Daily Mass reading for Tuesday, June 1st.
Tobit2:9-14
On the night of Pentecost, after I had buried the dead,
I, Tobit, went into my courtyard
to sleep next to the courtyard wall.
My face was uncovered because of the heat.
I did not know there were birds perched on the wall above me,
till their warm droppings settled in my eyes, causing cataracts.
I went to see some doctors for a cure
but the more they anointed my eyes with various salves,
the worse the cataracts became,
until I could see no more.
For four years I was deprived of eyesight, and
all my kinsmen were grieved at my condition.
Ahiqar, however, took care of me for two years,
until he left for Elymais.
At that time, my wife Anna worked for hire
at weaving cloth, the kind of work women do.
When she sent back the goods to their owners, they would pay her.
Late in winter on the seventh of Dystrus,
she finished the cloth and sent it back to the owners.
They paid her the full salary
and also gave her a young goat for the table.
On entering my house the goat began to bleat.
I called to my wife and said: “Where did this goat come from?
Perhaps it was stolen! Give it back to its owners;
we have no right to eat stolen food!”
She said to me, “It was given to me as a bonus over and above my wages.”
Yet I would not believe her,
and told her to give it back to its owners.
I became very angry with her over this.
So she retorted: “Where are your charitable deeds now?
Where are your virtuous acts?
See! Your true character is finally showing itself!”
Tobit is never read at regular Sunday Mass. Parts of it are read once every other year for one week of daily masses. This is the week! Read it through yourself and rejoice–there is lots to think about in it. Today let me suggest one intriguing application.
Tobit is presented as an ideal, courageous example of a faithful Israelite living in exile. He is especially known for, and ridiculed for, seeing that oppressed, murdered Israelites are given a proper burial in accord with the Torah. He has done this for a long time and suffered for doing so. He is a good, faithful follower of the Lord. He suffers for doing good. Yet this good man unjustly accuses his wife of theft and demands she return a gift she was given by a family she wove clothe for. She is justly exasperated at him:
She retorted: “Where are your charitable deeds now?
Where are your virtuous acts?
See! Your true character is finally showing itself!”
What is going on here? What does his wife’s response reveal about Tobit to us? Why has God allowed Tobit to go blind?
Let me suggest: Tobit, in effect, had carved out a little “idol” in the way he lived his faithfulness out. He honored God and did good deeds, but there was a little, destructive worm of self-righteousness and high self-regard at the heart of what he did. He had gotten very comfortable with his own way of doing things, of how his life and relationships were organized. He was quite stuck on them, in fact, and did not want them to change. He did not handle it well when God wanted him to take new and different steps in his walk of faith. Instead of gratitude to God and to his wife for supplying food when he could not earn it for them, he lashed out at the one who was trying to feed him, who was working diligently for both of them, and he demanded she humiliate herself by returning the gift. This sin was not obvious to everyone. God knew it, and his wife experienced it and recognized it all too clearly. Tobit has at least this one spot of self-righteous blindness–and it brings with it his punishment: the external blindness that he suffers as God patiently works out a great healing in his life.
For us: we are all vulnerable to turning good things into idols that become “blind spots” in our lives of faith. These could involve our political views or our certainties about how things should be done in the Church by our priests, or the bishops, or the pope, or they may touch other some deeply personal part of our lives. Our loving Father in heaven will work to heal our blind spots, though we may not recognize his hand at first. He will enable us to reject the “idols” that distort our response to Christ’s call to “be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Look at what the disciples and Paul go through in the New Testament–we should expect to have to change many, many things throughout our lives of faithfulness.