Bringing Our Hearts Closer to the Lord as Doers of the Word, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 1, 2024
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 the homily: 

• It’s great to be able to say, finally, a hearty welcome to all new students and a spirited welcome back to all those returning. The beginning of a new academic year is a time of great hope and expectation, as well as an occasion sometimes for some questions and anxiety, as we begin a new adventure. God is present, here, to be with us and to accompany us with his loving care in successes and struggles, in sickness and health, throughout the months that await and beyond. The start of an academic year is a time for maturely setting some resolutions about the types of priorities and habits we’re going to establish and strive to maintain. One of the most biggest and most important decisions that has to be made is about the role God is going to play in our life: whether we’re going to make time for him; whether we’re going to seek his help or try to do things on our own; whether we’re going to live in or out of accordance with the way he’s wired us, body, soul and conscience; whether, to follow Columbia’s motto, in lumine tuo, videbimus lumen, we’re going to try to see all things in his light or whether we’re going to try to live by some artificial light, or turn off the light and live in darkness. Today’s readings are super important because they put before us two big questions at the beginning of the year: first the role the word of God, and therefore the truth, will play in our life; and, second, the importance of our heart, what it will beat for and love, and whether we will keep it far from God or close, even united, to him. These are two of the big questions that God wants to help us clarify and answer with the help of the readings at Mass this afternoon.
• Let’s begin with the question of the role the Word of God will play in our life this year. In today’s second reading, St. James introduces the subject of the Word of God by describing how God has given us “every perfect gift” including our “birth by the word of truth.” He frames the Word of God as a gift and says that we owe not just physical life but our whole supernatural life beginning in baptism to the word of truth, and more specifically to the One through whom all things were made, to the source of our regeneration, Jesus himself, the Word made flesh and the One who said, “I am the Truth” (Jn 14:6). God is the one who communicates himself to us in human speech and by taking our own humanity. That’s why St. James can encourage us, “Humbly welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you.” Students come to Columbia because there’s a hunger to learn about many subjects and St. James is telling us today that we should have a ravenous hunger to learn from Jesus the Master himself. We should be humble enough to grasp we need what he teaches. We should try to receive what he plants on good soil, so that it will take deep root and bear great fruit. And we should be in awe at what the Word of God can do, because the Word has the power to save us and we need saving.
• Then St. James gives us the criterion to help us to determine if we really have welcomed the Word of God: “Be doers of the word,” he says, “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. To use Jesus’ image from one of his most famous parables, they received the seed of his word on hardened, rocky or thorny soil, rather than good soil, and bore little or no fruit. But why did St. James say that idle listeners were lying to themselves? I think the reason might be because if they were thinking that all God wanted was for them 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 transform our life and through us change the world. And if we come to hear the word of God without desiring for it to have a radical impact on our existence, without intending to act on it, without giving full rein to its power to save us and through us others, 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. The Word of God brought to life creation out of nothing! The Word of God calmed stormy seas, made the deaf hear, dumb speak, blind see, lame walk, healed lepers, exorcised demons, and raised the dead! We’re called not just to hear but to live off every word that comes from God’s mouth.
• We see how great a gift the Word of God is, and what our response to it needs to be, also in today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses conveyed to the Israelites what set the people of 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. God put his divine wisdom in human language and had it written down to guide them individually and as a people. 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 “Observe them carefully.” They were entrusted as words to be observed and obeyed, to be done and lived with gratitude. With tremendous pride, Moses asked aloud, “What great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” They recognized that God’s word, that God’s law and commandments, were a treasure. Just like scientists spend decades in labs trying to discover the secrets of biology and biochemistry or in observatories trying to unlock the secrets of the universe, so the Creator of the World has done us the enormous favor of giving us in his Word the handbook or users’ manual containing so many of the most important things about the way we’ve been made. And if Moses and the Israelites in the desert were able to exclaim how lucky they were to have the first five books of the Bible, if their descendants later could have rejoiced to have the prophetic and wisdom books as well, what should our response be as Christians that we have not only those treasures, but also the Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, and all the letters and works of the New Testament? How incredibly lucky we are! Moses called the Israelites to observe the commandments not as slaves just 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 learned 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 the path to true freedom, real love and lasting happiness. The truth that the Word of God contains is what is meant to set us free, not free to do whatever we please, which can often lead us to slavery and death, but free to flourish fully as God made us and experience life in abundance. But that comes from humbly welcoming God’s word, allowing it to grow within us, to save us, and to change us. It comes from being not just “hearers” of the Word, not just “knowers,” but “doers” of the word. As we prayed in the Psalm, the one who lives in the presence of the Lord is not just the one who knows what is just but one who “does justice,” concretely giving God and others the love that they are due.
• But as we see in the first reading, Moses gave his people a warning with regard to God’s law. He said, “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord, your God, … you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” From the beginning, he was indicating that there would be a temptation to change God’s word. It’s pretty easy to see why many people have sought to subtract from it the parts of it that aren’t easy, pleasant, convenient or in conformity with what one wants to believe and do. Martin Luther tried to eliminate the Book of James from Christian education, deeming it an “epistle of straw” because he didn’t like its passage that faith without works is dead; similarly he effectively eliminated seven Old Testament Books from his translation of the inspired works of the Bible, because they didn’t align with his theological ideas. U.S. founding father and our third president Thomas Jefferson similarly sought to make his own Bible, what’s become known as the Jeffersonian Bible, excising parts of the Gospels he didn’t like, reducing Jesus from a divine person and miracle worker to a moral philosopher, excising eliminating Jesus’ resurrection. Plenty of other people today try to eliminate from the Word of God passages they don’t want to hear or follow, whether about welcoming the stranger or sacrificing for the needy, or receiving little children like we receive Christ, or about forgiving 70 times seven times, or about denying ourselves and picking up our Cross, or about particular sins that they want to treat as quasi-sacraments, or more. If we’re going to be a doer of the Word, we have to be alert to the temptation to eliminate those parts of the word we don’t really want to do.
