BE A DOER AND NOT JUST A HEARER OF THE WORD OF GOD
To be a Christian is to be both hearer and doer of the Word and Commandments of God. It is not just enough to be a hearer of the Word of God but also a doer of the Word of God. This is the challenge confronting the Christian life today.
Being a doer and not a hearer is crucial to our Christian testimony. More so, at a time or an era when words have no meaning for many people who speak them. We live in a world of language or word-game, where many of us use words not with truth and conviction but only to deceive others or those who hear us.
A Christian must be a person of his words. This is the characteristic of not only a mature person but a godly and truthful person. One who speaks out truthfully and acts out honestly on his spoken words is actually the follower of Christ.
OUR THEME
The readings of this Sunday call us to be hearers, keepers, and doers of the Word of God. They invite and challenge us to a life of integrity, dignity, and decency to the Words of God. Hence, the true Christian life is not based on rational Christian talks on the bible, doctrines, and theologies, diligent observances of rules and regulations, or beautiful and expressive rituals celebrations.
It is the practical doing or living out of the commandments and Word of God. In the spirit of love, care, and encouragement of others. It is in seeing God in others and how we treat them conscious of the presence of God in them and in us.
The readings tell what true Christian faith and practice mean. The Christian life and its faith and practice is a spirituality that invites us to the consciousness of God. And how through that consciousness of God, we treat and relate with the people around us.
The readings of this Sunday did not only invite us to be hearers and doers of the Word of God. They encourage us to be shining examples or models of the Christian faith to others.
FIRST READING: DEUTERONOMY 4:1-2, 6-8
Moses did not just encourage the Israelites to be listeners of the Word or commandments of God. He also challenged them to be people who put into practice the Word or command of God. He warned them sternly never to adulterate or watered down the commandment or Word of God. It must be preserved and transmitted in its authenticity, originality, and entirety.
Equally, Moses called on them to be custodians or keepers of the Word, Status, and Ordinances of the Lord, which he has taught them. At the same time, they must transmit these Word and commandments of God to other nations.
Thereby letting them see their wisdom and discernment to listen to the Word of God that brings them life, prosperity, and wisdom. That is, they must live out exemplary life before all nations and people. So that they will come to the admiration of them as a great nation. One who has God that is near to them whenever they called upon him.
In all, the first reading points out to us how Israel heeding diligently to the Word of God and commandments does not only give her an identity as a nation and greatness. It also brings about admiration of God, who is near and responsive to their calling and needs at any time.
LESSONS FROM THE FIRST READING
- The practices of the commandments and the Word of God are what give Israel as a community of believers a national identity. This is what marks and makes the relationship of Israel with God distinctive among other nations.
- Moses, as the prophetic messenger, promotes unity through orthopraxy, ethical behaviour, and practice.
- Israel Keeping of the statutes and ordinances of the Lord results in divine favour and blessing in the Promised Land.
- Religious revelation depends on coherence, inviolability, and unity. When that testimony is altered by addition or subtraction, then the validity of the revelation comes under doubt.
- Absent mindfulness to the commandments and Word of God destroys the personal and communal commitment to God.
- The commandments and the Word of God must be transmitted from one generation to the next wholly and originally, without alliteration. This is how history, memory, and divine revelations can be preserved.
- In essence, the Word of God and its Law was also intended to keep Israel as a united, holy, and intelligent nation, proud of their powerful, protective, single God.
PSALM 15
The Psalmist in Psalm 15 reminds us that those who act justly will live in the presence of the Lord forever. That is to say, that the innocent and blameless person does not just believe in the Word and commandment of God. He also practices justice and truth and does not insult, slander, or despise others who would have peace.
In other words, for the Psalmist, a spiritual and godly person who practices true religion lives a life of blamelessness, justness, thoughtfulness, and honesty. Remarkably, in his dealing with others.
Equally, Psalm 15 has a teaching purpose. It encourages us to think about how we as individuals, families, and communities are invited to live in God’s presence with joy and integrity.
The most fundamental question to ask is that what or how should our relationship be with God? For the Psalmist, integrity, goodwill, and honesty are hallmarks of daily life with God as well as preserving the reputation of others.
SECOND READING: JAMES (1:17-18, 21-22, 27
The letter of the apostle James to the early Christian Church or community is one of the most challenging letters on the practice of Christian life and faith. It is a prophetic and provocative letter that diagnoses the death-dealing ways of the world for the poison that they are.
Hence, it challenges and encourages us at the same time to live an authentic Christian life. To be not only as hearers of the Word of God but also as doers of the Word of God who must put it into practice.
This emphasises that there was a critical gap in the religious community of St James nearly two thousand years ago. And that the same critical gap continues to exist today in so many of our religious communities and churches.
