Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-8 + Psalm 15 + James 1: 17-18, 21-27 + Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15,21-23
As a child I often got into trouble because I would ask a certain question. I honestly think it is a phase everyone goes through in growing up. I would ask the question and then often end up sitting in my room for a while to contemplate the answer: “Because I said so.” It never seemed like a good answer to me until I started to need it, which is, I guess, the first stage of moving out of that phase. I asked the question in the seminary a lot, and it would draw looks of suspicion from those in charge. That has not changed either. The question of course, is “Why”
When it comes to this part of Mark’s Gospel, there is a little trouble brewing over the law and following the law, and the trouble reveals for us a real tension that exists not between the law and freedom, but between the outside and the inside – a tension that is experienced in the very living of the law and answering the question “why” in the face of the law.
The Pharisees are a good example of that tension gone wrong. They were not typical of all Jews. I often call the Book of Deuteronomy from which we read first today a “Love Song to the Law”.
The mood and the spirit in which it is written is almost a poem that would describe the love of God’s Law – a Love that generates and sustains the very Love that is God. Staying in a right relationship to the Law puts one in a position of love. If you catch on to what the Book of Deuteronomy proposes you begin to get the idea that God’s love for God’s people is the source of the law because it leads to the Covenant. Our Love for God is expressed and lived in that covenant and the keeping of, loving of, and observance of the Law.
Now, that is an entirely interior idea. I like to call it a matter of the heart, and so it is the heart that determines how one keeps the law, why, and what comes from keeping the law. A loving and pure heart makes keeping the law a joy. But a tension arises when the focus shifts from the interior to the exterior, and I think that is what Jesus is talking about to his disciples using the Pharasees as his example. The Pharasees were focused was on the external expression of the law rather than the internal loving and living of the law. For them it did not matter how you felt, or what was in your heart. All that concerned them was a following the rules. If anyone asked them, “Why should we wash our hands?” their answer would have been: “Because it says so.” leaving the one who asked the question cold and distant from the law. Had they made some connection between a clean heart and clean hands and suggested that the cleaning of the hands be connected to a cleansing of the soul, the tension could have resolved into a wonderful moment of conversion.
This tension still exists today, and it has all the potential to turn us into Pharasees or lead us to deeper conversion, great joy, and love in our covenant with God. So, we have the Law of God. Why? Because it is God’s way of revealing God’s Will for us and leading us to be all that God wishes us and has imagined us to be. Why is there a law that says: Thou Shalt Not Kill? Now think with your heart, and don’t say because, “Because God said so.” That’s outside thinking. Inside thinking with the heart says: “Because wherever there is Life there is God, and the taking of any life diminishes the presence of God in this world. Because God is the creator of all life, destroying life destroys God’s last and best work of creation.” Why is there a rule that says: “Missing Mass on Sunday is wrong?” What do you say to a child that asks, “Why do we have to go?” Think with your heart. Only say “Because I said so if it’s a contest of the will.” The real answer when you’re not in a power struggle is: “Because we have been invited, and Jesus asked us to come and do this in his memory; because it is how we stay together with the Risen Christ and with others who love us.” Or perhaps a shorter answer from the heart is: “Because we can, not because we have to.” Why do we have to share? The heart says: “Because that is why God gave us what we have….because nothing we have is our own….. because it brings joy and happiness to others.” This is heart talk – it is what come from within.
The whole speech of Moses to the people as he delivered the Law to them was touched with joy and hope because he knew that God’s Law was the expression of God’s Love, and the keeping of that law would keep the Israelites within the embrace of God as no other nation or people could ever hope to experience. Rather than complain, avoid, and reluctantly keep the law, we might be tempted by the tension between right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, to ask why, and then from a heart filled with the Spirit of God begin follow the words of James today in the second reading: “Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls. Be doers of the word and not hears only.”
In the practice of our faith, the goal must be to internalize the law and the will of God for us so that we do not even think about the details of the law because we have so embraced it, so loved it, and so understood what the law is that we shall live the law, not keep the law or ever need to enforce the law. It has always seemed to me that enforcers of the law are the ones who have not yet themselves internalized the law. They are stuck on the outside fussing with the details while all the while never coming close to the God who is finally revealed within the Law within one’s heart.