Jesus had finished his ministry in Galilee
and now heads toward Jerusalem.Still in
the north, they stop on the way to Caesarea Philippi, a region which is
associated with Roman Imperial power, and Jewish accommodation to Roman
rule.Ruler of Caesarea Philippi at the
time was the son of King Herod the Great, Philip the Tetrarch.So I think it is important to note that Jesus
asks who people say He is here against the secular power and authority.
Jesus and his
disciples set out
for the villages of
Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked
his disciples,
"Who do people
say that I am?"
They said in reply,
"John the
Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of
the prophets."
And he asked them,
"But who do you
say that I am?"
Peter said to him in
reply,
"You are the
Christ."
Then he warned them
not to tell anyone about him.
He began to teach them
that the Son of Man
must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the
elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and
rise after three days.
He spoke this openly.
Then Peter took him
aside and began to rebuke him.
At this he turned
around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and
said, "Get behind me, Satan.
You are thinking not
as God does, but as human beings do."
He summoned the crowd
with his disciples and said to them,
"Whoever wishes
to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and
follow me.
For whoever wishes to
save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his
life for my sake
and that of the gospel
will save it."
~Mk 7:31-37
I’ve been searching
for new people to provide insight into the Gospel passages, and this homily by Fr.
Stephen Koeth, C.S.C. I thought insightful and very passionate.Fr. Stephan belongs to the Congregation of the
Holy Cross, and he really explains the connection to the cross that is alluded
to in the Gospel passage.Here is Fr. Stephan’s homily.
I think we should also interpret this passage in light of yesterday’s feast day, The Exultation of the Holy Cross.
Sunday Meditation: “Whoever wishes
to come after me must deny himself”
How appropriate is this song, “Take Up Your
Cross” by John Michael Talbot.
In today’s Gospel, we are told Jesus moves
about in the gentile world.Tyre, Sidon,
and the Decapolis are Greco pagan inhabited territories.But here too Jesus will perform a miracle,
and a very significant one.Here He is
fulfilling a miracle prophesied in Isaiah chapter 35, which, lo and behold, is
matched up today’s the lectionary.
Again Jesus left the
district of Tyre
and went by way of
Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of
the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man
who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay
his hand on him.
He took him off by
himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into
the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched
his tongue;
then he looked up to
heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is,
“Be opened!” —
And immediately the
man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment
was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to
tell anyone.
But the more he
ordered them not to,
the more they
proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly
astonished and they said,
“He has done all
things well.
He makes the deaf hear
and the mute speak.”
~Mk 7:31-37
In this little short
explanation Dr. Brant Pitre connects it all.
There is one other allusion that Dr. Pitre
doesn’t touch on in this passage to another part of the Old Testament, and that
is Genesis.When the people who are
witnesses to this miracle say that Jesus “has done all things well,” it is a
slant allusion to Genesis 1:31, “God looked at everything he had made, and
found it very good.”The root of the
word “good” of Genesis is the same the word “well” in Mark, at least in the
Septuagint translation of the Old Testament.So the implication is that Christ is recreating mankind anew, or at
least healing it to a restored state that had been damaged from the fall.
Sunday Meditation: “Be opened!”
Instead of a song this week, how about the
dramatization of this passage in the series The
Chosen
Only The
Chosen could derive humor from that scene.
As
followers of this blog well know, I read the monthly magazine, Magnificat religiously.I particularly read the Gospel readings and
the meditations that go along with it.I
have highlighted several of the meditations here, but frankly in every monthly
issue there are several that could be highlighted as exceptional.Here is one from last month’s issue that’s
been on my mind.
This
meditation is teamed with the Gospel passage, Mt 16:13-23 where Jesus tells the
disciples he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly.Peter responds with “God forbid,” and Jesus
tells Peter, “Get behind me Satan…you are thinking not as God does, but as
human beings do.”So the Gospel is about
the need to suffer.The meditation is
taken from Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. where he describes what our suffering
does for us.
Our Lord asks us to allow
him to work—to allow him to work to reproduce his image in us.Our Lord does not ask us to love suffering in
itself, but to love it as a means of salvation, just as a very bitter medicine
that will give us back our health can be loved.We are not asked to feel his love in a sensible way, but to give proof
of it by persevering, despite tribulations, in the practice of our religious
duties, especially prayer.Jesus expects
us to turn to him with ardent prayer, because he has already decided to hear us
and to lead us much higher than we ourselves could desire.Therefore, we should love the cross for the
love of souls and gladly accept being associated with our Lord in his work of
redemption.