Observedly, there is a gap between knowledge (knowing in the mind of one, ideas about God) and wisdom (living and acting from the soul what it knows of and about God in mind) in the Christian life.
James recognises the generosity and perfection of the gifts of God to all. Moreover, the gift of truth, wisdom, and knowledge to live out the truly godly life in Christ Jesus in the Christian life. In the same way, he acknowledges that in God is all light, and in Him, there is no alteration or shadow of change.
UNCHANGEABLE GOD
This is the metaphysical essence of God in whom there is all goodness, truth, and light with no element of contradiction. The implication is that if anyone wants to be a follower of this God, he must not have any notion of falsity, darkness, or contradiction. A true Christian must live a life of transparency, truthfulness, and honesty with no shade of gimmicks.
In other words, James affirms that the un-changeableness nature of God stands against the changeableness of every created thing. This makes the gifts of God perfect, whole, and unchangeable.
THE BEST CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES OF WITNESSING TO CHRIST
Concurrently, James draws our attention to the most virtuous way a Christian should live his life. That is, he should be a person who is slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen to God and others. This is always the best Christian policy for a just and irreproachable Christian lifestyle.
He also challenges all followers of Christ to strip themselves of all vice and filthiness lifestyle that does not produce or bear fruit in Christian life. He bids Christians receive the inborn (innate or implanted) word in gentleness.
Finally, for St James, true Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself unstained by the world. In other words, it is a practical living out the Word of God and doing the will of God and not just hearing or professing a faith.
THE GOSPEL: MARK 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
In the gospel, Jesus uses the occasion of the Scribes and Pharisees legally questioning the action of his disciples not to follow traditions of the past to teach what a thing or person defies.
The contest here is about tradition, religion, and spirituality, which are correlated. And at the same time also three distinctive things. On the tradition of the washing of hands before a meal, there was not a single scriptural quotation to back up this Jewish claim. It is all wholly a human tradition and has not to do with God.
Hence, Jesus accuses them that their sense of religion and religious worship of God was mere lip-service or eye-service. While their hearts are far from God and his Word and commandment.
The implication here is that for Jesus, true Christian life means a profound Christian spirituality of the consciousness of God. That also influence our thought, words and action towards others in our daily living. This involves being hearers and doers of the Word and commandments of God.
And not replace the practical living of them with human traditions or externalities of religious practices. For Christ, the true Christian life is not the rational or logical articulation of theologies, doctrines, rules, regulations, or traditions and customs. It is not the beautiful and emotional expressions of liturgies or the external polishing or packaging of behavioural conducts.
Christian spirituality is the internal renewal and transformation of our thoughts, words, and actions following the Word and commandments of God. This is the Christian spirituality that transforms us inside out. Fundamentally, a profound Christian spirituality creates a deep consciousness of God in us and around us. It influences how we live out this consciousness in concrete actions the way we treat or relate with each other.
Therefore, Jesus declared that what defies a person is not what goes into a person or what he touches. Rather, it is what comes out of the abundance of his heart. That is the evil intentions: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
With this declaration, Jesus tells us that God looks into the heart of men and their intentions and not in the intimidating religious attires or air of importance or external display of godliness. It is not the hood that makes the monk but the intention of his heart and attitudes of relationship with God and fellow human beings.
TRUE CHRISTIANITY
The core of Christianity is the transformation of the heart that produces good thoughts, words, and action. It is not the logical or beautiful expressions of words, ritualistic sentiments, or homilies.
The death of Christianity and its irrelevance in our world today is because of plenty of external piety with little or no internal transformation.
The fact is that there is no amount of theological or doctrinal articulations that replaces doing the will of God. Just as there is no way, liturgical expressions in colours, decorations, vestments, songs, or processions can take the place of Christian love. That is how we love and treat each other as Christians.
It is a hypocrite to claim to hold onto loving, emotional, and external rites or prayers with expressions of sentiments, love, care, and service. That end up only as merely words and never translate into concrete living actions. That could lead to the transformation of how we live, treat or relate with each other in society, family or Church.
Christianity is a spirituality of exemplary life and mere lips-service or eye-service to portray godliness externally.
The question asked was, why do Jesus and his disciples not observe the tradition of the elders? What was this tradition, and what was its moving spirit?
THE TRADITION OF THE ELDERS
For many centuries, the Ten Commandments and the first five books of the Jewish scripture known as the Pentateuch was the source of the Jewish law that govern the people of Israel.
The Pentateuch indeed contains a certain number of detailed regulations and instructions. However, they are in the matter of moral questions. Hence, what is being laid down is a series of great moral or ethical principles which a man (any Jewish individual) must interpret and apply for himself.
