Reflection
“Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders
instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
Mark 7:1-8
The gospel today refers to a small part of a complex holiness code that regulated personal and community life for the emergent Hebrew people 3,500 years ago. Scholars debate just how much or how little ordinary first-century Jews concerned themselves with maintaining ritual purity. But. the Pharisees about whom we read so much in the Gospels certainly did. Throughout the Gospels they repeatedly confronted Jesus because of his flagrant disregard for ritual purity. This was a clash between Jesus and the Pharisees about food purity. Holding to the tradition of the elders, the Pharisees did not eat unless they gave their hands a ceremonial washing, Jesus turned the purity system with its social boundaries on its head. In its place he substituted a radically alternate social vision. The new community that Jesus announced would be characterized by interior compassion for everyone, not external compliance to a purity code, by radical inclusivity rather than by hierarchical exclusivity, and by inward transformation rather than outward ritual.
Prayer
Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Action
Have I distorted the self-sacrificing, egalitarian love of God into self-serving, exclusionary elitism? What boundaries do I wrongly build or might I bravely shatter? How can I help build a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion?
Suggested Reading
Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
Mark 7:6-8
Rigidity in the church is a sin against the patience of God.
Pope Francis
God doesn’t want us to have rigid rituals .In the new covenant, God is more interested in having a relationship with us.
Joseph Prince
It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.
Pope Gregory VII
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. Make no judgments where you have no compassion.
Dalai Lama
Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new form of probability.
Hans Bender
Try to open up your mind a little, and move away from rigid opinions of what people should do and be – unless you have been there.
Ann Rule
We are all different. Don’t judge, understand instead.
Roy T. Bennett