NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 22nd in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time. And we're back with Saint Mark after our five-week hiatus, spending time with John, looking at John's reading of the feeding of the 5,000. But in fact, our reading of Saint Mark has jumped a little bit, but it's rather important that I put that back in when it comes to today's Gospel, because in Mark's Gospel, immediately after the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus makes his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side to Bethsaida while he dismisses the crowd. Then he goes up to the mountain to pray. While the boat is on the lake, the disciples are straining to get across, but Jesus walks by them. It looks as though he's walking by on the lake. It doesn't seem to be keen to get into the boat, but he intended to pass them by. But they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified. But he immediately spoke to them and said, "Take heart and do not be afraid." Then he gets into the boat and the wind ceased, and they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. So here we have the disciples, having witnessed the feeding of the 5,000, crossing under their own strength, not getting it really right, and Jesus coming along, intending to pass by them, but getting into the boat. This is the key thing. This is to parallel Joshua. Joshua had crossed — if you remember — the Jordan, thus doing the miracle that was as important for his people as Moses crossing the Red Sea had been for that generation. Jesus here is not only leading them across, getting before them; he's actually showing that the boat that the disciples are carrying is the ark in the original story. The priests stood with the ark in the Jordan while the people crossed over, and then the waters came back, and the ark itself carried the priests across. The ark became a boat and carried the priests across. So here the boat is carrying the disciples across, but they're straining because Jesus isn't in it. But then the Spirit comes. They think it's a ghost. The Spirit comes. He is with them. They don't understand the bread. They don't understand that this ark is carrying the bread of the presence, who is the real bread from heaven, and they get across to the other side. Anyhow, the key thing is: finally, one greater than Joshua has turned up on the other side. And immediately when they crossed over, they came to the land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him. Recognized? Did they recognize because they'd seen him on the other side, or did they recognize Joshua? Yeshua. Immediately they brought people for him to cure them. The original Joshua hadn't cured, so this one who is greater than Joshua cures. Now it's in this context, This context of Jesus coming to the other side of the Jordan, in other words, to visit the land that Joshua had conquered, to visitate it, if you like, to see how the mission is going. It's in this context that the Pharisees and scribes turn up from Jerusalem, because they're quite interested to see how Jesus is going to cope in this mixed territory — not only Jewish, but with little pockets of pagan in the midst. We're going to see some of that soon. But here the Pharisees have come down from Jerusalem to see how this strange mission of Jesus, which they've heard about, is doing, because they have quite a particular idea of how the people of God, the Jewish people, should be evangelized. And their mission consists, at this stage, of trying to persuade the people to take up in lay form various of the Temple rituals which had originally only been for the priests, but to take them up as part of lay life. That was, if you like, the new evangelization of the Pharisees. And it's what we will see eventually became — at this stage it wasn't, but eventually it became — rabbinical Judaism, which was in a sense a lay living of the formerly priestly life of the Temple, but now centered around texts and absence of place. But at this stage the Temple still existed. The priests, whom the Pharisees didn't think highly of, continued to perform there. But the Pharisees themselves had a project for evangelization. So they're now in conflict, or at least they're curious about, Jesus's project. So when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him — so they made their gathering, they made a little synagogos, a little gathering — they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing. Now we're talking about two sorts of washing here. First of all, there would have been hygienic washing, which everybody would have done. That was a completely lay thing, had no religious significance at all. And then after the hygienic washing there was an extra sacred washing, and you were not supposed to say, "Oh well, let my hygienic washing count as a sacred washing," because for them this mixing of the two meant that you weren't being faithful. You really needed to have a separate sacred washing to show that you were being sacred — that was the whole point: to consecrate yourself at the eating. That was what making the Temple alive. And this is, after all, not a bad way to get people to take the holiness of God seriously. It says here, then, in brackets: "For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders." In other words, actually it was this establishing of the tradition of the elders that this movement was about. It's the equivalent, in Catholic or Christian understandings, of people who want to say yes… There's revelation and then there's Church tradition, and Church tradition is really just as important as revelation. And it's really according to Church tradition that you read revelation. There isn't a separate special part before. In other words, it's an exercise in continuity. "And they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it. And there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots and bronze kettles." And that's a bit of a hint, because the bronze kettles and those things were used in the Temple. So here they're talking about the laicization of Temple life as a way of spreading the holiness of the people of God, getting ritual purity ever more widely spread – understanding, of course, that along with ritual purity people would live moral lives, that moral purity was important as well. These are not caricatures. These people are not caricatures. So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him: "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders?" The particular form of washing was: you're supposed to wash up to