August 28, 2009
Sunday Scripture
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
BY FATHER DONALD DILGER
After five Sundays of readings from the sixth chapter of John, the liturgy returns to Mark. In Mark also, just as in John, there was the story of the feeding of five thousand in the wilderness. As in John, so also in Mark, the feeding of the multitude was followed by the story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. John next inserted a long discourse on the meaning of those two miracles or signs. Mark did not. We therefore took leave of Mark to meditate on John’s discourse or homily. That accomplished, we return to Mark.
Jesus is still in Galilee, his home province. His reputation as healer and preacher attracted not only admiring and suffering crowds but also the watchdogs of true religion, true at least from their point of view. They noticed that Jesus’ disciples “ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed.” This is not a matter of hygiene as it would be today. Their concern was ritual purity of cleanliness. The basis for their concern about ritual purity is Levitivus 11-15. This is a long series of regulations designed to avoid whatever, from the priestly authors’ point of view, ritually contaminated a people to the extent that they could not participate in religious rites until they had undergone a purification ritual. Contamination could be contracted not only by human beings, but also by inanimate objects. The latter would have to be discarded or purified.
Mark briefly mentions the “purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.” The major concern however was the contamination of people. One could be easily contaminated in the marketplace. For example, if the marketplace was not kosher, one might brush against the corpse of animals butchered for food. One might even brush against Gentiles, an “unclean” people, perhaps contaminated with idolatry or who knows what. Thus when pious Jews returned from public places they engaged in a brief ritual washing. To provide opportunity for this type of cleansing, a host family provided containers of water at the entrance to the home. This was the purpose of the six stone water jars at the wedding feast of Cana, the jars of water which Jesus changed into wine.
Apparently Jesus’ critics found nothing to blame in Jesus’ conduct at this time, so they attacked him through his disciples’ ignoring the tradition of ritual washington of hands before eating. It happened on his watch. The Marcan Jesus in turn attacks his critics for hypocrisy because they are concerned with such human interpretations of Leviticus while they neglect a greater commandment. Our picked-apart gospel reading unfortunately avoids the example Mark cites. The scribes, lawyers for observance of religious laws, said that a man could avoid coming to the support of his parents if he declared all his possessions “corban,” that is, dedicated to the Lord. This was nothing but human evasiveness of a divine commandment, “You shall honor your father and your mother, etc.”
Mark now takes the opportunity to instruct his Christian community that kosher food laws do not apply to them. Jesus notes that nothing, meaning no food, that enters the mouth from outside defiles a person. Food is indifferent. Jesus says that food does not enter the heart of a person, but “enters his stomach and is ejected into the privy.” (That is the correct translation of Mark’s Greek.) What actually does defile a person is what comes out of the mouth, because it comes from the heart, “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance . . . .” Jesus’ critics have been guilty of what Jesus expresses in Matthew 23:24, “Blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” Mark is catechizing his community. He might well have added for them and for us, “If the shoe fits, wear it!”
Moses not only commands the people to observe all the laws of the Torah which God gives them, but not to change anything, “You shall not add to what I command you, not subtract from it.” This is strange indeed because Deuteronomy is not at all averse to making changes. Deuteronomy (Greek) means “second law.” It reviews and updates the version of Torah revealed in the Book of Exodus. Deuteronomy even made changes in the “second” version of the Ten Words or Ten Commandments. The point to make here is that, as the gospel today teaches, the laws of God are superior to human traditions sometimes too freely added to the laws of God.
James’ insistence that all good and only good comes from God is a response to those in his congregation who maintained that God causes evil. No way, says James. It would have helped if he had explained Isaiah 45:7, “I create shalom (peace, good, wholeness) and I create evil.” James defines pure and undefiled religion, “To care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” With this statement one could fit this second reading into the themes of the gospel and the first reading.