22nd Sunday – Aug 30, 2015

Dt 4:1-2, 6-8; Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mk 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Years ago Harry Emerson Fosdick told about a church in Denmark where the worshipers bowed regularly before a certain spot on the wall. They had been doing that for three centuries -- bowing at that one spot in the sanctuary. Nobody could remember why. One day in renovating the church, they removed some of the whitewash on the walls. At the exact spot where the people bowed they found the image of the Madonna under the whitewash. People had become so accustomed to bowing before that image that even after it was covered up for three centuries, people still bowed. Tradition is a powerful thing. The Pharisees had learned to substitute tradition, custom, habit for the presence of the living God. Jaroslav Pelikan once said, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." Traditionalism rears its head in many ways, in many times and in many places.

Introduction: Today’s readings explain what true religion is. It is not simply the scrupulous external observance of rules, laws, traditions and rituals. It is a loving, obedient relationship with God expressed in recognizing His presence in other human beings and rendering them loving and humble service. Prayers, rituals, sacraments and religious practices only help us to practice this true religion in our daily lives.

Scripture lessons:  The first reading explains that religion is a covenant relationship with a caring, providing and protecting God, fostered by keeping His commandments given through Moses. God gave Israel the Law so that the Israelites might keep their Covenant with Yahweh and thank Him for His love and fidelity to His Chosen People. The Law was also intended to keep them a united, holy and intelligent nation proud of their powerful, protective, single God. The responsorial psalm describes a person who practices true religion —blameless and just, thoughtful and honest in dealing with others. In the second reading, St. James defines true religion as keeping the word of God and doing His will by helping the needy, the poor and the weak in the community. He challenges Christians to become doers of the word, not merely hearers.  In today’s gospel, Jesus describes true religion as serving God and all His children with a pure and holy heart.  The occasion is a debate between Jesus and the Pharisees on the subject of "Tradition." Jesus warns the Pharisees against their tendency to equate traditional “human precepts” with God’s will. He blames the scribes and the Pharisees for giving undue importance to external observances in the name of “tradition,” while ignoring the Law’s real spirit. True religion should focus on the essentials. In particular, Jesus criticizes Pharisaic observance of ritual washing and declares that it is our inner motivations and dispositions that produce our purity or impurity.

First reading: Dt 4:1-2, 6-8: In the fifth century BC, internal corruption and external pressures had brought the Israelites to the brink of extinction.  Kings, priests, prophets and Temple had failed to hold them together. Deuteronomy, recorded under the Holy Spirit's direction during the crisis of the Babylonian exile, 587-539 BC, presented the ancient legal traditions surrounding the Law which had been given Israel by the Lord God through Moses. In this book, Moses described the beauty of the Law and commanded its observance as Israel’s sign of gratitude for the Lord God’s promise of the land. He assured the people that their God-given Law and their faithful observance of the Law would serve three purposes: a) it would help Israel survive as a people; b) it would make the people proud of their God and His Covenant; c) it would make neighboring nations marvel at the graciousness and justice of the God of Israel, at His closeness to His people and at their closeness to Him.  Hence, Moses challenged the Israelites with the questions: "What great nation is there that has its gods so near as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call to him?  What other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?" Moses cited the praise they would receive from neighboring nations as an additional reason for keeping the Law: "This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people."

Second Reading, James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27: Today we begin a series of five Sunday readings from the letter of James.  The letter is addressed to Christians in general, rather than to a particular community or person as Paul did in his letters.  After dealing with the value of trials and temptations and refuting the argument that temptations come from God (James 1:2-18), James provides the only formal definition of religion in the Bible. He defines true religion as translating the love of God into deeds of loving kindness toward the vulnerable members of the community and putting into practice the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. More specifically, true religion means that one is to “care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Exegesis: The context: Just as Jesus and His disciples were reforming Judaism by transforming it into Christianity, the Pharisees had begun reforming Judaism at an earlier period. They considered the “Written Law” or Torah or the Law of Moses (the first five books of the Bible), and the “Oral Law” (clarifications and additions given by Scribes from the fifth century B.C. to the Mosaic Law), as equally holy and binding.  These oral laws, known in Jesus’ time as the “Traditions of the Elders,” were a series of oral traditions intended to act as “a fence around the Law,” so that the Mosaic Law itself, and, thus, the Covenant, would never be violated. The original, noble intention of the Scribes who formulated these traditions, and of the Pharisees who practiced them, was to have their religion permeate all Israel, purifying the people in their daily lives, making them holy as their God is holy.  In spite of these noble intentions, however, by the time of Jesus, their religion had degenerated, being reduced to the exact performance of external rituals.  Small wonder, then, that the scribes and Pharisees were scandalized by the revolutionary teaching of Jesus, by the unique divine and messianic claims made by him and by his violations of the “Traditions of the Elders”! Hence, the supreme governing body of Judaism, the Sanhedrin, sent from Jerusalem as observers a team of Scribes (experts in the Jewish Law), to assess Jesus’ claims, miracles, violations of traditions and controversial teachings.  A few of the local Pharisees accompanied the experts and started questioning Jesus when they noticed that Jesus’ disciples had omitted the ritual cleansing of hands before a party meal.

