Cycle B - Year I:  

29 August 2021: Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time 

(Liturgical Color: Green)

Readings:

First Reading:        Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8

Second Reading:   James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27

Gospel:  Please Read  Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 

To love God from within our heart!

This Sunday our liturgy goes back to the Gospel of St. Mark after a number of Sundays in which St. John was the evangelist on his discourse on the Bread of Life.  Recall that we focus on the Gospel of Mark in lectionary Cycle B.

In today's Gospel Mark provides a significant amount of information about the Jewish's observance of ritual-purity laws. These laws were handed down from Moses which were intended to help keep the Israelites pure by using externals to emphasize internal spiritual cleanliness.

The Gospel incident narrates the scribes and Pharisees were upset that Jesus' disciples break with their ritual tradition by eating with unclean hands.  Now remember that washing of the hands before meal was an important religious ritual for the Jews.

Our Lord Jesus used this incident to teach what true holiness is in the very eyes of God.  It should come from within us, a genuine love of God in our hearts through our personal intimacy with God.

So Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their hypocrisy of putting human tradition above God's law. Here, Jesus is referring to the tradition of elders, the teachings of the Pharisees, which extended the ritual-purity laws of Temple worship to everyday Jewish life.

There is hypocrisy when we chastise others for a standard that we refuse to adopt for ourselves, or when we only make a pretense of following it for public consumption. So our Lord reminded them of Isaiah's saying: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts."

This attitude of "hypocrisy" in serving the Lord is still with us even in our generation. For example, many of those who profess their faith in Jesus are so much focused on external rituals and practices but forget the reason and meaning for observing them.

Jesus' words challenge us as well.  In our desire to show that we are holy, we might also give too much credence to externals, following rules without thinking about the intention behind them. Jesus reminds us that we do not make ourselves holy by our actions. Rather, we become holy when we allow God's Spirit to transform us. Our actions should be an expression of the conversion of our heart to God and to God's ways. So external rituals of cleansing are really empty physical acts without inner purification from within us.  Such "inner purification" is essentially the work of the Holy Spirit in a human heart that is open and receptive of divine intervention.

In sum, our Lord Jesus Christ reminds us that true holiness is first and foremost a matter of the heart, a personal intimacy with Jesus our Lord and God.  And we become close to God primarily because of His grace rather than our own merits.

A blessed Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!