Becoming Grateful Doers of the Word, 22nd Sunday (Year B), August 29, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 29, 2021
Deut 4:1-2.6-8, Ps 15, James 1:17-18.21-22.27, Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Saint James challenges every one of us here today in the same way he challenged the readers of his letter 1950 years ago. After we have just listened to the word of God in Sacred Scripture, the apostle tells us: “Humbly welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you.” And then he gives us the criterion to help us to determine if we really have welcomed it: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.”
• There obviously must have been several people in his day who liked to come just to listen to the word of God without any intention to put it into practice. But why did St. James say that they were lying to themselves? I think the reason is because if they were thinking that all God cared about was for us merely to show up on the Christian Sabbath and listen to the Scriptures, they were deceived, because God didn’t give us Sacred Scripture to win literary awards, or because he wanted to entertain us, but because he wanted to change our life. And if we come to hear the word of God without desiring for it to have a radical impact on our our life, to act on it, to give full rein to its power to save us, then God tells us that we, like Christians in St. James’ day, are triply-deceived. We’re deceived about its purpose, about its power, and about our dramatic need for it.
• We see a similar truth testified to in today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses conveyed to the Israelites what set Israel apart from other nations: the statutes and decrees the Lord had given them to help them live in fidelity to the covenant God had made with them. But Moses stressed that this gift was not supposed to sit on a metaphorical bookshelf. He repeatedly told them, “Hear the statutes and decrees that I am teaching you to observe,” “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord your God,” and“Observethem carefully.” They were entrusted as words to be done and lived with gratitude. With tremendous pride, Moses asks aloud, “What great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” They were called to observe the commandments not as slaves merely doing what they’re told, or as followers carry out a burdensome duty, but as people full of love for God and made ever more free the more faithfully they learn through the statutes and decrees to love God with their whole mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. At their best, the Israelites saw the law of the Lord not as a fence to hem them in, but as a signpost pointing the way to true freedom, real love and lasting happiness.
• But Moses gave them a warning with regard to God’s law. He said, “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord, your God, … you shall not addto what I command you nor subtractfrom it.” From the beginning, he was telling them there would be a temptation to change God’s word. It’s pretty easy to see why people might want to subtract from it the parts of it that aren’t easy or pleasant. But there’s also the temptation to change it by adding to it, by using the reverence we have for God to take it in another direction that in fact distorts it.
• This is what happened to the Pharisees and Scribes, whom Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel in the dramatic scene in which the two closely associated groups criticize Jesus and his disciples for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Mark describes the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster what they called ritual purity and that, over time, was treated as if it were part of the Ten Commandments. The scribes and the Pharisees taught that everyone needed to wash his or her hands in two directions with one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom, drying the other hand with the outside of a closed fist. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if these collectively neurotic, hygienic washings of hands — and similar practices with cups, jugs, kettles and beds — were what helped them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other.
• Jesus, the truth incarnate, responded to their accusation and to the false theology behind it with force and clarity. He called them hypocrites — literally, actors or fakers — and cited the Prophet Isaiah against them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” And then Jesus told them: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”They had changed what God had given to them, substituting their own humanly developed systems of cleanliness for what God himself wanted, adding these to the Word of God and in the process subtracting from the Word of God things far more important.
• Jesus’ words that the Pharisees and the Scribes were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to his listeners. The Scribes and Pharisees were considered as extraordinarily faithful Jews. They studied the Bible intensely down to the letter. Many had memorized it. They committed themselves to live it and go far beyond the minimum. They went to the synagogue not just every Saturday but most other days. They prayed at least three times per day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like others on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes on their whole income, rather than just on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And he was right! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who ended up conspiring to kill Jesus, working together with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and Romans to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from him! They were in fact not authentically religious at all but profound hypocrites, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers. They were doers, in fact, of what God had explicitly forbidden.
• After responding to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about what God wants in terms of purity. He wants usto be pure, not just the palms of our hands. And so he talked about purity and impurity of heart. In the Sermon on the Mount, you remember, Jesus praised the “pure of heart,” saying, “They shall see God,” and reminded us, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.” Jesus had come into the world not to show us how to wash our hands but to give us a heart transplant, to take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, cleansing us so that we might receive within God’s love expressed in the word of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then put it into practice by loving God and love others as God had loved us first.