Ritual versus hygienic washing: Ritual washing was required of the priest, but there was nothing in the Mosaic Law that required the same behavior from lay people.  Pious Jews began to adopt that habit on the principle of Exodus 19:6 — “you are a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” and gradually it became the “the tradition of the elders.”  The ritual cleansing of raw food items bought from the market, of vessels used for cooking and of the hands of those who were to eat the prepared food, like many similar practices, evolved later, to remind the Chosen People of their call to be "set apart as a holy and consecrated people," with values and life-style consciously different from those of pagans.  But in Jesus’ day, the Jews ignored the spirit of these traditions and practiced them as an essential judicial and ritual requisite.  The question "Why do your disciples not wash their hands before eating?" persisted. It created tensions in the early Church, particularly in the Christian community of Mark where some of the new Christians were Jews and some were Gentiles.  The Gentiles did not follow the Jewish customs and consequently some of the Jewish Christians were upset.

Jesus’ reaction: In response to the Sanhedrin’s public criticism, Jesus stands in the prophetic tradition by citing Isaiah 29:13, where the prophet castigates the tendency to “teach mere human precepts as dogmas.”  "This people pays Me lip-service but their heart is far from Me.  Empty is the reverence they do Me, because they teach as dogmas mere human precepts." The Pharisees placed emphasis, not on building a relationship with God and their fellow-human beings, but on checking out their own external behavior.  Originally these religious traditions were intended to symbolize inner realities -- outward signs of inward devotion to God's Will.  But the Pharisees were using them to boost their own egos.  Hence, Jesus flatly denied that external things or circumstances could separate a person from God.  Jesus was not criticizing rituals given in the Mosaic Law, but the disproportionate importance given to these things to the neglect of what was far more important, the love of God and the care for one's fellow-human beings.  By insisting that uncleanness comes from violations of the moral law rather than of minute ritual prescriptions, Jesus denied a basic principle of Jewish religion and set aside a considerable amount of Mosaic Law.  "Nothing that enters a man from outside can make him impure; that which comes out of him, and only that, constitutes impurity."

Real source of impurity:  As illustrations of evils really make a person sinful and alienate him from God, Jesus mentions six evil acts: practices of sexual immorality, thefts, murders, adulteries, acts of coveting or lust and wickedness in general.  Then he adds a check list of six vices or sins of the heart: deceit (lying), wantonness (shamelessness, immodesty), jealousy or envy, slander (imputing evil to others), pride (arrogance), and folly (the stupidity of one lacking moral judgment).  The point is clear.  Righteousness is not what we do on the outside, but who we are on the inside.  Righteousness is not about the hand; it is about the heart.  Acts of adultery, murder and unkindness come from within, from hearts that are adulterous, murderous and unkind.  For Jesus, a community that is actively worshiping God is a community that does not base its behavior solely on precepts and doctrines, but is integrally connected to God through righteous, just and loving relationships.  What makes a person holy are the attitudes and actions that Paul in Gal 5:22-23 lists as “the fruit” of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. 

Life messages: 1) We need to keep the spirit of the Church’s laws and practices. For example our  Sunday obligation is intended to allow us to worship God in the parish community, to offer our lives to God, to ask his pardon for our sins, to thank God for His blessings, to  present our needs before Him  and to receive divine life and strength from Him in receiving Holy Communion. Our daily   family prayers are meant to thank God for his blessings, to present the family’s needs before God, to ask pardon for all our sins, and to maintain the spirit of unity and love in the family.

 2) Let us avoid the tendency to become cafeteria Christians:  As the Pharisees did, we too show the tendency to add to or subtract from God’s laws given in the Bible and taught by the Church. Some of us pick and choose certain commandments to follow, ignoring the others as we do in a cafeteria. For example some actively do corporal and spiritual works of charity, but avoid Sunday Mass and remain unfaithful to their obligations attached to the   gift of their sexuality or the sacrament of marriage. Others are interested in fulfilling only the “minimal obligations” of the faith. They come to Mass late and leave early. They make an effort to avoid serious sins, but don’t go to confession even when they fall into mortal sins.

 3) Let us accept the challenge to become hearers and doers of God’s word as St. James instructs us:  Let us ask ourselves how the Sunday or daily readings are affecting or changing our lives. That will show us whether we are being attentive listeners to, and doers of, God’s word. We become more fully Jesus’ family members, only when we consistently “hear the word of God and do it” (Lk 8:21). When we receive Jesus in Holy Communion today, let us ask him for the grace to become the doers of his word as he was the doer of his Fathers’ will. 

The December 1998 issue of Life magazine carried a full page picture of a group of about a dozen protestors in the U.S. These people with twisted and angry faces were not protesting at the White House or in front of a military base. They were protesting at a funeral. One of them holds a sign which reads in big letters: "FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS THE RIGHT TO HATE." They were protesting at the October 16, 1998 funeral of Matthew Shephard, the 21 year old gay student beaten to death and hanged cross-like on a fence in Laramie, Wyoming. After such a terrible crime, could they not at least allow Matthew's family and friends to mourn in peace? I wonder if the people protesting at Matthew Shephard's funeral considered themselves Christians. If so, I wonder how they justify their hatred--regardless of how they might have felt about Shephard's lifestyle. Even on the cross, Jesus forgave his enemies. How could they possibly justify hatred in his name? But that's what happens when your lips are one place and your heart is somewhere else. You use religion to mask a heart filled with evil. You use religion as a weapon against those whom you despise.          

(Source: Homilies of Fr. Tony Kadavil)