22nn Sunday of the Year B

There are times when it is impossible to understand fully the teaching of Jesus without some knowledge of the historical background to the scripture passages we read each week. And today is one of those. In this morning’s Gospel we heard how the Scribes and Pharisees questioned Jesus about why his disciples did not respect the tradition of the elders and ate with unclean hands. Behind this question, however, lies the whole story of how the Jewish Law had developed over centuries, and, since it also takes us to the heart of Jesus’ conflict with the religious leaders of his day, a conflict which runs through the whole of the New Testament and is still with us, I would like to tell you about it briefly this morning.

In its original form the Law consisted of the Ten Commandments, to which were added the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch. These books do contain some detailed instructions about the daily life of the people, but, in its simplest form, the Law, as is obvious with the Ten Commandments, consisted of general principles which the individual had to apply to the concrete circumstances in which he found himself. And for centuries that’s exactly what happened. But four of five hundred years before the birth of Jesus – around the time of the Exile in Babylon – there came into being a class of legal experts whom we know as the Scribes. And we are all familiar with what happens when lawyers get involved. They were not content with general moral principles, and, as a result of their efforts, literally thousands and thousands of rules and regulations came into being which came to control every conceivable aspect of of Jewish life. These rules and regulations were never written down, however, and were known as the oral law. Or, as we heard them called today, the tradition of the elders. And so that we can have a better understanding of what it was Jesus took issue with, I would like to explain to you in some detail what was involved in the particular example contained in today’s Gospel; the rules surrounding the washing of hands.

And the first thing we have to understand about these rules is that they were nothing to do with hygiene. They were about religion, and anyone who did not conform to them was considered ritually unclean and so unacceptable to God. A lot of those whom the Gospel calls sinners, for example, were only sinners in the sense that they were poor and so unable observe every single detail of the Law. In the case of eating, the hands first had to be held with the fingertips pointing upwards. Water was then poured over them which had to run at least down to the wrist and while the hands were wet each one had to be cleaned with the fist of the other. The amount of water was also closely measured and had to be the amount which could be contained in one and a half egg-shells. But since the hands had been unclean before this water was poured, the water itself was now unclean through contact with unclean hands. And so, this time, with fingertips pointing downwards, the whole process had to be gone through again before the person was ready to eat, a procedure which had to be gone through, not just before the meal, but in between each of its courses as well. And for the Scribes and Pharisees this, from morning to night, was what religion and serving God were about. The Law had begun centuries earlier with sound moral principles like truth, honesty in dealing with others, respect for human life, the care of elderly parents and so on, and by Jesus’ day these principles had been lost sight of, buried under a pile of rules and regulations. The spirit of the Law had been completely lost, and, faced with this sad reality, Jesus is utterly scathing in his criticism of it.

But just try to imagine what it was like for the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus was undermining everything they believed in. For them the rules surrounding the washing of hands were what their religion was about. In his commentary on Mark’s Gospel from which the details of this homily are taken, Professor William Barclay writes of how a Rabbi who failed to perform these actions on just one occasion was buried an excommunicated man. He tells the story of another Rabbi, imprisoned by the Romans, who almost died of thirst because he used the water given him by his guards to wash his hands and not for drinking. Ritual cleanness and its opposite, ritual uncleanness, meant everything to the pious Jew in Jesus’ day. A woman after childbirth was unclean. Lepers were unclean. Anyone who touched a dead body was unclean. A dish touched by a gentile was unclean and so on, to the point where a strict Jew who returned from the market immersed his whole body in clean water in case he had inadvertently touched or been touch by anything that was ritually unclean. And all of this, Jesus is telling them, is a load of garbage. No wonder they crucified him.

But he goes further than that, telling them – and this in many ways was the most shocking thing of all – that nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean, an idea that was complete anathema to the people of his time. In the book of Maccabees, for example, we hear the story of how, during the reign of the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes, hundreds of Jews died horrific deaths rather than eat pork. And here is Jesus, again telling them that none of this, the stuff of legends, matters; that it is what comes out of the heart of a person that matters. Faith in God is not about external things, It is not about rules and regulations. It is about much deeper things than that.

My original intention when I first began to prepare this homily was to speak for a while about the background to this week’s Gospel and then, using that as a starting point, move on to reflect on how, in many ways, nothing much has changed; how the tendency to bury the things that really matter under a pile of rubbish has gone on all through history and still goes on in the Church today. But in the end I decided not to do that. The conclusion I came to was that, if you cannot see it for yourselves; if the similarities between then and now are not staring you in the face; if it is not immediately obvious how we do similar if not indentical things ourselves, then there is really no point in my spelling it out for you.

BIDDING PRAYERS

It has been said that every celebration of Mass should carry a health warning. This is because, at the heart of the Mass, lies a profound call to change radically the way we live. And so, consciously or unconsciously, we protect ourselves from this threat to the way we live by turning the Mass into a religious ritual. In this way, we rob it of its original meaning and, like the people in Jesus’ day, leave ourselves largely untouched by it. And so we pray for the insight to see this............Lord hear us

Many of us are old enough to remember a time when a Catholic was a person who went to Mass, married in the Church, made his or her Easter Duties and performed a variety of other external actions associated with what it was to be ‘A practising Catholic.’ But a genuine Catholic is a person who, fed by the Word and the Eucharist, makes the teaching of Jesus a reality in the world, and we ask God to raise up many such Catholic men and women in this parish...........Lord hear us

Before too long, we will start again the process of preparing children and parents for the celebration of Confirmation and First Communion. And so, even now, we begin to pray for them. We pray, in particular, that, following on what he heard Jesus say in this week’s Gospel, we will never again see in this parish a celebration of any sacrament which revolves around purely external things and has little or nothing to do with the true meaning of the sacrament in question...........Lord hear us

Our prayer, too, can be superficial and lacking in depth. This happens especially when it becomes tied up with the fundamentally superstitious notion that we can make deals with God or influence him by performing particular actions or saying certain words a fixed number of times. This is exactly the kind of thing which made Jesus so angry throughout the Gospels and we pray for the grace we need to recognize any sign of it in the way we ourselves pray.....Lord hear us

The word which sums up everything Jesus hated and opposed in the religious world of his day is the word hypocrisy. It has its roots in the Greek term for an actor and finishes up meaning a person whose life is a piece of acting without any sincerity behind it all. Sadly, there is, and always has been, a strong streak of such hypocrisy running through most religions, and we pray that, as far as is possible, God will protect us from it here in St Matthew’s...........Lord hear us

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were deeply shocked by his teaching, which undermined the whole basis of their religious thinking. And so they crucified him. But the truth is often shocking and difficult to accept. This has happened in our own day with the Second Vatican Council, still resisted by many in the Church, and we pray for the courage and generosity we need to accept the truth even when it challenges our whole way of thinking too...........Lord hear us