The cross is necessary to
us.The Lord tries us only because he
loves us, because he wishes to assimilate us to himself, to supernatralize our
spirit, to give us more exalted knowledge of ourselves and of him, and also to
give us a stronger love.Together with
humility, the cross develops in us the three virtues that are properly divine
and are the heart of the Christian life: faith, hope, and charity. The cross
makes our soul similar to the soul of Christ, and therefore similar to
God.Sometimes this effect of the cross
is so sublime that it is reflected in the human body.Saint Benedict Joseph Labre was passing
through the streets of Rome one day when an artist, who had visited all the
museums of Italy without finding what he was searching for, stopped him.He begged the saint to follow him and led him
to his room.There, after he had painted
the resemblance of the poor man of Christ, the artist knelt down, kissed his
hands, and exclaimed, “You have the face of Christ!”On another occasion, the poor saint was seen
enveloped by a brilliant light.Emanating from his face were rays that shone with such splendor that he
seemed to be on fire.Such was the fruit
of the cross in the soul of this saint.For such crosses the angels envy us, being unable to give God this
testimony of love.The cross leads all
Christians to the true light of God, the prelude to heaven: Per crucem ad lucem.Through the cross to the light.
~Fr.
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P (from Magnificat,
August 2024, Vol 26, No. 6, p.110-11, originally quoted from Knowing the Love of God: Lessons from a Spiritual Master, 2015)
Fr.
Garrigou-Lagrange was a Dominican priest
from France from the early to the middle of the 20th century.He was very influential at Vatican II, and was
teacher and friend to the future Pope John Paul II.He wrote many books on theology and
spirituality.
No
one wants suffering.Job endured it, and
when he questioned it was left without an answer.God could not answer it because Jesus had not
been revealed yet.Job would finally get
this answer harrowed hell and brought out all the Old Testament righteous.Job would learn when Christ came to raise him
to the light that his suffering was a cross given to him to configure to
Christ.Fr. Réginald points out here
that our suffering is the stamp of Christ placed upon our face.Another way to say it is, “we are the clay,
you are the potter, the work of your hands”Sometimes I wonder if I suffer enough.
Throughout humanity most
groups of people have believed in a concept of the divine, but there are
different conceptions of God. One major
distinction is a God outside of creation (Christianity) from a God infused as
part of creation (Pantheism).
Chapter
2: The Invasion
Given that there is evil
in the world, we can conceptualize the world as a good world that has gone bad
(Christianity) or a world where good and bad are of equal strength in
opposition (Dualism).
Chapter
3: The Shocking Alternative
God created man with free
will to choose either right or wrong, and the need to choose Him. He presented Himself to a people for us to
know Him, and then provided a savior to show us how to choose right.
Chapter
4: The Perfect Penitent
This Savior is God
Himself in human form, come to show us how to become one with God. This union with God requires man to repent of
his disunity and graft onto God Himself.
Chapter
5: The Practical Conclusion
Jesus Christ showed us
perfect repentance and sacrifice and by sharing in that sacrifice and humility
we can share in His conquest of death.
###
My
Comment:
I found the breakdown of
the rival conceptions of God in Chapter 1 fascinating. If I may, Lewis breaks it down into a series
of contrasts, first between a materialist universe versus a spiritual endowed
universe and second between two types of spiritually endowed universe, a
pantheistic and a transcendent. Book 1
was all about contrasting a material atheist universe, so he doesn’t spend much
time here on it. Chapter 1 was mostly
contrasting a pantheistic universe with a transcendent God universe. He doesn’t use the word transcendent, though
I think that’s the right theological term.
He derives three contrasting distinctions between a pantheistic God (or
gods) and a transcendent God.
1. A pantheistic universe
is amoral while a transcendent God universe contains morality.
2. In a pantheistic
universe, God is the universe while in a transcendent God universe, the universe
is God’s creation.
3. In a pantheistic
universe, there is no distinction between good and evil while in a transcendent
God universe, there must exist a difference between good and evil.
