Telling a lie removes a bit of capital from our spiritual bank account. The more lies we tell, the smaller our account becomes. Lying becomes habitual, second nature. Eventually we're not even aware of it. We're spiritually bankrupt. That's where the jewish leaders found themselves by the time they managed to get Jesus crucified. They had been lying about Him for a long time. They had diminished his parentage. They had said that He came from a place from which nothing good could come. They questioned His sanity. They said He was possessed by demons. When they were trying to persuade Pilot that He needed to be executed, they said (falsely) that He was opposed to paying taxes to Rome. The Jewish leaders got so much into the habit of lying about Jesus that it seems they didn't even care about truth or facts. They had their narrative, and nothing else mattered. I think that's the only explanation for the surprising omission in today's Gospel reading (Mt 28: 8-15), in which we read about the fact that the guards posted at Jesus' tomb have reported that Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" had gone to the tomb and found it empty. The response of the Jewish leaders is to tell the guards to lie-- to say that they had fallen asleep and, during that period, Jesus' disciples must have stolen the body. The leaders pay a lot of money for that lie, as well they should because for a soldier to say he was asleep at his post on guard duty was to admit to a very-serious crime. It might even be a capital crime. That's why the leaders have to say that they'll get the soldiers a pardon in the Roman governor hears about the story. Otherwise even a significant amount of money wouldn't have been enough in view of the risk. But what's missing? Wouldn't you think that the leaders would have wanted to know what happened? They knew the guards didn't actually fall asleep. So what happened to the body? Where did it go? How could it have vanished from the tomb? And what did all this mean about Jesus, whom they had just crucified? Apparently none of those questions crossed their minds. They just had their false narrative, and all they cared about was how to keep the story going. The truth-- if it didn't help the story-- was of no interest to them. The sad fact is that the Jewish leaders of Jesus' time are not the only people who have lied so much that they become uninterested in the truth. It can happen to any of us, flawed humans that we are. That's why we must insist on telling the truth-- in our own behavior and in the behavior of our leaders. After all, look where all the lying gor the Jewish nation. The lying was justified as a way to save the country from a Roman crack-down, but, despite all the lies, within 40 years of Jesus' death, the Jewish nation was brutally destroyed by Rome anyway. The path of spiritual bankruptcy leads only to destruction.