August 30, 2009 Cycle B
Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-8 James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8,14,15,21,23
It is now the season of teachers. School has started, parents are relieved, and teachers are once again at the head of the classroom. Teachers deserve and receive a lot of respect. Perhaps teachers get more respect, because they have the power of the grade book. Lawyers have their law books, but teachers have their grade books.
That’s what we see in today’s Gospel – Jesus the Divine Teacher, a very special teacher. When we see Him He is with the Pharisees carrying His grade book. But before we look at the grades that the Pharisees received, we need to go back and consider what lesson it was the Pharisees were being graded on. For that we need to go back a few thousand years in the history of Israel to consider an unprecedented moment in human history.
We go back to when God chose a rag tag bag of wandering Semites to be a Chosen People. God entered into a special relationship of love with these people. He entered into a Covenant with Israel and said, “I will be your God and you will be My people.” And to preserve that unique relationship of love God gave the Chosen People the Commandments. These were the rules for living that would preserve that relationship.
The law of the Commandments were not given as an end to themselves, they were always intended as a means to an end. They were intended as a means for preserving this incredible love relationship, which God had established. Now we come forward to the time of Christ and the Pharisees that we meet in our Gospel today.
In one of his books the Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, has a character who says about another person, “He got all A’s, but flunked life!” That is essentially what Jesus the Divine Teacher is saying to the Pharisees, “You get all A’s in keeping the Commandments as you understand them, but you flunk life.”
The Pharisees and many others at the time of Jesus were focused on a complex set of rules for following the law. But in some important ways, however, they had neglected the Covenant of Love. They had lost their focus on what the essence of the Covenant – a loving relationship with God and all of creation. Someone said the Pharisees had moved religion from the Sanctuary into the kitchen – and that is what their questioning reveals. They have the Lord of life, the Lord of the dance, sitting in front of them, and they wanted to talk about the rules for washing hands! They got all A’s, but they flunked life.
There is something unsettling about this scene with the Pharisees. It is easy for us to nod and agree that “yes, yes, the Pharisees got it wrong. They deserve bad grades.” But what nags at my conscience is that we know that the lesson here is not limited simply to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were “after all, at the time of Jesus, respected religious people. Like us, they were not thought of as bad people.”
As so we do feel compelled today to ask ourselves, “What grades would the Divine Teacher give us?” Do we in some ways get all A’s, but flunk life? Do we in our families, at work, and in our Church, focus narrowly on a strict observance of a multitude of rules, but fail to seek out and celebrate truly loving relationships? We don’t need a preacher to point out the many ways in which we may be flunking life. And in our Church, do we at times move our religious focus from the Sanctuary to the kitchen? If the Eucharist is for us more about details than about the joyful celebration of God’s love, namely in prayer, song, even sometimes dance – then our religious experience may be more pharisaic than Christian.
There is one very reassuring thought in all of this. We are being daily taught by a most unusual teacher. Not the teacher of the year or even of the century, but the Teacher of all time and eternity. Like the many good teachers so many of us have known, this teacher will never give up on us. This Teacher is eternally patient, eternally loving. ThisTeacher does not want us to fail. Our Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, has shown us convincing, through His death of the cross, that He will make the ultimate sacrifice. He does this all that we might too share in that loving relationship with God, a promise to our own ancestors in faith long long ago. Let us gather now around the altar to rejoice in that knowledge and celebrate it in our Eucharist.
Amen. Amen. Msgr. Tom, Pastor Christ the King