Year B / Ordinary Time / Twenty-second Sunday
Readings: Deuteronomy 4.1-2, 6b-8 / Psalm 14. 2-3ab, 4cd-4, 5 (R/v 1a) / James 1.17-18, 21b-22, 27 / Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Have you ever fallen in love?
Been so bewitched, bothered and bewildered that thoughts about the one you’re in love with fill your every waking moment and every dream? Been so excited that every beep on your handphone may be his latest text or every ping on your Facebook may be her liking your post again?
I’d like to think that many of us here—married, in love, or once in love—can identify with this falling in love experience. If I were to ask you, how do you know you’re in love, you’d might say, “I know with whom my heart is.”
Where does your heart lie?
This is in fact the question Jesus is asking the Pharisees in today’s gospel passage. It is hidden amidst the exchange we are so often focused on between Jesus and the Pharisees over purification and eating. The Pharisees are fixated on obeying the Law: purify yourselves before you eat, they teach. Jesus is challenging them: know the real reason for obeying and practicing the Law.
In the midst of this exchange, it is easy for us to miss this significant line Jesus says: “This people honours me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.” This is the crux of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees and his teaching to the crowds and us today.
What Jesus challenges us with is this blunt honesty: the one who acts according to God’s Law but whose heart does not lie with God is really a hypocrite.
Yes, Jesus is challenging us to look at how we observe and practice God’s Law. It cannot be an end in itself. Rather, how we observe and practice God’s law must reflect where our hearts really lie. For Jesus, the one and only reason that must motivate us to follow God’s law is that our hearts are truly centered on God
I don’t know about you but I find Jesus’ teaching today difficult to hear. It cuts so very close to the bone of how I am sometimes less Christian than I ought to be, less authentic than the person I make myself out to others, less a man of integrity before God. Perhaps, you feel like this too as you listened to today’s gospel passage.
I have a feeling that we squirm at Jesus’ harsh, honest words. We do because Jesus is forcing us to look at the masks we wear. That behind our veneer of the faithful church-goer, the loving parent, the filial child, the upright citizen, the humble priest we are like these Pharisees in some ways. That our words and action, yes, our very lives, can be hypocritical sometimes, and for some of us all the time.
In a moment like this, I’d like to think that we share the same discomfort the Pharisees felt when they heard Jesus’ words. It’s also the same unease that fornicators, liars, adulterers, thieves, killers, sensualists, the envious, and the arrogant feel when the truth confronts them.
Harsh words to hear on a Sunday evening. Hard talk from Jesus to us. Not the best way to end the weekend and start the week, is it?
Or, may be it is. It is because Jesus’ teaching today invites us to change our ways and to reset our heart’s orientation right again: on God.
Some of us will listen politely to Jesus’ teaching, squirm quietly, then go home and put it aside till next Sunday. I call these the “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” Catholics. Others will pick and choose what they’d like to take home to better live their Christian faith this week. These I’d call the “Buffet Catholics.” A few others will hear Jesus’ teaching and then say, “No, it’s not about me but it’s about that divorcee who keeps receiving communion, this fake man who thinks he’s so good, those gossipers who help out in the parish—they are the sinful hypocrites, and I hope Jesus’ teaching makes them change their ways.” These are the “Point and Brand” Catholics.
We all have a bit of the “out of mind, out of sight, buffet style, point and brand” way of living out our Christian life poorly. When this becomes more and more how we live, we become like the Pharisees of old: we know what is right and wrong and we recognize sin, as long as these don’t apply to us. Then, we become righteous, may be even self-righteous, in how we relate to one another.
This is why Jesus’ teaching this evening must challenge. He is asking us if we disregard God’s commandments by putting our way first. He is confronting us to consider how we obey God’s law, this way of living Christian life right and fully: with lip service or with our whole heart centered on God?
Does listening to Jesus’ teaching sting a bit? Does it sting because it is asking us how much we cherish what has been handed down as God’s law for us to live our Christian life well? And if we cherish God’s Law, does Jesus’ teaching sting because Jesus is asking us how vigilant we are in placing our hearts in the right place?
If our hearts are stung by Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees, then, be grateful.
His harsh teaching has achieved half of what I believe Jesus intended to accomplish when he challenged the Pharisees: to re-orientate where our hearts should be directed towards -- God.
If we felt stung, then the healing of our hearts has began. How then can we complete this healing of our hearts?
By learning from the very human act of falling in love. Why? Because in this state of falling in love and staying in love, our hearts are orientated well toward and onto the one we love. Aren’t all our words and actions centered on our loved ones, be they spouses, children, parents, or friends?
And so, it must be with God: where God is, there is our heart too.
One way to obey and practice God’s Law is to take up this advice by the former Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe:
Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
Can we fall in love with God? Should we fall in love with God so that we can obey and practice God’s Law out of love and not out of human expectations?
I think we can and must fall in love with God because God has first fallen in love with us. This is the subtext when Moses teaches us in our first reading that the wisdom of God’s law is that it expresses where the heart of God lies: close to us.
God’s heart lies with us because God loves us. If this is true, then the one and only purpose we ought to have, then, in observing God’s law is to keep our hearts close to God.
And isn’t this hope then worth working for this week?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: engagement in central park, nyc by adrian danker, sj, february 2014
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