Father THOMAS IDERGARD SJ
Homily for 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
2024-09-01
Year B: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Ps 15; James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
St. Lars Catholic Church, Uppsala (English Mass)
Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was about holiness; to be set apart for God: What characterizes it, how is it obtained? This conflict remains relevant, because it ultimately is about salvation.
The Pharisees were a popular religious party in First century Israel. They wanted to safeguard the collective holiness of the Jewish people, as they thought that the covenant with God could only be preserved if all peoples’ actions met certain formal criteria, interpreted from above all the ritual prescripts in the Law of Moses.
Jesus’s attitude can only be understood considering his claim to be the Lawmaker himself. Jesus is today often misunderstood as being against rules, like a religious anarchist or a premature flower power guru. This is not only superficial but wrong. In reality, Jesus contrariwise sharpens moral commandments, and raises the bar for behaviours to express God’s true will. E.g. he bans divorce, introduced in Israel’s law because humans wanted God to confirm theirwishes. I.e. what today is called “modernization” of the faith.
Jesus does not want any “modernization”. Instead, he wants to reveal God’s timeless intentions with his commandments and correct us where we err in understanding. Jesus does not take us “back to basics”, rather “forward into the fundament” he fully reveals! And he does so by giving himself to us as both a yardstick and a concrete help for direction and nourishment, ever present through his and the Father’s Spirit in the Church that he founds, binds himself to, and authorizes to carry his presence in her immutable teachings and seven sacraments.
The aim of Israel’s collective holiness in the Old Testament was to be a people who lived the testimony about the One and true God, and through whom God finally could enter the world and reach all nations. In the first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, we heard God through Moses announce his plan for Israel and the role of his commandments, i.e. the Mosaic Law. This Law consisted by three parts: 1) the moral law, 2) the ritual law – e.g. rules concerning the sabbath, circumcision, purity, food, religious festivals and temple sacrifice – and 3) the law regulating the social and political order.
When God becomes man and fulfils the Old Covenant, the purpose of two of the three parts of the Law is achieved: The religiously shaped social and political rules can now be replaced by secular, civil and criminal legislation, as faith in Israel’s God no longer needs to be carried by a nation, but instead by the New Israel, the Church, held together by Canon law. The same applies to the ritual law. With his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ reveals himself as the final sacrifice, the eternal priest, the living temple and the true sabbath, i.e., as the personalization of right worship, with its summit in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
But what about the third part of the Mosaic Law, the moral law, the manual for being human as it were? It of course remains, as it refers to the natural order in creation. What the precepts directly ask us to do or avoid, we can understand with our natural reason. But when Jesus describes murder as an end station of an inner process of decay, beginning with wrath, and marital infidelity as a top of an ice berg of outlived sexual desires, detached from their divinely ordered purpose; then we understand that true obedience to the moral commandments – continuously upheld by the Church on Christ’s commission, independent of popular opinion – goes deeper and requires something more than we naturally are capable of, because of the wound from original sin. A wound causing us to commit the sins Jesus talked about in the Gospel, making us less virtuous, philosophically seen, and spiritually unclean, seen with the eyes of faith.
True alignment to the moral law, and the inner, spiritual purity it points towards, requires of us to receive supernatural, divine love, i.e. God’s gift of himself for our ultimate good. Instead of being rules imposed from the outside, the commandments, lived through grace from within, become a path of a personal vocation to holiness and a tool for transformation of us, inside out, fighting sin at the root and stepwise replacing it with true freedom.
Consequently, Christ reveals and explains true holiness not as a collective attribute but as a quality within each person who acts, i.e. who lives, by, with and for divine grace. The project for holiness, the growth in communion with God, starts with professing Jesus Christ as Lord of our entire life and thus a will to do his will, in all areas of our lives. Then, divine truth and love can stepwise transform us in a way that includes, but far exceeds, what is prescribed by the moral precepts of the Mosaic and Natural Law. It was described by our second reading from the Book of James, as us doing, from within, “what the word … planted in” us, in order to “save” our “souls … tells” us.
The Pharisaic answer to Jesus is this: “I do not need you for salvation. My doings, according to my set of rules, suffice. I do not want you to change me in any way.” This is the voice of auto-salvation. And although time and circumstances change, it remains the answer, both from us when we want to turn away from one or some of the moral commandments and the Church’s teaching on them, and from a culture permeated by the illusion that just the right political idea, the right leader, idol and influencer, the right identity, the right technical or scientific progress or the right commercial invention, will solve our problems.
There is nothing wrong with e.g. technical progress. On the contrary, it can help a lot. But the wound of original sin and the need for reconciliation will remain in us, and paradise never be a product of ever so great human progress. The greatest of all dangers to us, greater than both wars and climate change, is the Pharisaic attitude – then and now – rejecting Christ’s transformation of us. It underestimates and misunderstands sin and consequently salvation. But sin is not a weakness for us to overcome on or own, or something we do not need to bother about “anymore”. Sin is a condition from which we have to be saved. By Jesus Christ. And only by him.
Let us therefore surrender to him, as he in the Holy Eucharist wants to enter our physical being, to transform us so that we, with renewed and strengthened divine life in us, i.e. Jesus living even stronger in us, can live, as the responsorial psalm today expressed it, “in the presence of the Lord”. Starting already here and now, which is a condition for it to be fulfilled, as God promises through becoming man, in eternal life. Amen.