22nd Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2018

It seems hard for us to make sense of the attitude of the Pharisees and the Jerusalem scribes we encountered in today’s Gospel passage. How could they be so off the point and yet so sure of themselves? Yet if we dig a little below the surface, we discover that we share many of their attitudes and practices.

At the time of Jesus, Palestine had been an occupied territory for quite some time. It had been defeated by the Greek ruler, Alexander the Great, who put his successors in charge of the country; and about fifty years before Jesus, the Romans under Pompey had taken over from the Greeks. Galilee particularly came under foreign domination.

Given the cultural, as well as the military, superiority of first the Greeks, and then the Romans, many Jews felt under pressure to adopt pagan ideas and practices, and gradually to be absorbed by the kind of mini-globalisation, or multi-culturalism, that was in the air, and to abandon their own religion and its practices. The wealthy elites, represented by the priestly and aristocratic families, were the first to inculturate. It was a lay movement, led by Pharisees, that tried to maintain the orthodoxy, the distinctness, the separateness, of the Jewish people and their religion.

They emphasized the difference of the God of Israel, God’s separateness, God’s holiness. If the priests began to abandon their need to be holy, they would take over from them and encourage all true believers to keep themselves separate, distinctive, holy. They would take on the distinct practices that the priests used to observe to make their identity quite clear, and add even more. They recognized the importance of making them clearly visible – practices that had real symbolic meaning to them, but not much intrinsic relationship to God. They looked on their Greek and Roman occupiers as enemies, and, in order to maintain their religious and spiritual identity, sought to spell out clearly the boundaries between “us” and “them”. God is “our God”. Traces of the same dynamic can be seen in today’s First Reading from Deuteronomy: “What great nation is there that has its gods so near as the Lord our God is to us…?” For them, the just man was the one who, as today’s Responsorial Psalm proclaimed, “holds the godless in disdain”.

Jesus’ sense of God was of a God of all people, of all nations; a God who had no favourites, who loved all people. His God was not a separate, unattainable God, but a God who forgives, who is love.  His God is honoured, not by irrelevant acts of ritual purity and kosher ways of cooking kosher meals, but is met and served by “coming to the help of orphans and widows in their need”. God’s people are to be, as today’s letter from St James put it, “a sort of first-fruits of all that he has created” – the symbol, the assurance and the workers for the universal harvest yet to ripen.

Yet here lies the challenge. We need to be constantly at work in our world, not afraid of our world, loving our world, forgiving our world; yet also, again as St James put it, “keeping ourselves uncontaminated by the world”. The blinding power of the Mystery of Sin seems to reside especially in our cultures, in our institutions, in the attitudes and practices we take so easily for granted. Despite all that Jesus said to the contrary, how come so many of us Christians see no problem in the slogans: controlling our borders, calling asylum-seekers illegals, making profit the dominant motive of economic activity at the expense of persons and of the fragile environment, forgetting those on the edge and continuing to reduce the sustenance of people whom the economy cannot find ways to employ?

Somehow, we need to find ways to support each other to see beyond the blindness caused by the sin of the world, to get in touch with “our hearts”, as Jesus said, so that God, the “Father of all light”, might enlighten us and share with us his sense of the dignity with which he has graced us human persons and all creation.