Lectionary reading
First reading: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 14(15):2-5
Second reading: James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Link to readings
COMMENTARY
Today’s Gospel takes us straight into the rather sensitive issue of Jesus’ attitude to the Jewish law. I say ‘sensitive’ because it is so easy for Christians to separate Jesus from his Jewish heritage and portray him as ‘one of us’ and not one of ‘them’.
Jesus would have read with pride and appreciation the praise of the Law set out in the First Reading (Deut 4:1-2, 6-8), and understood it to be what the Hebrew word ‘Torah’, which we inadequately translate ‘law’, really means: not primarily a legal code but ‘a light that shows the way’. Like a torch that lights up a path on a dark night, for Jewish people the Torah is a body of wisdom and enlightenment showing how to live as the covenant people of God.
JESUS’ CHALLENGE
It is important then to understand that Jesus is not critical of the Jewish law as such. What he challenges is the addition to it of further prescriptions and customs that were not part of the original revelation and which in his view could sometimes work against its true purpose.
These traditions were particularly preserved and guarded by the Pharisees. Again, let us not be too hard on this group. They were historically a lay group who sought to help the Jewish people live out their vocation to be the ‘holy people of God’ (Lev 20:26) in the mixed society which was the Palestine of Jesus’ day. This sense of ‘holiness’ was reinforced through a host of washings and other rituals of cleanliness which were obligatory after contact with outsiders in the market and other public spheres. In due course, the rituals of holiness originally intended only for the priests and Levites came to be extended to the people as a whole. Observing them, they could live out their high vocation to be a ‘nation of priests’ in the world (cf. Exod 19:6).
The intention, then, was good but, as so often happens with religious tradition, attention can be focused on the external rituals to the neglect of the inner conversion of heart central to all relationship with God. When Jesus criticises the Pharisees on this score he is not really bringing something radically new but standing within a firm prophetic tradition, shown by his quotation of Isa 29:13: ‘This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’ (v. 6). For him, everything goes back to the heart. No amount of external ritual is of any use if it obscures or distorts the primary truth that holiness is ultimately about conversion of heart.
The body of traditions which the Pharisees had erected around the basic Torah suggested that ‘uncleanness’ was something that came from outside and threatened to defile the basic holiness of the people of God. Therefore, it had to be warded off by washings and other rituals.
‘CATCHING’ HOLINESS
Jesus clearly had a different view of the way holiness ‘worked’. Holiness belongs essentially to God. Human holiness came from being in contact with God – something that begins in the heart. Jesus, who was supremely in contact with God, went about touching ‘unclean’ persons like lepers and associating with ‘tax collectors and sinners.’ He did not ‘catch’ uncleanness from them, as though it were a contagious disease. Rather, the ‘flow’ was the other way round: they ‘caught’ holiness and healing from him. Drawn into the sphere of holiness constituted by his person, they were restored to full citizenship in the holy people of God.
The Pharisees could do nothing with people considered ‘unholy’ like this, save try to keep them at a distance. Jesus understood true holiness to be essentially inclusive rather than exclusive. It had to do with God’s reaching out rather than withdrawing to a sacred inner space.
So, Jesus insists, since holiness is primarily a matter of the heart if you want to know whether a person is holy or not, see what comes out of their heart. The list of vices towards the end of the reading is a kind of check-list – to which we could probably add a few more examples relevant for our time. By the same token, on the positive side, we could think of virtues that would demonstrate true holiness of heart.
In a sense, James does this in the Second Reading (Jas 1:17-18, 21-22, 27) when he virtually defines ‘pure, undefiled religion’ as ‘coming to the aid of orphans and widows in their distress, and to keeping oneself unstained by the world’. The final phrase may seem a bit at odds with what I have been suggesting about Jesus. But what James means I think is preserving oneself not from contact with people but from an undiscerning acceptance of the values of the world.
Brendan Byrne, SJ, FAHA, taught New Testament at Jesuit Theological College, Parkville, Vic., for almost forty years. He is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Divinity (Melbourne). His commentaries on the Gospels can be found at Pauline Books and Media