The readings for this Sunday can be found here.
At first glance, it may seem that our readings for today conflict with each other. In our first reading from Deuteronomy, we hear Moses instructing the people to observe carefully the statues of God. These rules and regulations do not represent a punishment to the people, but rather indicate their uniqueness. Not every nation has direct access to God’s rules, but this one does! The Lord’s willingness to communicate these statues is an advantage, showing that the people are just and God is close to them.
So why then, do we find Jesus criticizing the statutes of the Jewish faith in our gospel reading from Mark? It is not – we may suppose – so that the simplistic preacher can make anti-Semitic comments as he proclaims that Jesus has done away with the cumbersome rules. This would be a strange conclusion to draw given that our Church itself continues to have many rules, regulating morality and liturgy.
The laws of God are meant to facilitate our freedom, the freedom for excellence that is freely choosing to do God’s will. The privilege of the Israelites was a closeness with God in knowing his laws; they were aided in doing what was right and just because they knew God’s will and could freely choose to adhere to it. In so doing, the people could keep their hearts close to God.
What Jesus perceives, however, is that the Pharisees’ and scribes’ following of the rules has become a surface-level formality, or worse, a point of pride and hypocrisy that results in others – such as Jesus and his disciples – being criticized. It is neither facilitating their freedom, nor bringing them closer to God, since they start from a position of judgment. They want to be close to Jesus; they come from Jerusalem to see him. But they don’t want him to change their lives, so they have to find reasons to dismiss him.
Jesus’s response does not dismiss or criticize the laws given by God through Moses, but rather, he draws attention to the underlying problem. The laws were a means to facilitate the people’s freedom by keeping their hearts close to God; the laws were never their own end.
Jesus is the end. Jesus facilitates our freedom. Jesus keeps our hearts close to God. The evils coming from within a person or people are what defile. But what if we have Jesus within us? Moses believed the Israelites were privileged because they were given the statutes of God. The Church is that much more privileged because we do not have to know God primarily through his will given in laws, but rather we know him through his will given in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. We have the word in the New Testament Scriptures that tell about him, but we also have the Word made flesh who lived among us and continues to be with us in the Eucharist.
This doesn’t mean that we can perfectly adhere lovingly to the rules or that we always follow them in a way that facilitates our freedom and shows our closeness to God. We may struggle to be doers of the word and to live in justice; we may see ourselves in the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. However, while the demands on us may be greater in some sense than on the Israelites, we are also given much greater assistance. For those times that we fail, we can receive forgiveness for our sins in the sacrament of confession. We are drawn into Christ in the Eucharist, and we are given grace in many other ways.
Indeed, what we see is that God desires our ultimate success and our true freedom, and thus God provides for us more abundantly than we could ever imagine.