That is fascinating. I think he is right to limit the notion of
God to either ontologically being the universe or ontologically being separated
from the universe. Can you have
something other than these two options?
I can’t conceptualize one.
I have to admit I’m not
totally convinced of his derived notions of the pantheistic universe. I’ve never given it any thought but I’m not
sure why a pantheistic universe would have to be amoral. Couldn’t you have a degeneration from an
originally good pantheistic universe, a corruption of that origin?
Casey
Replied:
Hmm... interesting
question. Well for the pantheist if all is God and God is all then everything
has godliness in it. Or if we say God is the highest thing then the universe is
the highest thing which means everything is the highest thing which is the same
as saying nothing is the highest thing. In other words nothing has any special
value over anything else.
I'd suppose for the
pantheist wrong is simply swimming against the current of the universe.
My
Reply to Casey:
Yeah, I just don't know
enough about pantheism to pin anything down. So is the pantheistic god inside
individual people too, and how would they understand an act such as murder? The
fact that I can conceptualize alternatives that could show a corruption from
the deity may mean that it's possible to have a belief in morality within
pantheism. But frankly this is pure speculation on my part.
Casey
Replied:
I guess saying pantheism
is like saying monotheism. How one understands the One God leads one down very
different paths.
So some might say nature
is good. A mountain is good or more good than a skyscraper. So acting in a way
that's one with nature is good. But then why is a skyscraper not equivalent to
an anthill? We are nature too.
The other way to see it
is that man is at the top of the natural world. I think this would be in line
with ancient Greek thought. So what's good for man is what is good for all men.
Golden rule kind of thing.
But I can't see where
morality emerges really. In other words a pantheist would say murder is wrong
because how could you say otherwise but it doesn't emerge from their pantheism.
They just rig up a reason that shows it is consistent.
I'm having a hard time
articulating but I hope that's somewhat clear. The thing is nobody says
"I'm a pantheist." They're a particular thing that falls under that
category.
My
Reply to Casey:
LOL. I've never met one.
It's so far afield from our concept of the universe that we can't grasp it or
articulate it. I don't think Lewis is an expert on it himself. Let's just say
we would need more expert information, and it's not really relevant to this
book. I do appreciate the fact that Lewis did articulate these two distinct
possibilities. That in itself is a idea to have learned.
Casey
Commented:
The quote from this
section that sticks out for me is "But the Christian thinks any good he
does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love is
because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us"
Don't you think this sums
up the biggest misconception non-Christians have about Christians? Our struggle
is not to please God or win His favor but to get out of God's way so he can
take us over.
My
Comment:
From chapter 2, that the
Christianity is complicated resonated with me.
Critics of Christianity (especially Muslims) point to the complexity of
the Trinity and ask why the Christian concept of God so complicated? Both Jews and Muslims point to a simple
concept of God and think that resonates with truth. The rebuttal is why would you think God is
simple? Look at the universe and how
complicated it is, Newtonian physics, electromagnetics, quantum mechanics,
relativity, string theory. We
consistently find more and more complexity.
The fact of the complexity of the Trinity suggests to me that someone
did not make it up. Who would have made
up quantum mechanics from fiction? No
one. You wouldn’t make up something that
defies logic, but one can see how a simple Allah as God is made up.
My
Comment:
Also from Chapter 2,
Lewis says: “Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled
goodness.” I’ve heard this concept
subtlety differently. I’ve heard it
stated that “evil is the absence of good.”
The distinction sounds small but could be huge. Wikipedia has an article on the “Absence of Good.”
It quotes Augustine on
the subject from Book 7 of the Confessions:
“And it was made clear unto me that those things are good which yet are
corrupted, which, neither were they supremely good, nor unless they were good,
could be corrupted; because if supremely good, they were incorruptible, and if
not good at all, there was nothing in them to be corrupted.”
Augustine seems to be
saying that if something is good it can’t be corrupted. The Wikipedia article also cites other
Catholic theologians who hold that evil is the absence of good:
Through the influence of
Augustine, this doctrine influenced much of Catholic thought on the subject of
evil. For instance, Boethius famously proved, in Book III of his Consolation of
Philosophy, that "evil is nothing". The theologian Pseudo-Dionysius
the Areopagite also states that all being is good, in Chapter 4 of his work The
Divine Names. Further to the East, John of Damascus wrote in his Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (book 2, chapter 4) that "evil is nothing
else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light. For
goodness is the light of the mind, and, similarly, evil is the darkness of the
mind." Thomas Aquinas concluded, in article 1 of question 5 of the First
Part of his Summa Theologiae, that "goodness and being are really the
same, and differ only in idea"
Is there a distinction
between those writers and what Lewis presented in chapter 2? It seems to me that there is.
