About being clean...

The Gospel passage I heard this morning, that of Jesus calling on the Pharisees to clean the interior as well as the exterior, reminded me of what Fr VV Paul (Shillong) once shared during class hours. Vendors walking in and out of trains selling all sorts of things ... and people purchasing these is a common phenomenon on Indian trains. Most often those who purchase groundnuts, keep dropping the empty shells on the train floor itself. Then there are those street boys, those who live on the railway platforms, who come around sweeping the compartments. Now these boys are always kept at a distance because they do the 'dirty job' of cleaning the compartments. Fr VV Paul's observation was an interesting one: Those who dirty the place claim to be clean and those who clean the place are branded dirty!