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Dear Parish Family,
“Buckle up your seat belts. It’s the Law.” As Americans we unconsciously “buckle up” because we do not want to get a traffic ticket. So often the determination of our actions is based on whether we will be punished, not on what is right or wrong. “Drive as if your children lived here” make us think of speed in a different way. The sign is inviting us to go a notch higher than the law and have concern for the lives of children.
Now the first reading for this Sunday from the Book of Deuteronomy speaks about the laws that God gave to the people of Israel in terms of his love for them. The Israelites did not view these laws as impositions from above that had to be followed to avoid punishment. They saw the law as a personal expression of God’s love for them. “What great nation is there that has its gods so near as the Lord Our God is to us when we call on him?” The people of Israel had a personal relationship with God. They knew that he cared for them. His laws were an expression of his love. They kept the law to return his love.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus and the Pharisees have a public fight about the Jewish tradition of washing hands before dinner. Jesus puts the Pharisees and their tradition down with a scathing denunciation. He calls the Pharisees “hypocrites,” who have God on their lips but not in their hearts. The pious practices per se, were not bad. What Christ opposed was the attitude of Pharisees that such formal and merely external actions constituted a person’s religiosity. It is worse when these were done for display or to show to the people how pious they were. In other words, the real intent of the law has been lost for the sake of merely keeping the ritual.
When the Pharisees ask Jesus why his disciples did not keep the tradition of handwashing, their question is not a request for information. The issue that the Pharisees had with Jesus’ disciples was not about their hygiene. It is a challenge to Jesus’ whole ministry. From the point of view of the Pharisees, a person couldn’t be from God and not wash his hands before dinner in accordance with the tradition. The practice itself of washing hands for ritualistic purification is what Jews then and today call the n’tilat-yadayim, which is done to remove impurities that you may have acquired by touching ceremonially impure things, such as products in the marketplace. To perform the n’tilat-yadayim, you would simply rinse your hands all the way up to the wrists with water. Why? Because your home is your temple and your dining table is your altar and the food on it is your sacrifice and you are the priest (cohen). Therefore, being that the Tanakh requires the cohanim to be ceremonially pure before offering sacrifices on the Temple altar, the Oral Torah requires the same before eating a meal.
Jesus challenges them that it is not the ritual purification of hands, cups, kettles, etc., although this is important also for sanitary purposes, a person is guaranteed an interior purification. Rather, it is not through this ritual that makes this person clean or unclean. But rather, the heart of morality is no other than the heart of a person which is pure in disposition toward God and His poeple. That is why Jesus says to the Pharisees by quoting Isaiah’s prophecy: “These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines mere human precepts,” (vv. 6-7).
The motivation for our actions as Christians must be hearts full of love. Performing actions without love is just paying God lip service. What matters is the motivation of our actions. What matters is what is inside of us. Sin springs from hatred and selfishness within a person and takes its expression in the terrible actions enumerated at the end of the Gospel reading, fornication, murder, theft, adultery, etc. Virtue springs from hearts full of the love of God and responds with charity, kindness, and upright decent behavior.