, neither is He fooled by ours today. The Queen Mary was the largest ship to cross the oceans when it was launched in 1936. Through four decades and a World War she served until she was retired, anchored as a floating hotel and museum in Long Beach, California. During the conversion, her three massive smokestacks were taken off to be scraped down and repainted. But on the dock they crumbled. Nothing was left of the 3/4 inch steel plate from which the stacks had been formed. All that remained were more than thirty coasts of paint that had been applied over the years. The steel had rusted away. When Jesus called the Pharisees “Whitewashed tombs,” He meant they had no substance, only an exterior appearance. How’s your substance today?