Homily for Sunday, 2 September 2018

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5; James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

This homily was given at St. James and Our Lady of the Valley Churches, Vernon and Coldstream, BC, Canada. 

What do we make of the tensions in today’s readings between internal intentions and external actions; between observance of religious laws and traditions and what Jesus teaches is most important to God?

To some extent, I anticipate that most if not all of us have a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions, whether they are from God or from people; religious or secular. And there is nothing wrong with having a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions. In Canada, as in most or all developed countries at least, we speak of the “rule of law”—the Constitution and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, civil and criminal law, precedent set by the rulings of several levels of courts of law—as a principle to govern our society. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses instills among the people of Israel a “rule of law” system. Israel is to be ruled by God’s laws, which will not be difficult for the people to discern and observe. God’s laws, Moses says to the people of Israel, are not to be seen as an imposition or a nuisance, but as a gift.

Other nations around Israel at the time worshipped several gods, and many worshipped their human rulers as gods. Many gods and human rulers as gods meant complicated systems of laws for the people to follow. What, then, does God propose through Moses to Israel’s people? If there is one God, then there is one simplified system of laws to communicate to Israel the nearness to it of its God; the care of God for Israel. And so God asks rhetorically through Moses: “For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today”? The point is that no other nation would enjoy such closeness to its God. No other nation would enjoy the gift of a rule of law so intelligible and just as Israel would enjoy. This law would be a perfect echo of God’s voice, caring for and sustaining our well-being on earth, so there would be no need to add to or take away from it.

There is nothing wrong with laws, rules, and traditions, as long as we do not allow these laws, rules, and traditions in themselves to become our gods. This is the point Jesus makes in the Gospel of Mark from which we hear today; in his dispute with the Pharisees and scribes who come from Jerusalem to investigate how well Jesus and his disciples observe the laws about food, laws about the ritual purification of dishes and vessels for food and drink and their bodies.

Neither Jesus nor Mark, the Gospel writer, simply dismiss this set of laws the Jews had inherited from Moses’ time as unimportant. In fact, in this part of Mark’s Gospel we get a sense that, very soon after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the earliest Christian communities had to contend with both Jews, who knew and followed the law given them through Moses, and Greek and Roman pagans, who did not, joining them. This is most likely why Mark explains the long list of laws the Jews had about food preparation and washing the food, the vessels to prepare the food, and themselves. The first Christian leaders after Jesus decided immediately that, as Jesus had taught and lived among them, their communities would include everybody: Jews and pagans alike who had come to believe in Jesus. This would create some uneasy tensions among different groups of people, each with their laws, rules, and traditions.

These laws, rules, and traditions would remain important, though, and even constructive of Christian community as long as these laws, rules, and traditions did not become gods in themselves. These laws, rules, and traditions would be praiseworthy as long as they were observed as a gift that pointed the people to the one God, who cares for and sustains our life and well-being here on earth. Neither could religious or cultural laws, rules, and traditions become reduced to decrees we merely follow externally, while they fail to change our hearts and bring us closer to God.

This is at the heart of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and scribes of his time, based on the words of the prophet Isaiah centuries before Jesus: “You hypocrites… ‘this people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’” I offer this with a caveat that most Pharisees and other religious leaders of Jesus’ time followed with their hearts the sometimes-rigorous outward observance of religious law that they expected of themselves and everybody else. Mark’s Gospel today features a small group of Pharisees and scribes “from Jerusalem.” These were the self-proclaimed official police of observance of the Law of Moses, who thought themselves to be important because they had come from Jerusalem, the city at the centre of the Jewish faith. For them, the laws, rules, and traditions of faith were no longer a gift from God to point us back to God and to eternal life. They were no longer a sign of God’s care for us and for creation, but had been reduced to a means to power and prestige by this minority of religious leaders of Jesus’ time.

And when laws, rules, and traditions become inflexible, static means to power and prestige, how often does this show itself as self-righteous judgmentalism, in our own time as often as in the time of Jesus? If we appoint ourselves judges based on external observance of laws, rules, and traditions, we risk failing to discern accurately, as well as possible, the condition of the hearts of the faithful before God, which may or may not be well-reflected in external observance.

Yet how often do we hear, if we have not said ourselves, things like, “People who have committed or supported such-and-such an action should not receive communion? Those people come to Canada to take our jobs and change our culture and customs! How dare that person openly question that teaching; she or he is a heretic! That couple is ‘living in sin’”!

“This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” I imagine Jesus thinking of the people for whom laws, rules, and traditions become means to their own power and prestige instead of means toward patiently bringing external observances closer into line with the more universal longing of our hearts for God.

What, then, are the remedies for this self-righteousness; what we might call “Phariseeism”; for reducing laws, rules, and traditions, religious and otherwise, to means to power and prestige? First, I think it is important, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, to recognize that evil (but also good) does not come from outside us; from external observances, no matter how faithful. Goodness or evil are conditions of the heart, of what is inside us. Second, as we hear in the Letter of James [the patron saint of this church], an important remedy to judging based on externals is to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive” ourselves.

We become “doers of the word” when we are deeply aware of the condition of our own hearts; the presence within each of us of good and evil. We become “doers of the word” when our external observances are a sincere reflection of the condition of our hearts; when we expect of others only what we ourselves are capable; when we consider everybody as loved by God and called to eternal life; when we consider nobody as excluded from the eternal life God offers us.

We become “doers of the word,” and our hearts are drawn to the heart of God, when the law becomes not a means to power if not to an abuse of power; when laws, rules, and traditions are not gods in themselves but a gift from God to point us to eternal life.