22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Year B
Thursday, August 29th, 2024 @ 11:12 am
Keeping God as the horizon of our lives is essential, but to do that we need to be reminded again and again of who he really is.
Seeds:
First Reading: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8
- Deuteronomy is the concluding book of the Torah, or Pentateuch. The laws that Moses referred to here are those contained in Deuteronomy, but also those contained in the rest of the Torah.
- The purpose of the Law and its observance is here given as “that you may have life” and come into the promise God had made. Is that how we usually view the Law?
- Deuteronomy and Revelation both stress the need to refrain from adding and subtracting from the words of Scripture. Lectio Divina (the prayerful reading of the Bible) can help contextualise this, as it fosters an attitude of receiving the Bible as a gift from the Lord and allows the Lord to set the agenda.
Psalm: Psalm 14(15):2-5
- The ‘holy mountain’ is a place rich in biblical allusions; parts of the Old Testament refer to Eden as a mountain, God gave the Law on a mountain, the Temple was on a mountain, Jesus was transfigured on a mountain, and so on. The mountain is both the place of God’s dwelling and of his meeting with his people.
- This psalm sums up, in a way meant to be memorised and sung, what is needed to dwell with God: namely truth, justice, integrity, and honouring the Lord.
- The psalm was perhaps originally sung as preparation for worship in the Temple; how might it help us to prepare our hearts to worship the Lord at Mass, or to speak with him in prayer?
Second Reading: James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27
- Above, we mentioned the tradition of Lectio Divina and its emphasis on receiving the Scriptures as a gift from God. James here echoes that sentiment, calling on the reader or listener of the Scriptures to both accept and submit to them, as a book not to be mastered but to be mastered by.
- James lays out the practical outworkings of faith, chiefly in helping orphans and widows (and perhaps by extension anyone who needs help in our contemporary society), and in keeping oneself ‘uncontaminated by the world’ – that is: holy, set apart. How can we live out those values in our lives today?
- Just as Deuteronomy emphasised the givenness of revelation, and exhorted us not to tamper with it, James reaffirms this by reminding us that God himself is unchanging. You might like to explore how that unchanging nature of God is a comfort when thinking of his love, heaven, etc.
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
- See below for a fuller discussion of the idea of ‘hypocrites’ in this context: Jesus is here concerned with integrity, and with preserving the revelation of God without accretions.
- Notice that the Pharisees were watching Jesus and the disciples closely, looking for an opening to criticise or condemn. You might be reminded here of Jesus’ story of the plank and the splinter. Excessive concern for the religious observance of others can often be a cloak for our own insecurities in that regard.
- There is a disturbing line here, quoted from Isaiah: ‘the worship they offer me is worthless’. Do we ever consider the worthiness of our worship? The Bible has many examples of people who tried to fashion worship after their own ideas, such as Aaron’s sons who offered strange fire on the altar. The prophets spoke often of God rejecting insincere worship, or worship polluted by sinful actions and a disconnect between people’s outward observance and their inner lives. The ultimate question in this, I suppose, is whether our worship is for God or for ourselves? Do we ever ask ourselves that question?
Sapling:
A hypocrite is an actor, someone who wears a mask. The wolf in the story of Red Riding Hood is a hypocrite: it acts the part of her grandmother. Or another wolf: one in sheep’s clothing, that too is a hypocrite.
A hypocrite has a disconnect between the inside and the outside of who they are. They present one way, but on the inside it’s a different story.
Jesus accused the Pharisees of being hypocrites; actors; people who suffered from a disconnect between the outside and the inside. Jesus quoted from Isaiah to make that point succinctly:
“This people honours me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me.”
We’ve got to remember that the Pharisees were not all bad people, they wanted to be holy. In our modern parlance, they wanted to be saints. And to achieve that goal they formed their lives as deeply as they could in the ways that they believed God wanted them to: by scrupulously following the law of Moses and the body of tradition that had grown up to apply it in people’s daily lives.
It’s that application that Jesus took aim at here. Not application in general, because we most definitely are called to live and act in certain ways (as we’ll see with James), but the way we apply God’s commandments matters.
If we jump back to the conclusion of the law of Moses, in Deuteronomy, we read in the first reading: “You must add nothing to what I command you, and take nothing from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God just as I lay them down for you.”
The traditions of the elders fell foul of this warning. In trying to apply the law to various situations they actually ended up adding to God’s commands, and blurring the distinction between those commands and the interpretations the elders put upon them.
In short, they lost the voice of God and essentially fell into idolatry; the primal and perennial sin in the Bible, the replacing of God with something other than who and what he really is.
Idolatry, as we’ve said before, is insidious: it creeps in, as it did for the Pharisees, unseen and unrecognised, but results in distorting the reality of God.
That’s why, in Jesus’ quote from Isaiah, we read these stark words as well: “The worship they offer me is worthless, the doctrines they teach are only human regulations.”
What an indictment! Put yourself into the shoes of a Pharisee for a moment: you’d dedicated your life to pursuing holiness as it had been handed down. It wasn’t easy, it involved a scrupulous life, radically sculpted down to the smallest detail, to remain pure and holy before the God you wanted to please. And then you hear the words: your worship is worthless.
This was Jesus bringing a sword, as he says elsewhere. This is the sword of the Word, in this case separating truth from falsehood.
Keeping God as the horizon of our lives is essential, but to do that we need to be reminded again and again of who he really is. We can never hear the gospel too many times, we can never recite the creed at Mass too many times: we need to constantly adjust our course, like a pilot keeping their eye on the horizon to keep the plane level.
Fruit:
- Guigo II, the Ladder of Monks (a historic explanation of Lectio Divina. For a contemporary account of the same tradition, see Michael Casey’s ‘Sacred Reading’)
- Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, on worship and liturgy