Sadly, in the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, there came into being a class of legal experts whom we know as the Scribes. They were not content with these general moral principles.
They wanted these moral or ethical principles amplified, expanded, broken down until they issued thousands and thousands of little rules and regulations. That governs every possible action and every possible situation in life virtually.
Therefore, from Just ten simple laws and the Pentateuch, they multiplied into endless rules and regulations not written down but been transmitted orally. These unwritten laws are known as the “Oral Law”. This is what the Jews called the tradition of the elders. The word “elders” does not mean, in this phrase, the officials of the synagogue; it means the ancients, the great legal experts of the old days.
It is important to note that though they were interpretations of the Pentateuch and the Ten Commandments, they were subjected to re-interpretations or misinterpretations and heavily influence by human thinking. They are more of human rules and regulations than divine injunctions.
Above all, they lost the spirit of the law given by God for the orderly living among each other. They became a burden onto men.
THE WASHING OF HANDS
The Jewish rite of the washing of hands before a meal is one aspect of these Scribal traditions. That emerged in the gospel passage of today. Interestingly, it was not about hygienic purity. No, it was ceremonial cleanness that was at stake here.
Therefore, the Scribes and Pharisees accused the disciples of Jesus of eating with unclean hands. There were definite and rigid rules for the washing of hands. For the Jews before every meal and between each activity of the courses of the day. The hands had to be washed, and they had to be washed in a certain way.
First, the hands had to be free of any coating of sand or mortar or gravel or any such substance. The water for washing had to be kept in a special large stone jar. So that it cannot be contaminated. It was in Jars for the water of purifications that Jesus changed water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.
First, the hands were held with fingertips pointing upwards; water was poured over them and had to run at least down to the wrist.
The minimum amount of water was one-quarter of a log, equal to one and a half egg-shells full of water.
While the hands were still wet with water, each hand had to be cleansed with the fist of the other hand. The fist of one hand was rubbed into the palm and against the surface of the other.
At this stage, the hands were wet with water, but that water was now unclean. This is because it had touched unclean hands.
Finally, the hands had to be held with fingertips pointing downwards, and water had to be poured over them in such a way that it began at the wrists and ran off at the fingertips. After all these scrupulous rites had been done, the hands were considered clean. This is the detailed way the hands and feet or things were washed or purified by the Jews.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF NOT WASHING THE HANDS
The failure to do this was from Jewish eyes, not to be guilty of bad manners, not to be dirty in the health sense, but to be unclean in the sight of God.
There were various teaching among the Scribes and Pharisees that the man who ate with unclean hands was subject to the attacks of a demon called Shibta. To omit so to wash the hands was to become liable to poverty and destruction. Bread eaten with unclean hands was not better than excrement.
There are also ancient claims of horrible things happening to Teachers of Jews who violated these traditions of the elders. A Rabbi who once omitted the ceremony was buried in ex-communication. Another Rabbi was imprisoned by the Romans for using the water given to him for handwashing. Instead of drinking and nearly perished of thirst, because he was determined to observe the rules of cleanliness rather than satisfy his taste for water.
THE CONCEPTION OF JEWISH UNCLEANNESS
This is the second aspect of the Scribal or Pharisaic rules and regulations known as the traditions of the elders. A thing might be seen in the ordinary sense to be clean naturally. Yet, from the Jewish religious legal point be considered as unclean by the Jewish traditions. There is something about this conception of uncleanness in Lev.11-15 and in Num.19.
Nowadays, we would talk rather of things being taboo than of being unclean. Certain animals were unclean (Lev.11). A woman after childbirth or when she is in her period is seen as unclean. A leper was seen as an unclean person. Anyone who touched a dead body was considered unclean. And anyone who had become unclean can make unclean anything he touched or made contact with.
A Gentile was unclean; food touched by a Gentile was unclean; any vessel touched by a Gentile was unclean. In our gospel passage of this Sunday, the washings of cups and pitchers and vessels of bronze mean that any vessels could become unclean easily. They might be touched by an unclean person or by unclean food.
So, then, when a strict Jew returned from the marketplace or public places. He immersed his whole body in clean water to wash away the taints of uncleanliness he might have acquired.
The uncleanliness of a vessel, plate, or cup is from inside and not outside. That is to say, it did not matter who or what touched its outside. However, it did matter a lot what or who touched its inside.
As a result, unclean earthen vessels must be broken and buried. In the case of metal or bronze, they must be immersed, boiled, purged with fire.
WHAT IS RELIGION FOR JEWS?
