Word to the Wise
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - Tuesday in the 18th Week in Ordinary Time
[Jer 30:1-2, 12-15, 18-22 and Matt 14:22-36 or, in Year A, Matt 15:1-2, 10-14,480]Some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands when they eat a meal." He summoned the crowd and said to them, "Hear and understand. It is not what enters one's mouth that defiles the man; but what comes out of the mouth is what defiles one"
"Did you wash your hands?" Now THERE'S a voice from the past (maybe even in the present) in our lives! And during flu season, it's an almost national or international thing! But in both those cases, it is a matter of hygiene and safety. In the case of the Pharisees, it had to do with ritual purity. If one had touched something considered unclean and then touched the food one ate, then one became ritually unclean and had to go through a purification before he or she could do anything temple-wise or socially! Jesus' seemingly casual attitude about these "traditions" irritated the Pharisees.
By the time the Gospel of Matthew was composed, the matter of continuing Jewish observances in the early Christian community was being hotly debated. In Matthew, Jesus speaks more to the attitude and meaning of the practices without condemning them outright as he seems to do in the Gospel of Mark [7:19]. There were, indeed, some Pharisees who had accepted Christianity and still believed the observances of the law were binding.
In our own day, we might pay attention to the discovery by many younger Catholics of certain observances and rituals of the Catholicism some of us older folks remember from the 1950's and earlier. Where does one draw the line between "etiquette" and faith? How deep is the overlap between "culture" and belief? If one does not genuflect in the aisle, does that mean one does not believe in "the Real Presence" in the tabernacle? It seems wise to me to recall Jesus' teaching about these things. Start with the heart! AMEN