• And so Jesus said to all those assembled,“Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” He emphasized that nothing coming from the outside, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person — like a woman at her time of the month, or a leper, or anyone who has come into contact with either — or even anything we eat, can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart, which in the Biblical understanding is the real core of the person, pointing to what we love and desire. It’s what’s in the heart — and the actions that flow from the heart — that renders a person pure or impure, holy or sinful, Jesus says, emphasizing that it is from the heart, from what we desire, that sins like “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, and folly,” all come. These evil desires, Jesus says, are what make someone impure, and we see several of them, especially malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, and murderous thoughts on evident display in the actions of the Pharisees.
• Jesus wants all of us to hear him and understand the truths he is describing. He wants this conversation with the Pharisees to be consequential in the way you and I understand our faith and live it. And so we need to ask, “Am I a hypocrite like the Pharisees or do I live the faith with integrity? Do I cling to human traditions as a substitute for authentic clinging to God? In the core of my being, what is the treasure of my heart? Do I desire chastity or to have my lusts fulfilled? Do I live with spiritual poverty or with greed and envy? Am I faithful to God, to my family, and to others or am I adulterous? Do I desire the good of others or wish them evil? Do I desire to praise God with my life or am I comfortable with blasphemy just because so many others are doing so with their words or their lifestyle? Am I humble or arrogant? Do I desire divine wisdom — do I study Scripture, the Catechism and the doctors of the Church, do I pray — or do I practically desire the folly of worldly ideas?
• There are many today who try to substitute human traditions for God’s commandments. They disregard Moses’ warning and subtract from the word of God or try to add to it. They pick and choose what commandments to follow. They are concerned only with doing the “minimal obligations” of the faith without striving to be holy. They add their liturgical preferences to God’s law and focus more on liturgical form and rubrics than they do on God in the Sacraments. They substitute woke or politically correct ideas on human sexuality, gender, marriage and family for what God has revealed. They supplant the commandment not to kill to permit the destruction of human life in the womb or in hospitals and nursing homes. They replace God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves with justifications for treating migrants and refugees (like those now fleeing Afghanistan), or those of other races or religions, with hardened hearts. Like the people of Saint James’ day, who were deceived simply because they were listening to the Word of God and knew it intellectually but were neglecting orphans and widows, not controlling their tongues, and allowing themselves to be stained by the world, so many today similarly fail to do anything when they when they encounter abandoned mothers and children or find their neighbor in need, who gossip as much as non-believers do, who not bear the stains of the world but stain others.
• The point of the Gospel is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, but to help us examine our hearts and make a commitment to ensure our hearts are as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. It’s to honor the Lord with both our lips and our hearts. It’s to cling to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness. It’s to take great advantage of the Sacrament of Confession in which God power-washes our insides. It’s to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus condemns: to commit to chastity, generosity, self-sacrifice, faithful love, goodness, truthfulness, integrity, happiness over others’ gifts, praise of God and others, humility and wisdom. It’s to respond to Jesus who says, “Hear me all of you and understand,” with great attention, comprehension, and action.
• The great litmus test for us to determine whether we’re idle listeners is to ask how we respond to the readings of God at Mass. Today is supposed to change us, and not just in tiny ways but big ones, like 30, 60 or 100 ways, to use the numbers Jesus gave in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. If in a week’s time there’s no noticeable difference, in first in our hearts and then in our deeds, then we’re simply not attentive listeners and doers of God’s word. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus said that his family members, his real brothers and sisters, are those who “hear the word of God and do it” (Lk 8:21). We are called like our mother and His, who herself heard the word of God and obeyed it (11:28), to treasure that word in our heart and to give it our flesh, so that we become living commentaries of it for the whole world to see. As we prepare to receive the word-made-flesh at this Mass, we ask Jesus, who calls us to imitate him as a doer of the word, to give us the help he knows we need to accomplish it. If we respond to those graces, then we will realize the truth of today’s responsorial psalm — “The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord” — not just in this life but forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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