• But there’s also the temptation to change the Word of God by adding to it, by using the reverence we have for God to take his Word in a 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 these two closely associated groups convene to 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. Over time, such practices, such human traditions, began to be emphasized almost as much as the Ten Commandments. In this case, 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 such collectively neurotic, obsessive-compulsive washings of hands — and similar practices with cups, jugs, kettles and beds — were what would help them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other. Jesus responded to their accusation and to the false theology behind it with strength and clarity. He called them hypocrites — literally, in Greek, “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 de factosubtracting 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 them and to all 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 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 not only on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law but on their whole income. 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, as God, says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And he was of course right! These critics who were doing all of these religious deeds were also the ones who would end up conspiring to kill Jesus, cavorting with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and even the Romans, to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from God despite all of their external practices! They were in fact not authentically religious at all but profound hypocrites, since, despite their washed hands, in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers. They were doers, in fact, not of God’s word but 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 us to be pure, not just our palms and fingers. And so Jesus 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 outside a person, 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. A truly religious person, we prayed in the Psalm, “thinks the truth in his heart” and therefore “slanders not with his tongue,” “walks blamelessly and does justice.” A hypocrite doesn’t. Jesus emphasizes 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. What Jesus wants from us is for our hearts to be as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. He wants us to honor the Lord not just with our lips, but with our hearts, hands, knees, feet, and all our mind, soul and strength; to cling not to our own man-made rules and conventions but to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness; to place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus says flows from a corrupt heart. Therefore, from your heart and mine, he wants us to commit to chastity and integrity instead of unchastity and licentiousness, generosity instead of theft and greed, self-sacrifice instead of murder, faithful love rather than adultery, goodness rather than malice, truthfulness instead of deceit, happiness over others’ gifts instead of envy, praise of God and others rather than blasphemy, humility and wisdom instead of arrogance and folly. It’s to respond to Jesus who says, “Hear me all of you and understand,” with great attention, comprehension, and action.
• It’s good for us at the beginning of the academic year, for some students at the beginning of their university career, to focus in particular on Jesus’ words about the heart. If with the words he put on Isaiah’s lips, he criticized his critics for their hearts being far from him, he obviously desires that our hearts be close to him. If he said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, words and deeds, he desires out of our hearts to come holy thoughts, truthful words, and loving deeds. Are our hearts close to him? Do we want them to be close to him? We could obviously look at whether our hearts to desire truly to know his word so that we might be doers of it; if so, then we will take advantage of our time at Columbia to come to know God’s word intimately, like, for example, by participating in the FOCUS Bible studies that will start this month, or listening religiously to Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast. But insofar as we are in the heart of the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States, in which with gratitude we acknowledge, celebrate, adore and share Jesus, the Word made flesh on our altars, in our Tabernacles, and even within us in Holy Communion, I think it’s important that we ask, with humility and sincerity, whether we’re idle listeners of the Word-made-flesh, deceiving ourselves, or doers of the Word-made-flesh. The Church’s teaching on the Eucharist can’t just remain intellectual or theological; it must become practical. It’s not enough to honor the Lord with our lips, merely stating — and believing — that after the words of consecration, the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Precious Blood of Christ. We also need to honor this awesome mystery with our hearts and conform our lives to this reality. Are our hearts really close to the Eucharistic Jesus or are our hearts far from him? Does this show in the way we prioritize the Mass, pray the Mass, and make time to spend with Jesus in adoration? Do truly Eucharistic deeds flow from within our hearts — in which we give our own body, blood, sweat, tears, time and things to God and others, as we seek to do “this” in memory of Jesus  — or, rather, do self-centered and even selfish thoughts, words and actions flow, even after we’ve received Jesus? I mentioned last week and likewise in the past that the most important decision I ever made in college was three weeks into my freshman year at Harvard, when I asked whether there was anything more important I could do on any given day that receive Jesus inside? Knowing that the answer was clearly no, I made a resolution to try to attend daily Mass and by God’s grace I’m still doing so, now 36 years later this month. The desire to keep my heart close to Jesus was what led me also to team with other Catholic students to start adoration at the Catholic Center and to attend various holy hours. It’s what led me to try to bring other students to Jesus at Mass and in prayer and to discover with wonder the incredible gift we have as Catholics, that we have a God so close to us that he hides himself miraculously under the humble appearances of bread and wine so that he can be with us always throughout our university studies and until the end of time, so that he can nourish us from within, so that he can change us from within, save and sanctify us, and little by little, person by person, through us transform the world. And so I would urge you as this year begins and you make some decisions about how you are going to order your time and what your priorities will be, to take to your prayer how you can keep your hearts close to him and to his teachings, and how you can with his help become a true doer of the Word, someone who does justice, and in all the aspects of your life live in his presence.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you
and is able to save your souls.

Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:
to care for orphans and widows in their affliction
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

He summoned the crowd again and said to them,
“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.

“From within people, from their hearts,
come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within and they defile.”

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