Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 28, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
August 28, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when, after several weeks of focusing on Jesus’ words to us in St. John’s Gospel about Jesus’ self-gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist, we return to St. Mark’s Gospel where Jesus speaks to us about the type of homage he asks of us.
• It’s a dramatic scene in which Jesus and his followers are criticized by the Pharisees for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Jesus, the truth incarnate, responds with force and clarity. He calls them hypocrites and cites 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 tells the Pharisees: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”
• Jesus’ words that the Pharisees 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 Pharisees were considered as extraordinarily faithful Jews. They went to the synagogue every Saturday. They prayed at least three times a 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 washed before every meal. 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, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers.
• But they thought they were exemplary believers because of the way they scrupulously adhered to their human traditions above God’s clear commandments. St. 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. They needed to wash their 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. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if these collectively neurotic, hygienic washings of hands, cups, jugs, kettles and beds were what helped them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other.
• In response to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about the purity God himself wants. In the Sermon on the Mount, 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 the love of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then love God and love others as God had loved us first.
• And so Jesus says 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, 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. The heart 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. Jesus states 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, 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? What is the treasure of my heart? In the core of my being, do I desire chastity or having my lusts fulfilled? Do I live with spiritual poverty or with greed and envy? Am I faithful to God, to my spouse, 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 and 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 substitute football stadiums for Churches on Sunday, they cling to liturgical preferences more than they do to God in the Sacraments, they substitute woke or politically correct ideas on human sexuality, gender, sex, 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, or the poor and needy, or those of other races, or religions, or races with hardened hearts. We can multiply the examples.
• But the point of the Gospel is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, rather than examining our own hearts. It’s to 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 Gospel on which this Sunday’s homily was based was: 

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