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: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.28.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

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.