your elbow and then hold up your hands and clench your fists after. There was a particular thing, to let the water drip down from your fingers so your fingers would then be ritually pure for eating. But he says to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites." And here we have to be careful, because our word "hypocrite" is a terrible offense. It's the ultimate offense, the ultimate accusation of a religious leader – or self-accusation. I personally consider that part of the what-you-said occupational hazard of being a preacher is that I'm a hypocrite. This is absolutely a standard thing. One of the things that preachers know is that we always outrun our homilies – we always speak much better than what we understand in our homilies. We learn sometimes years later in our real lives what we've been preaching in our homilies. And that's the use that Jesus is making here. "Hypocrites" here is probably simply referring to the Greek word for stage actors. It's not yet the very strong disqualifier for a religious person by which I would certainly be disqualified – and I guess many of you would be. No, here it's referring specifically to stage actors, because the whole point of a stage actor was that a stage actor was someone who mouthed the lines but didn't internalize the meaning. If you were stage-acting Zeus, you mouthed the lines but you shouldn't internalize the meaning, or else you'd be in real trouble, because you would think yourself a god – it'd be awful. So stage actors mouth lines but don't internalize meanings. The question is: to what extent are we preachers and spinners of religious observance just like that? And then he quotes Isaiah in a way that Aristotle would – no doubt, who gives us the definition of a book as someone who speaks the words but doesn't interiorize their meaning: "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." This is perfect — learns the lines but doesn't interiorize their meaning. "In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines." So Jesus is using Isaiah to indicate something which is of enormous importance for all of us, and this really is part of the Christian Gospel: that there is no such thing as an uninterrupted tradition between the word that has come amongst us and our living out of it. In other words, we are constantly having to ask ourselves whether we are following the Word of God or whether we are following human precepts. This is something, if you like, that every generation has to face up to. In our generation, one of the areas in which we're facing this is the question of gay and lesbian relationships. Are we holding fast to the Word of God, or are we nullifying the Word of God by holding fast to human traditions? This is a question which Jesus introduces here. It's a question that never goes away. It's one of the questions that is present wherever Jesus is present. And he says this: "You abandon the commandment of God and hold on to human traditions." Now the fact is that it was a very minor issue, the issue of the purification of the hands. He then explains with relation to a text from Moses, which doesn't appear in our Gospel this week, but it's just an indication of how a divine commandment can be put aside for apparently holy motives — when in fact actually you are going against the whole point of what God is saying, but have convinced yourself it's the right thing to do, which we are brilliant at doing. So this — there's nothing anti-Semitic in this at all. "So you do many things, making void the Word of God through your tradition that you've handed on, and you do many things like this." And this of course is true of us. He's talking here about humans. He's also talking about the Gospel that he is seeking to bring into this mixed country. So he then calls the crowd again and says to them, in very solemn language: "Listen to me, all of you, and understand." Listen — Shema. He's actually speaking very, very much as the Lord here. "There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." Now Jesus was not here immediately bringing to an end kosher and the Jewish food laws. He was merely bringing out the central principle for the determination of all such issues, which over a very long period of time we have come to understand. He then leaves the crowd and goes in and talks to his disciples, and they ask him: "What is this parable which you've been telling?" That little line was a parable, according to the disciples. So here we get the understanding that what we have in today's Gospel Is the explanation which Jesus gave the disciples over time, including after his resurrection, as to what this might mean and how it was that Christianity became the form of Judaism that prioritizes the desire of the heart as being what is absolutely central above all things. Any other things that you might hold on to — they might be fine, they might not be fine — but the really important thing is the desire of the heart. Jesus then gives a list of twelve of these forms of disordered desire which make us genuinely unclean. He starts with evil intentions. These englobe all the things that he's going to talk about, all the twelve that are to follow, suggesting that he is talking about something with a determinative, a conscious quality about it, that form of wrongdoing. Then he starts with fornication, strangely enough, and probably that means idolatry, idolatry coming before murder, theft and murder. The reason I say it's probably idolatry is that that was to use fornication to refer to idolatry as standard in the Jewish world at the time. And the sexual elements that we associate with fornication come in adultery and licentiousness later in the list. So it's reasonable to assume that he's not simply repeating himself here. He's talking about different things, and starting as a good Jew would with idolatry as being the source of all other evils. So: adultery, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride and folly. The different ways in which our heart, our pattern of desire, can take us away from God. And of course it's going to be the working out of that after the resurrection, after the coming of the Holy Spirit, starting with what Jesus taught about that which is inside coming out may defile, rather than that which is outside coming in — which has to be the whole basis of how we learn to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, following a religion of spirit, how to become holy bodies by working through the patterns of desire such that the Holy One may live in our hearts. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.