Monday of the 9th
Week in Ordinary Time
June 1, 2015 8:30am
Last week I heard someone say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
I have heard this saying from
time to time and probably all of us have.
I suppose it expresses
exasperation or frustration at trying to do something good and then being
misunderstood or unappreciated by others.
This is the situation of Tobit in
today’s first reading.
Tobit goes well beyond the
requirement of the religious law of his day.
He cares for the body of a man
who has been murdered and in doing this, he actually goes against the religious
law.
This made him ritually unclean.
But Tobit does this because he
believes this is how God himself would respond to the situation.
What happens?
Tobit is mocked and ridiculed, as
a do-gooder and especially as a breaker of the law.
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
There is a lesson here for us.
Sometimes we might do what these
people did to Tobit.
Maybe what they do or say goes
beyond or violates the technical laws of our religion, as in the case of Tobit.
Or maybe it is something we feel
uncomfortable with.
Or it might be something that we disagree
with.
Whatever the situation may be, I
am simply saying that this incident with Tobit beckons us to slow down and
pause before we put down or ridicule.
Sometimes we need to try to
understand what the other person is thinking or intending.
Sometimes we need to expand
beyond our own comfort zone.
Sometimes we need to put things
in perspective and prioritize certain values over other values or even rules,
as the people mocking Tobit should have done.
We will be hearing this
interesting story about Tobit and his family throughout this week and there
will some more good lessons from this.
