22^nd Sunday of the Year

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Today’s readings collectively define for us true religion.

The gospel also has a subtle link with Father’s Day: the commandment of God Jesus uses as an illustration of his contention that the scribes and Pharisees put aside the commandment of God for the sake of their traditions is the commandment, Honour thy father and thy mother. All the commandments, including this one, are of course directed mainly at adults, meaning something like: continue to respect them even when they get older, care for them, look after them in their old age. So today let us indeed honour our fathers and our mothers.

But there is a lot more going on in today’s gospel than this.

In its original context, it probably emerges as a vigorous defence by Jesus of some of his little ones. This is often the case when Jesus goes on the offensive, and I’m pretty sure it’s the case here. Only some of the disciples are eating with unwashed hands (the New American Bible has “a few”). Why them, and not the rest? Because these ones in particular used to be part of the Lost Sheep, the non-included ones, the people Jesus has been particularly interested in seeking out. As lost sheep, when it comes to traditional Jewish religious customs and rituals they don’t know any better. And yet now they are included. Jesus is thus engaging in a defence of some of these lost sheep, and of his policy of radical inclusion.

His defence is two pronged.

Firstly, you’ve got the bias of your religion all wrong. It’s all lip service, what matters is the heart. Rituals all you want, it’s what comes from within, from people’s hearts, which makes the difference, for good or ill. (Note however that this is not a dualism between heart and behaviour, but bias in favour of behaviour which expresses what our real attachments really are, where our heart really lies.) But also, secondly, sometimes these human traditions, albeit in the name of religion, even get in the way of our performance of the key commandments of the law.

There is no evidence to suggest, on the other hand, that in the original context Jesus and the other disciples felt obliged to change their normal, everyday, inherited Jewish practices, of washing their hands and not eating unclean food like pork and such. For them it may even have been part of their spirituality, in the sense of a way of acknowledging they were parties to the covenant, like their brother and sister Jews, albeit a covenant of the heart expressing itself importantly in the key commandments. And there is no reason to think that Jesus would have disapproved of his brother James noted even by the Pharisee party later on as a pious Jewish person in spite of being a Christian. Indeed, Jesus’ point is much the same as James later on: “Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of widows and orphans when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world.” While still defending his Lost Sheep of the House of Israel, and probably also the newly integrated even more lost Gentiles.

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This last bit is part of a longer story, a meditation on which may yet have some lessons for us even today. My apologies for the following extremely rough re-telling.

The Jesus or Kingdom of God movement of brothers and sisters and mothers started life as a reform movement within Judaism, with particular emphasis on a mission to the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel: the poor, the sick, the blind, the lame, the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners, the lepers and demon possessed and other miscellaneous non-included persons. Even apart from this latter, though certainly congenial to this, it involved a shifting of balance in spirituality, a religion of the heart in Jesus’ sense, expressed in the big commandments and key attachments and commitments to God and neighbour, much like as in the epistle of James. But a religion of the heart only possible, eventually, because of the very coming of the Reign of God in Jesus’ ministry and suffering and death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Later on this proved to be attractive not just to God-fearers but even to out and out Gentiles. As more and more Gentiles came along, the question arose, Do Gentiles have to become fully fledged Jews in order to take this on? After a struggle, and much thinking and praying, it was decided: No, provided they keep to a few essentials for the sake of harmony with their Jewish Christian brothers and sisters. But this Spirit-provoked compromise did not stop tensions and divisions from manifesting, very, very roughly with St James, head of the Church in Jerusalem, on the one side, St Paul Apostle to the Gentiles into grace and faith in a big way on the other, and St Peter trying to straddle the gap and keep the whole show together.

Some more extreme disciples of Paul (not Paul himself, who was very careful when addressing his fellow Jewish Christians and was even prepared to do Temple sacrifices) seem to have contended: Not only do Gentiles who become Christian not have to become Jews, but Jews should give up being Jews when they become Christians. This was a step too far, way beyond anything Jesus is actually arguing or even stood for, and lead to a serious and seemly irrevocable split and the eventual exclusion of the original Jewish Christians, pushed from both sides, hanging on for a few hundred years before fading from history.

There is a lesson in this somewhere in the old debate between conservatives and liberals in the post Vatican II church – for both sides, I think.

This debate, I’m getting convinced, is now passé, and I’ve tried recently to move myself beyond it. I think lots of people on both sides, indeed, are now moving beyond it, perhaps towards a renewal of Jesus’ religion of the heart, made possible by the Love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord, expressing itself in the key commandments as indicating our real attachments, but open to rituals both old and new. In this respect, it may be a good sign that Pope Benedict’s first encyclical was a learned and beautifully written treatise on charity.

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