From the external observances of traditions, it is clear that the Pharisaic and Scribal laws what religion was for the Jews. It was a series of rituals, ceremonials, rules, and regulations. These, for them, are considered as the essence of service to God. Hence, the ethics and morals of religion were buried under a mass of taboos and rules.
In a nutshell, to the scribes and Pharisees, these rules and regulations were the essences of religion. To observe them was to please God; to break them was to sin. This was their idea of goodness and of the service of God. In the religious sense, Jesus and these people spoke different languages.
There is a fundamental cleavage here between a legalistic religious person and a spiritual, loving person. That is the cleavage of a man who sees religion as ritual, ceremonial, rules, and regulations. And the man who sees religion as loving God and loving his fellow men.
THE LAWS OF GOD AND THE RULES OF MEN
Jesus did not miss a word in calling out the Scribe and Pharisees out on the hypocritical lifestyle. He quoted the Prophecy of Isaiah 29:13, where God accused the Israelites of lips service and worship with their hearts far from Him.
IN PRINCIPLE, JESUS ACCUSED THE SCRIBES AND PHARISEES OF TWO THINGS
(I) He accused them of hypocrisy. That is one whose actions and words all his life is devoid of truth and sincerity. In a religious sense, it implies anyone to whom religion is a legal thing and practice of external rules and regulations is nothing but a hypocrite. In the same way, to be entirely connected with the observations of certain rituals and the keeping of a certain number of taboos is a hypocrite.
Today, it is evident that, in the Christian fold, there are legalistic Christians who would externally observe religious rules and regulations. They are frequent to Church. They are members of pious groups or associations. They also pay tithes, pray, fast, and give alms. Yet, their hearts are full of pride, envy, jealousy, bitterness, or hatred against their fellow brothers and sisters.
Fundamentally, there is no greater religious peril than that of identifying religion with outward observances. Equally, there is no commoner religious mistake than to see the Christian goodness with certain so-called religious acts. Such as Church-going, bible-reading, careful financial giving, even time-tabled prayer does not make a man a good man.
(II) The second accusation that Jesus implicitly levelled against these legalists was that they substituted the efforts of human ingenuity for the laws of God. That is, they hold on tenaciously to the latter of the law that enslaves them and others. While rejecting the spirit of the law that liberates from mechanical religious life.
For their guidance for life, they did not depend on listening to God. Instead, they rely on listening to the clever arguments and debates, the fine-spun niceties, the ingenious interpretations of the legal experts. When the actual fact is that is cleverness never can be the basis of the true Christian life.
True Christianity can never be the product of the mind of men. It must always come, not from the creative discoveries of men, but rather from the simple listening to and accepting the voice of God through his Sacred Word and commandments.
THE REAL DEFILEMENT OF THE BODY, HEART, AND SOUL
The clarity Jesus brought to the external practices of traditions rather than the internal purification and transformation of the heart is one of the New Testament revolutionary thoughts of all time.
Jesus did not only show to these legalistic religious leaders. How their rigid adherence to the traditional law can actually mean disobedience to the law of God. Clearly, he demonstrated also to them that nothing that goes into a man can possibly defile him. For it is received only into his body, which rids itself of it in the normal and natural physical way.
By his revolutionary statement that nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean. Jesus was wiping out at one stroke the laws for which Jews had suffered and died. These laws are evident in the Book of Leviticus chapter 11 that contains a list of prohibited animals. Equally, in the First Book of Maccabees chapter 7, there is also the story of a widow and her seven sons who were martyred for not eating swine meat.
In effect, Jesus was saying that things cannot be either unclean or clean in any real religious sense of the term. A person can only be defied by his actions, words, or thoughts which come from within him.
The readings of today challenged us to match faith with actions. It is not enough to make a commitment to stand as a priest, religious, or Christian without a faith-action to show for our profession of faith in Christ Jesus. Is it not a pending doom or fall for Christianity to depend on only its truth profession without practice?
THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
Can we call ourselves Christian without being doers of the Word of God or commandments of God? Can we be hearers or keepers of the Word of God? And not be doers and transmitters of the Word of God?
How is your heart towards God and your fellow men? Are you a legalistic or external lip-service Christian? Or is your life interiorly transform by your thoughts, words, and actions towards God and others?
If harbour in your heart hatred, bitterness, grudges, pride, and yet you live out all the outward religious rules and regulations are not a hypocrite? Is Christianity a mere expression of externalities or an inner transformation?
What makes you clean or unclean? Your unwashed hands? Or your heart full of resentments and hatred?
OUR PRAYER
Lord Jesus Christ, often our self-righteousness is not based on an interior, personal, and transformative relationship with God. It is purely based observation of external human rules and regulations as well as customs and traditions. Help us to be both hearers, keepers, transmitters, and doers of the Word of God. Amen!
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