22nd Sunday Year B

See Commentary on Mark 7:1-13 & Mark 7:14-23


Homily 1 - 2006

One problem facing Jesus - and later on, Mark’s community - was a problem not peculiar simply to Pharisees, but to all people who take religion seriously.  Jesus had real problems with Pharisees precisely because they took their religion seriously. Unlike a lot of others, they cared about what Jesus was saying and doing - because he did in fact behave differently, indeed, critically.  He was a problem for them. Jesus criticised the traditional ways in which many things were done. They were concerned enough to see that, and to feel it strongly.

Why did he have trouble with their loyalty to time-honoured traditions?  Basically because the detail had become more important than the essential. It had become important in itself.  What mattered for them was how things have always been done. But the why had often become lost from view in the process.

Why did some Pharisees, some Jews, get hung up on dietary regulations? Why, like them, do a lot of people get hung up on procedural issues? on the ways things are done?  There are a variety of reasons, I believe.

Regulations are clear and specific; their observance – or otherwise – is clearly seen, whereas values and attitudes are not so precise or so visible. For example, if a person genuflects before the Blessed Sacrament, it is specific; it’s visible. Whereas what their inner attitude towards Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament – where their heart is - may not be clear or visible. Because the ways of doing things are specific and clear, they can absorb our attention.

As well, noticeable, visible, different behaviours easily identify people. In the old days, Catholics would not eat meat on Fridays. They wouldn’t eat after midnight if they were going to Communion the next day. People knew they were Catholics.  And just as Sunday Mass, Friday abstinence, fasting from midnight, identified Catholics to others, it also gave Catholics a sense of identity and of belonging. It strengthened their sense of who was and who wasn’t.

Whether Catholics deeply respected the human dignity of others, whether they loved their neighbour, was not so clear and identifiable – and certainly didn’t identify them, whether to themselves or to others. Because they weren’t what was easily noticed, they weren’t necessarily seen as so important.

Yet Jesus insisted that what mattered was what is going on in the heart. That will have some practical expressions – as Jesus noted: theft, murder, adultery – that are easily seen. But it’s often less noticeable whether people’s hearts are governed by pride, avarice, folly, etc., (especially if that’s what the rest of the world is up to) or instead by mercy, compassion and justice.

Let’s forget about the Pharisees for a moment and focus on ourselves. What are some of the things that most upset some people in the Church today? What upsets, worries you?  Perhaps people not coming to Mass, or the lack of the usual signs of respect and reverence in Church, or some of the ways in which Mass is celebrated. Do we ask why Mass is so important?

Well … Jesus asked us to remember him this way, to remember his death and resurrection, not just that they happened, but why they happened.  Why did he die? Why was he killed? Because he insisted that people, societies, synagogues recognise and respect the inherent dignity of every person simply because they are precious to God and loved by God. Do we get worried much by what worried Jesus?

The followers of Jesus are not conspicuous for their stand for justice – like Jesus.  Are our hearts in sync with the heart of Jesus? Is our priority that of Jesus? As he said on one occasion: What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.  I sometimes wonder if we as Catholics were particularly noted for our relentless and consistent insistence on justice for all, in our own nation, in our globalising world, would there be more people joining us at Mass? or fewer?


Homily 2 - 2015

Today is Refugee and Migrant Sunday. And here am I up front talking about it. I feel quite phoney, because I do so little about the plight particularly of Refugees. I feel for them to some extent, which only makes things worse. Why do I do so little, beyond signing an occasional online petition? Is it a kind of “Refugee Fatigue: It’s too hard; it’s too unpopular; I’m tired of feeling guilty?” I’m not quite sure where my energy has gone.

All three of today’s Readings had me thinking about the issue of refugees. In the first, Moses was addressing the migrating Hebrew slaves fleeing from oppression and injustice in Egypt, just before they invaded the already-occupied Holy Land. No “With your permission, please!” They needed somewhere. The nearest region was not suitable – they had been wandering around the Sinai Peninsula for forty years. They just forcibly took over the next suitable place.

The Second Reading identified “pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father” as practical help of the powerless and oppressed. And, like any decent father, God does not have favourites among his children – all alike have equal dignity and value; though, again like any decent father, God does take particular interest in, and directs his energy towards, those most in need, to those struggling against oppression and injustice.