Casey
Replied:
Regarding goodness and
badness, I think the distinction is this: There is a hierarchy of goods. Food
is a good. it is right to pursue food. the absence of food or starvation is an
evil. That's the philosophical idea.
What Lewis is saying is
that we go wrong when we pursue food as if it were at the top of the hierarchy.
We aim wrongly. Become gluttons. We've spoiled the food so to speak.
My
Reply:
Yes, I understand that
Casey. We can also think of gluttony as good and proper eating having lost some
of the good. The good diminished and so it became disordered and to how much
good diminished leads to the severity. I guess "spoiled goodness" can
encapsulate the same concept. The diminished good has spoiled eating. Perhaps
it's the same idea.
My
Comment:
So Book 2, Chapter 3 is
where C.S. Lewis gives us his famous options of choosing Christ’s nature:
either a lunatic, demon, or the Son of God!
A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached
egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either
this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you
can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any
patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.
That is spot on!
###
The
central idea of Christianity is summarized nicely in Chapter 4:
We are told that Christ
was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He
disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what
has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all
this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone
if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with
the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
What
Lewis is alluding is the theology of atonement, how does Christ’s death save
us. He is right to say how it is really
vague on how that works. As far as I
know, the Catholic Church does not have a single, dogmatic belief on it. The Catholic Church offers several
possibilities: Christ as sacrificial offering in the mode of a sin offering, Christus Victor (Christ the conqueror of
death and victor over Satan), Christ as paying a ransom (Christ paid a debt for
us that we couldn’t pay), and Christ as a model of vicarious love. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. They can all be true at the same time, and a
Catholic is free to believe in any one or all three. I tend to believe all four.
What
is interesting is that Lewis gives one option, and it’s the ransom theory. Why I find this interesting is that the
Lutherans and Calvinists do have a dogmatic theory, and it’s the penal
substitution theory. In the penal
substitution theory Christ is punished by a wrathful God the Father in
substitution for human sins. God
redirects His wrath to Christ rather than on human beings. In other words God punishes the innocent and
lets the guilty go free. The Catholic
Church explicitly rejects this view (God cannot be unjust), and per the Council
of Trent Catholics are not allowed to hold this view. You are free to hold any of the other options
but not penal substitution. I find it
interesting that Lewis, a Protestant (and not all types of Protestants
subscribe to the penal substitution belief) promotes one of the Catholic
options and not the most widely known Protestant option.
###
Quite
a few things captivated me from chapter 5.
I absolutely loved the point in the very first paragraph that the next
step in the evolution of man has occurred.
People often ask when the
next step in evolution—the step to something beyond man—will happen. But on the
Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new kind of man appeared:
and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.
Our
mission in this life is to evolve to be Christ so that we can pass into the
next life in the state of this new man.
And then Lewis reduces how this is done into three things:
There are three things
that spread the Christ life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action
which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the Mass,
the Lord’s Supper. At least, those are the three ordinary methods. I am not
saying there may not be special cases where it is spread without one or more of
these.
Another
interesting point from this chapter is how God transforms us. Through those three things, Christ-life is
instilled in us, and that Christ is working through us.
You can lose [the
Christ-life] by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You
have to feed it and look after it: but always remember you are not making it,
you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a
Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to
make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not
acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could
never have acquired by his own efforts.
And
so we get to the “practical consequence” of which Lewis names this
chapter.
And that has practical
consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot
towards repairing that body. Cut it, and
up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one
that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the
same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is
enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each
stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time,
enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which
Christ Himself carried out.
And
there is so much more to this chapter.
He explains how we Christians make up the Body of Christ and how Christ
operates through Christians. One of the
most satisfying things (at least for me) Lewis touches on is the possible
eternal destiny of non-Christians.
Here is another thing
that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should
be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him?
But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other
people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do
not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the
meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable
thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body,
the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to
do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to
the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would
be an odd way of getting him to do more work.
