The Genesis of Good and Evil, Fifth Wednesday (I), February 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Josephine Bakhita
February 8, 2023
Gen 2:4-9.15-17, Ps 104, Mk 7:14-23

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Gospel today Jesus asks the disciples, “Are even you likewise without understanding?” Lest we fail to understand the absolutely revolutionary point Jesus is making in today’s Gospel, let’s take some time to do what he asks, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.”
• Jesus was continuing his conversation with the Scribes and the Pharisees after their criticism that Jesus’ disciples ate their meals with ritually unwashed hands. The Scribes had determined that in order for someone to be pleasing to God they needed to obsess about ritual impurity, washing their hands twice with one-and-a-half egg shells full of water, and washing pots, jugs, beds, themselves and any other thing that had touched Gentiles or things not consecrated to the Lord. Jesus yesterday called them hypocrites because the word hypocrite means actor and they were, frankly, just pretending to be faithful to God, substituting human precepts for God’s word and will. Today Jesus extended the conversation to something that would have astonished the disciples, something that would have been totally revolutionary. He said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” This point was revolutionary because it was precisely things from the outside that the Jews of Jesus’ day thought would make them impure. We remember that Judas Maccabeus and so many of his heroic contemporaries were willing to lay down their lives on the battlefield because the Greeks, 150 years before Christ, were trying to force the Jews to eat pork. They refused. Many people were martyred. Many Jews today still refuse to eat meat unless it’s kosher, unless all the blood has dripped out. Jesus was saying that the food we eat ultimately can’t make us impure before God. In doing this, St. Mark comments, “He thus declared all foods clean.” This is something that would take even the disciples a long time to come to grips with: St. Peter, for example, needed a vision in Joppa to help him to recognize that Jesus was not asking that Jews follow the scribal dietary laws.
• What does make us impure before God? Jesus says it’s “the things that come out from within,” and then he defines them: “Evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” It’s from the tree of the heart that either good fruit or bad fruit comes. And where a person’s treasure is, there will the heart be. Does the heart treasure God and the things of God or does it desire evil? God wants us not to have “hearts far from” him, but hearts that are fully united to him. The type of purity he cares about is a pure heart that leads to pure hands, to pure speech, to pure vision, to thoughts, words and deeds of pure love.
• In the first reading, we see the beginning of an illustration of what happens when one’s heart is not purely united to the Lord. We see where sin comes from. In the account of our beginnings in the Book of Genesis, we see that God placed Adam in the garden and gave everything over to him, to cultivate and care for God’s creation. He gave him only one restriction: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” God didn’t place the tree there as bait to trip Adam up. He didn’t create it as a temptation. The tree symbolized good and evil, ultimately life and death. To eat of its fruit meant to eat of evil and consume death, knowing that we become what we eat. Everything else in the garden, we know, was created “good” and the human being was created “very good.” God, in giving this restriction, was reminding Adam to desire what was good and do it. But as we’ll see on Friday in the account of the Fall, Adam and Eve couldn’t resist the allure of the fruit of the Tree of communion with good and evil. Genesis will tell us that they “saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes and desirable for gaining wisdom.” They started to covet from the heart. That happened after they had begun to distrust God at the word of the Serpent who convinced them that God was a liar in telling them that eating of its forbidden fruit would prove fatal. “You certainly will not die!,” the serpent exclaimed. “No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” God had created us in his image and likeness and desired us to be like Him, but according to God’s wisdom rather than according to evil desire. But Eve and Adam took the diabolical bait that pretended that evil was good and sinned. It came from their heart. They were defiled before they even took the first bite. It wasn’t the physical act of masticating a piece of forbidden fruit that ruptured their relationship with God, with each other and within themselves, but their heart’s desire to obtain what the serpent mendaciously promised they would receive through that consumption. Jesus’ whole mission was to heal our heart, to take away the hearts that had become stony through sin and to restore a heart that is pure, a heart that trusts God, a heart that says yes, a heart that treasures God’s word and seeks to conform itself to God’s infinite goodness. Regardless of where our heart is right now, God wants to help us draw closer to him, to allow him to heal whatever parts of our heart that might give rise to evil, lustful, greedy, malicious, deceitful, envious, arrogant, and foolish thoughts and deeds, and to thank Him for all the goodness he has given and to enter into communion, not with evil, but with the God who is goodness incarnate.
