Homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
If you could pick eight of the Ten Commandments to follow and drop two, which would they be? What if you could keep six as commandments and downgrade four to recommendations? Perhaps you’re thinking, “I probably only need about five or so, but I know a lot of people who could use a few more, maybe 12 or 15 for them.” The Pharisees in the Gospel seem to have adopted this last strategy, and perhaps because of their bad example sometimes the very idea of law gets a bad rap. Didn’t Jesus teach grace rather than law, mercy instead of rules? Didn’t Jesus say, “All you need is love, love is all you need”?
Actually, that was the Beatles. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law.”
Now it is true that, as in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus harshly criticizes a certain way of using the law as self-serving and hypocritical. So to be disciples of Jesus we need to think carefully about the role the law plays in salvation history and in our own lives of faith.
Today’s first reading from Deuteronomy makes clear that the law of Israel is God’s gift. It makes equally clear that no one but God may add to or subtract from what he commands. No matter how much we find the commandments hard to follow, no matter how old they are, no matter if we think we could attract crowds of new people to our Church by loosening the loopholes, only God can modify the law of God.
This is as important for us to remember today as it was for the Israelites four thousand years ago; today in particular it’s common to misuse the idea of conscience to get around the commandments. Here’s what Vatican II says about conscience: “In the depths of his heart man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience.” In other words, our conscience doesn’t write the laws of right and wrong; it understands them and then applies them to our everyday decisions. So to say “follow your conscience” can never mean anything different than “follow God’s law.”
Now if you’ve read the entire Book of Deuteronomy or Leviticus or Numbers, you might have an objection. These books contain plenty of laws we Catholics do not follow, such the prohibition on eating shellfish—or ostrich. Without getting into too much detail, we can say that the first Christians realized that the Old Testament contained two types of laws: the universal moral law, which has to do with questions of right and wrong, and cultural laws, which have to do with being a member of a particular ethnic group, the Jewish people. The moral law—which includes things like, “thou shall not kill” and “thou shall not commit adultery”—does apply to Christians; the second, the cultural law, which included things like diet and clothing, does not.
Why then would Jesus spend time arguing about washing hands or purifying kettles? In the Gospel passages where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, the question always just below the surface is authority. By claiming the right to modify the law—as Jesus does, for example, when he prohibits divorce—Jesus is claiming the right to do what only God can do. So the fundamental though unspoken question in these passages is: is Jesus God?
I’ll add one more note of historical background in a moment, but first I want to jump to another question which is important for us in terms of how the law fits into our lives of faith: Why? Why follow the law? Why does God give us the law?
Sometimes I think we have the impression that the reason is something like what parents give when they’re too tired to explain adult concepts to a three year old: because I said so. In fact, none of God’s laws are arbitrary. The moral law is the minimum necessary to live at peace with God, others, and ourselves. Even those Jewish dietary laws, which sometimes get an unfair reputation in Christian circles, have a beautiful purpose. I was once invited to a Seder meal by an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, and watching them I realized that the purpose of observing these detailed rules is to make God present in the small details of daily life, to make him present in what they eat, in what they wear, in how they rest. If lived in the right spirit, these cultural laws are ways of making God’s will concrete and alive.
However, as the Pharisees show, if these laws are done in the wrong spirit, they can become technicalities used to escape the will of God. Everything good can be misused, especially if its intended purpose is forgotten. Revealing the purpose behind all the rules is what Jesus means when he says he comes not to abolish but to fulfill the law. And what is that purpose? If you remember anything from the Bread of Life discourses last month, you probably picked up that the summit of our Catholic faith is communion with God. And that means total union. The greatest commandment according to Jesus, the one that summarizes all the others is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Total union. The other commandments just make this more specific.
To really appreciate how radical Jesus’ teaching was at this point, I’ll add one last bit of historical background, which today we may not realize. In the pagan world, it was possible to trick the gods. Zeus and Mars, Venus and Athena had tremendous power, but they couldn’t see inside of us. They didn’t know what humans were thinking or feeling. So it was entirely possible to sacrifice a bull to Zeus and get him on your side, all the while cursing him in your heart and plotting against him. The Pharisees in today’s reading seem to be thinking in a similar way. So when at the end of today’s reading Jesus points to our thoughts, feelings, and desires, he’s not just making a point about human psychology. He’s also revealing to us another dimension of the divine union into which the Lord invites us. It’s not a part-time union or a best-eight-out-of-ten union or an until-something-better-comes-along union. It’s an invitation to participate in God’s love with all our being.
God’s law is one of the expressions of that love. It’s both a call to obedience and a promise of fidelity, a call to total self-giving—with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength—and the promise that what we receive in return is nothing less than God’s total self-gift.
Readings: Dt 4:1-2, 6-8; Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church, Rapid City, SD
2018
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 