Again
Lewis seems to go against the fundamentalist Protestant who restrict salvation
not just Christians but certain types of Christians who are of the
“elect.” I even see it in some of the
ultra-traditionalist Catholics who insist that no one outside the Church can be
saved. That is not actually the Catholic
position.
###
Some
notable quotes from Book 2.
From Chapter 1: The Rival Conceptions
of God
The first big division of
humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the
minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority—lines
up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus,
Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist.
⁂
Pantheists usually
believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body:
that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist
either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God.
⁂
The Christian idea is
quite different. They think God invented and made the universe—like a man
making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does
not die if his picture is destroyed.
⁂
From Chapter 2: The Invasion
Reality, in fact, is
usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I
believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed.
⁂
What is the problem? A
universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless,
but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and
meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the
Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains
the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism.
Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the
back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe
is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think
that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on
the market.
⁂
From Chapter 3: The Shocking
Alternative
Christians, then, believe
that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.
And, of course, that raises problems. Is this state of affairs in accordance
with God’s will or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say: and if it
is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute
power?
⁂
Then comes the real
shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as
if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He
says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this
clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part
of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this
man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their
language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely
different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that
what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever
been uttered by human lips.
⁂
A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached
egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either
this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you
can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any
patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.
From Chapter 4: The Perfect Penitent
Now it seems to me
obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however
strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that
He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.
⁂
We believe that the death
of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely
unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot
picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not
going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully
understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be—the
inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into
nature like lightning.
⁂
Now what was the sort of
“hole” man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave
as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an
imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his
arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that
you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again
from the ground floor—that is the only way out of our “hole.” This process of
surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance.
⁂
But supposing God became
a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with
God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender
His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly
because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it
in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man.
From Chapter 5: The Practical
Conclusion
The perfect surrender and
humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and
humiliation because He was man. Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow
share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest
of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and
perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to
follow His teaching. People often ask when the next step in evolution—the step
to something beyond man—will happen. But on the Christian view, it has happened
already. In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which
began in Him is to be put into us.
⁂
And perhaps that explains
one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely
mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It
is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—a biological
or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than
God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses
material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.
⁂
To
conclude, I would like to end this post with a video clip of Lewis giving a
spiritual talk titled, “God Is Always With You!” This is actually an excerpt from his
broadcast of Mere Christianity.
We now return to the Gospel of Mark, and
Jesus comes to another confrontation with the Pharisees and Scribes.This time the confrontation is over form
rather than substance.
When the Pharisees with some scribes
who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they observed that some of
his disciples ate their meals with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands.
—For the Pharisees
and, in fact, all Jews,
do not eat without
carefully washing their hands,
keeping the tradition
of the elders.
And on coming from the
marketplace
they do not eat
without purifying themselves.
And there are many other things that
they have traditionally observed, the purification of cups and jugs and kettles
and beds.—
So the Pharisees and
scribes questioned him,
"Why do your
disciples not follow the tradition of the elders
but instead eat a meal
with unclean hands?"
He responded,
"Well did Isaiah
prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
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.
You disregard God's commandment but
cling to human tradition."
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.
All these evils come
from within and they defile."
~Mk 7:1-8, 14-15,
21-23
I was going to search
out the best homily other than from Bishop Barron.But, Bishop Barron gave a most brilliant
homily, one that is in accord with some of my personal suppositions.So it had to be Bishop Barron again.
I’s not that the law
or traditions are not important.It’s a
question of prioritization.You don’t
get grace from a mere ritualistic act.You
get grace by the law implanted in you.Could
the view of the Pharisees be summarized as form being more important than the
substance?I’m not a theologian, but I
would venture to say that is so.
Which takes me to all
those who insist on a particular form of worship and claim their form is more
efficacious than everyone else’s.I
think Bishop Barron is alluding to these people.I’m not saying their form of worship is any
less efficacious.But I dispute that it’s
any more.Personally I think Jesus
agrees with me.
Sunday Meditation: “You disregard
God's commandment but cling to human tradition.”
Let’s return to a John Michael Talbot song, “Create
In Me A Clean Heart.”
I think that is about as appropriate to today’s
meditation as I could find.