• Someone with the type of good heart that desires what God desires, that places its treasure in God and in the things of God, beat firmly within the breast of Saint Josephine Bakhita. She had suffered tremendously as a slave, but it didn’t change her heart, because her heart belonged to God, and because of that she has become a symbol of purity even in the most impure circumstances. When Pope Benedict wrote his beautiful encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi, he featured her. She was born in the Darfur region of Sudan about 1869 (there were no records and no one knew for sure). When she was 9, she was kidnapped by Arab Muslim bandits, forced to convert to Islam, and then sold into slavery on five different occasions to six different owners. As was the custom with Sudanese slaveowners at the time, she was repeatedly beaten as a little girl, even when she was prompt in doing what was commanded. On one occasion, one or her masters showed up with flour, salt and razor blades to brand her. With the flour, the owner sketched on her breasts, belly and arms 114 intricate designs and then with the razor blades cut into her skin according to those patterns. While she was bleeding and in enormous pain, the master then poured salt into the wounds so that they would never heal and she would always be branded. To those wounds were added another 30 indelible scars over the course of her enslavement. She was eventually sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum. This was the first time she wasn’t beaten when she was told to do things. When the political situation destabilized, the consul needed to leave the country and he took along with him Bakhita — a name that means “fortunate,” given to her by one of her owners, because she couldn’t remember the name her parents had given her, so great was the trauma of her capture and her beatings. He gave her to the service of friends when he arrived back in Italy, where she helped to raise a baby as a nanny. When the owners were preparing to return to the Sudan after the political situation had improved, they temporarily entrusted Bakhita and the little girl to the care of the Canossian Sisters in town. It was there that Bakhita was really exposed to Christianity for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a bloody Italian crucifix was unforgettable. She recognized that the one whom Christians adored as Lord and Master must be able to understand her pain, since he had been lacerated in his scourging just as severely as she had been repeatedly whipped and then sliced up with razor blades. When the family returned from the Sudan to take Bakhita and their daughter with them to Africa, Bakhita refused. A lawsuit followed that under Italian law in general and under a law freeing Sudanese slaves in particular, the tribunal declared her to be free. Insofar as she was now over 18, she could stay. She was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret and confirmed, made her first Communion from the hands of the future St. Pius X, and was eventually accepted as a Canossian Sister, where she served for the next 44 years as a cook, sacristan and portress. She was always so grateful for the teaching of her new true Parón or “Master” — not a slave master but a Magister, or teacher, teaching her the wisdom of how to live, love and die so as to live forever —  and she always sought not only to live according to that wisdom but to pass it on to others. Even though she had never received much education, the school girls used to line up at the door of the school just for her to pat them on the head, because she was able to teach them the wisdom of life, love and trust. The greatest lesson she taught, however, is the treasure we have in the Redeemer and his love. She was asked by one of the students what she would say to her slave masters if she were to encounter them. She replied unhesitatingly, “If I were to meet the slave-traders who kidnapped me and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands, for if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian and religious today.” She looked at everything through the eyes of the wondrous treasure of faith, and the gift we receive is so great that it justified, she implied, many years in brutal slavery. As Pope Benedict wrote about her in his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope Spe Salvi, “She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron,’ before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. … The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.” Her experience of Christ’s triumph and the desire to share it with others became the great desire of her pure heart. Rather than being filled with evil, lustful, greedy, malicious, deceitful, envious, arrogant, and foolish thoughts, she was filled with God.
• The evil that began with coveting from the heart the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was redeemed by the new Tree of Life, which was planted on Calvary in the Cross. We’re preparing now to receive the fruit of that life-giving tree: Jesus’ own body, blood, soul and divinity. Let us remember that this gesture is not just a physical act, because the mere physical reception of holy communion itself alone cannot sanctify us. What sanctifies us is our cooperation with Jesus’ self-giving, our genuinely desiring this gift, loving the One who gives himself, receiving Holy Communion not just in our mouths but in our heart. Today we thank the Lord for giving us the grace to hear what he says with understanding. Let us receive him today in our heart so that from that heart may proceed deeds like those that emanated from Saint Josephine to the praise and glory of God the Father and for the sanctification of the world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download