TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

Ritual is essential in life.   All of us have rituals that we remember and cherish. Some are simple habits; others are tied to memories of love and affection from our earliest years; a few, like the Eucharist, are holy.  

Our readings today are centred around ritual, but with strings attached.

  In Deuteronomy, as in the prophets, the promises given by God, as reported in the Bible, always carry a condition and often a warning. Simply put it is this: I will give you the land, or a child, or a kingdom, if you are obedient to my commandments. As our reading today says, “ Now, Israel, take notice of the laws and customs that I teach you today, and observe them, that you may have life and may enter and take possession of the land that the Lord the God of your fathers is giving you.” The promise is conditioned upon the action of obedience. Today’s reading makes it clear: Pay attention to my teachings so that you may be given the land. And the opposite is true: If you don’t pay attention to my teachings, if you are not obedient, I will not give you the land. This last part is conveniently forgotten. God’s love is unconditional, but God’s promises are not.

As the years pass  instead of religious rituals, rituals of injustice were established in the church and in the marketplace to the detriment of all. And St James writes: “ you must do what the word tells you, and not just listen to it and deceive yourselves.”  The verb “ do” in this verse is the same as “to create”. So, to do the word after hearing it has profound implications: the idea of being co-creators with God as we obey and then as we do the word.

Jesus, in the Gospel from Mark, puts ritual in its place. As he always did, he looked beyond the obvious, beyond the religious habit, to zero in on what lies in the heart. He quotes Isaiah to them. They really should know better. Isaiah has been with them for centuries.

“ This people honours me only with lip-service,
 while their hearts are far from me.
 The worship they offer me is worthless,
 the doctrines they teach are only human regulations.”

“ You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.’.”

On this occasion Jesus is asking the people to think of what is more important – the ritual of washing or the feeding of those who are hungry. Is compassion more important than ritual? What matters to us?  What matters to us? Doing the will of the Father or holding on to traditions?

At the time of Jesus, the religious people were arguing about the cleanliness of their hands and of the food they bought in the marketplace and were criticizing the disciples for not doing the same. What they ate and when they ate it was of importance to the religious people of the day.   Jesus declares all food as clean and then tells them that what goes inside the mouth, inside the body from the outside is not what harms their souls. It is what emerges from the heart to find utterance in the mouth that truly harms them.

The world has changed drastically since then. But we have changed very little.   In church, we too can  hide behind ritual and find it all too easy to ignore that which is difficult to obey. We leave church and go back to our mundane lives. How can we become doers of the word as we hold on to the words we heard or uttered? Jesus surrounded himself with the poor and the disreputable perhaps because he saw in their hearts a true longing to love God and obey God’s commandments. He reserved his most acerbic comments for those who were respectable, who performed the religious rituals, but who had no compassion left in their hearts for everyone who was different from themselves. He said to them, in pain, “You abandoned the commandments of God to hold on to human traditions.”

The Word is a gift. We should not add to it through vain and needless devotions. Nor should we subtract from it by picking and choosing which of His laws to Honor. “Listen to me, all of you, and understand,” Jesus says in today’s Gospel.  Is the practice of our religion  listening to Jesus, a  welcoming of the Word planted in us and able to save our souls? Or are we only paying lip service?