Thought for the week - 1 September 2024

Take one thing away, and the total effect can often be spoiled for many of us. It doesn’t need to be a big thing even, but its removal is sufficient to make us wonder why we ever bothered. Being given a bowl of whitebait but learning there is no accompanying shaker of cayenne pepper for example or driving a vehicle that won’t go over seventy miles an hour or watching a horror film without the scary music – it’s all there, but something is missing which somehow makes it all work. Many people feel the same way about Church I think – whether they want the music, or incense or stained-glass windows, or whatever it might be that makes it all work for us – there is nothing wrong with those things not being there, but it might make the experience somehow lacking for us. This would, generally, be wrong of course, although perfectly natural, for we can get hooked on the externals of a thing rather than the thing itself. Does anyone actually like neat gin, or do we need the tonic and ice and lime to make it the way we like it? Well, today let yourself feel sorry for the Pharisees and scribes. Jesus tells us they are interested in externals and have set aside the commandments of God to cling to human traditions, but it would have been hard for them to see things from his perspective, and not only because they are fixated on one aspect of the package of faith alone.

We may decry some of the details of the traditions described in the Gospel as merely human additions – and to tut inwardly at Kosher dietary law, or to think it a human external, but we too might count our calories, cut off the fat, look for natural cooking oil, choose only perfect vegetables and want our fish to be organic, so food choices are hardly a thing alien to us. But the general pattern, the idea that certain foods make you unclean, that food must be prepared in certain ways and not others, and even that it must be eaten in certain ways, are part of the Jewish Law, as well as our own preferences.

That Law, the Jews were fiercely proud to have received from God Himself. We get a piece of Scripture teaching adherence to the Law, and even pride in it, in our first reading. It is by keeping this Law which embodies the wisdom and understanding of God that the Jews will come to hear the nations round about exclaim, ‘No other people is as wise and prudent as this great nation.’ This Law forms the Jews as the great nation that they are and makes them visibly the people of God. They are defined as themselves and as people of God by adherence to the law. So, when the disciples do not keep to the traditions, and when Jesus does not chastise them for it, but rather criticises these Jews who expect the disciples to wash their hands, and even more when he goes further and categorically states that nothing which goes into a person can make them unclean, this is all very shocking. It must have seemed that he was rejecting his very Jewishness, and to be praising careless, unreligious people over those who keep the law of His Father. It’s a problem, and as I said last week, must have made Jesus seem disappointing and hard to follow for most people, including His own disciples.

We, with the gift of hindsight so common in Biblical study, realise that we are living in a clearly defined New Covenant, when these rules have been replaced, but at the time of the Gospel, when they were actually being rewritten and replaced, things were not at all clear cut, and this must have seemed a very challenging teaching.

Well, what is wrong here? What externals are being removed and why? Is it the Gin or the Ice, the Whitebait or the Cayenne? The Pharisees think, with good cause, that they know the will and plan of God, partly (and convincingly) because he seems to have given it to them, as we read in the first reading, but on the other hand they certainly have held and begun traditions that are stricter than required – well, nothing particularly bad in that yet, we all do as much from time to time. But they criticise and look down on others who do differently, and in doing that forget the love they ought to have for their neighbour, one of the central points of the Law – and more importantly, their love for neighbour extends only to other Jews (other people like us, we might say), and that is notably about to change.

We need to learn to love the law of God. Because within it is found the will and heart of the Father and the revelation of the Son and the ongoing gift of the Spirit, but the law of God is itself to love, and so like the Pharisees, we need to keep alert to the extraordinary discovery of the disciples which is that the Law is, at the heart, a way of revealing God to us, that it holds at its heart a mystery, a mystery which is further revealed in the ongoing and ever new work of the Church. The Pharisees looked to a fulfilment of the Law but they could not grasp that the fulfilment would be in the person of this unlikely man who would bring so much challenge and change – that is the lesson they had to learn, that no matter how sure we may be of what we practice in our faith life, He may ask us to sweep it all away if the love is not visible.