The Gospel today looked at Pharisees, men who genuinely tried to make every action of their day remind them of their God, just as we used to bless ourselves before eating or praying, bow our heads at the name of Jesus, genuflect on entering the church, refrain from eating meat on Fridays, etc.. Jesus had no problem with wanting to bring God into everyday life, but his question was more, “Who is the God you seek to honour? And what are God’s priorities?” Jesus wanted every action of his day to remind him of his Father, too; but his Father looked beyond familiar practices to people’s hearts. In fact, Jesus’ Father was a God of mercy, and Jesus sought to make every action of his day an expression of mercy flowing out from his own heart. And he thought the Pharisees could well do the same.

Our nation claims that by turning back the boats, asylum seekers have been saved from drowning. That is true. But what is the motivation? What is going on in our hearts? Does our action flow from a deep and beautiful concern for refugees’ lives and dignity? Or do we simply not want them inconveniently seeking our mercy and protection? After all, they might disturb in some way our well-ordered ways and our comfortable standard of living.

It is hard to know what to do, and why. Why can we not simply admit as much, and not pretend to be righteous? The world is facing unprecedented strain from vast numbers of people seeking asylum from oppression in their home countries. There are literally millions of them, desperate and helpless. Though most of them at the moment are fleeing armed conflict, many are increasingly being displaced by a deteriorating environment that can no longer support them. And we might well ask, Who is supplying the arms? And who is responsible for the deteriorating environment?

Global political decisions are beyond us. But democratic governments are to some extent influenced by the educated opinions of their populations. If we care to ignore the steadily worsening situation, we might well ask, What is motivating our ignorance? What is motivating our failure to engage? What is going on in our hearts? Our hearts - that is where God’s attention is directed.

The world’s problems are interconnected. Pope Francis thinks we are increasingly treating people and the material world as objects, commodities for the enjoyment of the lucky, the wealthy and the powerful. He says that we need to get to know our hearts. I need what Francis calls a “contemplative conversion”.


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.


 

Homily 4 - 2021

In the course of his Gospel, Mark wrote about a variety of hostile engagements that Jesus had with various groups of Pharisees. But Mark was not so interested in simply giving us a history lesson. Jesus had been off the scene for thirty years by the time that Mark began to write his Gospel. What he was doing in writing about the Pharisees of Jesus’ time was really about addressing the “Pharisee” in all of his readers — and that includes us.

Today’s Gospel incident is meant for me, for you.

Jesus called them hypocrites. In his day, however, “hypocrite” simply referred to play-actors in a theatre production. In a play, actors play the role of someone else. And there lies the tendency in all of us. We do our best to look good before others. The problem is that we can consider ourselves in fact to be good. More often than not, we are quite oblivious to many of our faults. It is a failing of us as individuals. It is a failure so often of the broader culture.

At the moment most people are quite disturbed by what is happening in Afghanistan. We had gone in there to fight nearly twenty years ago — to fight for and champion democracy, freedom, particularly freedom for women and minority groups. We prided ourselves, and spoke to them, of respect, humanity, truth and virtue. But so often we did not live that way. We killed insurgents, or trained and equipped some local groups to do so. In the process, however, we killed many more innocent civilians than insurgents. We lived with that, by categorising the casualties as “collateral damage”— their deaths unfortunate but necessary. No wonder the Taliban could virtually walk into Kabul with minimum resistance — they were more welcome than the allies.

Why did Australia really go there in the first place, and then stay there for twenty years? I think, if we are honest, we did so because we wanted to be accepted as special friends of the United States in the hope that they will look after us in the case of future military threats on us. And the United States were there to avenge the humiliation of the “9/11” attacks — but spoke of their involvement in terms of a crusade of good against evil. If only it were good against evil! As it happens, Afghanistan also has huge resources of invaluable minerals, including uranium.

Personally, I shuddered as I was watching the ABC News on Friday night when I heard the American President say with regard to Isis-K, who had just killed 12 Americans and at least 60 innocent Afghans: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” He felt free to say that, no doubt, because he believed that the majority of people in the United States would agree with him. It suited their image — to play tough and to look strong.

The Scottish poet, Robbie Burns, once wrote: “O that God the gift would gi’e us to see ourselves as others see us” — very much today’s Gospel message. Who am I in actual fact? What do I really value? Might I have come to a more fruitful knowledge of my inner self if I had spent as much energy on that as on looking acceptable to others? Am I afraid? or just one more unconscious casualty of the culture in which I am inevitably immersed?