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.
