Doers of the Word With Hearts United to the Lord, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY
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: 

• Saint James challenges every one of us today in the same way he challenged the readers of his letter more than 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. 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 change 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 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 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 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 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 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. Like we prayed in the Psalm, at their best they sought not just to know what is just but to “do justice” and so “live in the presence of the Lord.”
• But 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 telling them 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 educating, 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, like with the Epistle of James, they didn’t align with his theological ideas. U.S. founding father and third president Thomas Jefferson excised parts of the Gospels he didn’t like, reducing Jesus from a divine person and miracle worker to a moral philosopher, excising even 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 receiving little children like we receive Christ, or about sexual sins, or even, as we’ve seen over the last several weeks, about the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.
• 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 almost as if such practices were as important as 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 such collectively neurotic, obsessive-compulsive hygienic 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, the truth incarnate, responded to their accusation and to the false theology behind it with force 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 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 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! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who would end up conspiring to kill Jesus, conspiring with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and 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 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 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 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, 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.
• 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 our lips, our hearts, our hands, our knees, our feet, and all our mind, soul and strength. It’s to cling to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness. It’s to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus condemns and therefore 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.
• It’s good for us 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. In 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, we need to ask 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, stating that after the consecration the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Precious Blood of Christ, but we need to honor this mystery with our hearts and conform our lives to this reality. Are our hearts close to the Eucharistic Jesus at Mass, in adoration, in life, or far from him? 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?
• That brings us to the great litmus test God gives us to determine whether we’re idle listeners or doers of the Word: how we respond to what God is doing at Mass. The Mass is supposed to change us, and change us big-time, even 30, 60 or 100 ways, to use the numbers Jesus gave in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. As we listen to the Word of God in the Liturgy of the Word, we’re called humbly to welcome it, conscious that God at Mass seeks to plant it within us, because it has the power to save our souls. He wants us to nourish the Word of God within, much like the Blessed Mother whose fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum shows that she wanted her whole life to develop in accordance with God’s word. He wants us to strive to remember it, to pray it, to strive to enflesh it more and more, and to share it with others in all its saving power. He wants us to respond to it like St. Teresa of Calcutta, whose feast we will celebrate this Thursday, responded to God’s Word when he revealed his plans for her on the train to Darjeeling. He wants what he has spoken to us today through Moses, through the Psalm, through James and in the Gospel to purify and transform first our hearts, and then our thoughts, then words and actions, so that we may be missionaries of that saving word and the charity to which it leads in the midst of a world in which that word is often not heard, seen or believed. 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). The Word of God confirms us in our divine filiation and makes us spiritual siblings if we but hear, observe and obey it. This is the path of the saints. As Pope St. Gregory the Great, whose feast we will celebrate on Tuesday, once declared: vita bonorum viva lectio, that the life of the good, the life of the saints, is a living reading of the Word of God. We are supposed to be living, breathing, commentaries of God’s word 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, like the Blessed Mother, Teresa of Calcutta, Gregory the Great and the saints already have, 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: 

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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