October 2011

Homily for Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time 23 October 2011

In today’s Gospel we see another example of the way the Pharisees and others who were hostile to Jesus tried to set traps for him- as far as they knew, he was just another wandering freelance preacher, someone with no formal theological training, just the carpenter’s son from some remote village, and they thought it would be easy enough to make a fool of him, to show him up as an ignoramus. And so they ask him very loaded questions; last week, they asked, “Should we pay taxes to this dreadful government or not?” and today they pose a question that many Jews were forever mulling over at this time – “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?”
This question was on people’s minds so much because there were just so many commandments- the Jews had of course begun with just ten, the big ten we all know as the Ten Commandments, but they had gone on and on developing more and more, we can find them all through the first five books of the Bible, until they had, believe it or not, 613! There were laws for this and laws for that, and this was forbidden and so was that. And Jews who wanted to follow take their religion seriously found themselves caught up in trying to remember to do, or not do, hundreds of things. The Pharisees in particular paid great attention to every little minor rule – you remember Jesus speaking scornfully of the way they would carefully tithe even a bunch of herbs: Luke has Jesus say “woe to you, Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of God” (Lk 11 xlii). As well as these 613 commandments, there had grown up over the centuries a whole body of interpretation of them- rather like we have the Code of Canon Law springing from our tradition and Scripture- and all these examples and case studies that the rabbis had accumulated had also come to have as it were the force of law. This is what Jesus is referring to when he says, in the very next chapter of this Gospel “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Mt 23 iv) and he denounces them in strong language: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in” (ibid xiii).

This is of course the great danger of religion, of any religion- we always run the risk as we try to become more faithful to our faith, of getting bogged down in the detail – which means that either we reach a point where we can’t see the wood for the trees anymore, or the details assume such importance for us that the whole purpose of our faith is fatally undermined and we forget why we are believers in the first place. And let’s face it, talking about and getting obsessed with the minutiae of religion, is always far safer and easier than actually living it and facing its real challenges. The great example of this I always think is the encounter Our Lord has with the Samaritan woman at the well, which we find in John’s Gospel, chapter 4. You remember, Our Lord asks her for a drink, thus breaking several taboos in one go but that’s another story. He talks to her of the living water, the life in the Holy Spirit that he wants to give her, and he sees deep into her very soul and into her life: “you have had five husbands and he whom you now have is not your husband”. This is the start of the kind of encounter Jesus wants to have with each one of us, a conversation based on reality, the reality of our present situation in life, no holds barred, no varnish. It is all too much for this woman, and so she retreats at once into discussing religion, let’s not talk about me and who I actually am and the muddle I am really in, let’s talk instead about the differences between the Samaritans and the Jews, “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship”(Jn 4 xx).
And so this muddle in the Jewish people’s minds, of how many rules and regulations have we got and do they all carry equal weight, and this terrible tendency all devout people have, of losing their way in their own smokescreen of religiosity, is what Our Lord now cuts through with his reply. He begins by quoting from Deuteronomy (6 iv,v) the great Jewish statement of faith that is always known by its first Hebrew word, the “Shema” – Jesus reminds them “ The Lord your God is one God and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” – but he changes the last word from might to mind. This is interesting, because the rabbis interpreted this as follows: your heart means your will, your soul means your life, your might means your wealth. Jesus is saying now instead, you must show your real love of God by your mind, your whole attitude to life, not just by what you put in the collection. He goes on to quote another Old Testament text, this time from Leviticus (19 xviii), which up to this point the Jews had not regarded as a first rank commandment so to speak: “you shall love your neighbour as yourself; I am the Lord”. Jesus brings this sentence out of the shadows and from now on in the Christian religion it will stay in the foreground, because as he goes on to tell us, “on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets also”.
Why are we Christians at all? Why are we here this morning? Well, either we are here and we identify ourselves as Catholic Christians because we want to live in a close relationship with God and develop that intimacy until it irrigates our whole life, or we might as well stay in bed and forget the whole thing. “Simples!” And if we are serious about being friends with God, and I know we are, even if we have a certain timidity about the prospect some days, if we want to be friends with God we will want to show him our love in the way we treat our fellow human beings – and this doesn’t mean just thinking lovely thoughts about the starving millions but how we actually treat the people we live with and work with day by day. Remember, we can only encounter Our Lord meaningfully when we do so in the reality – not the pious fiction, the reality- of our lives. That is where he waits for us, as he waits for us at the communion rails this morning. Our communion antiphon says it all: “if anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him and we shall come to him”. Jesus, we love you, we keep your word, come to us this morning, in the reality of your Body and Blood, in the reality of our lives. Amen.