I was at a local ethnic parish. The pastor introduced me to one of his parishioners. As I went to shake his hand, the parishioner immediately pulled his hand back and then looked to me and then to the pastor.
I turned to the pastor myself. “What did I do?” I said to him.
Well, we were standing at the parish garage, I was inside the garage and the parishioner was outside. The door was up. In his country it is a strong tradition that you never shake hands over a threshold. As the parishioner went to shake my hand, he noticed that it was over a threshold and he immediately pulled back. Once I understood, I went outside the garage and shook his hand.
This is a strong tradition in his country, although to us it can be confusing. Today we are looking at something similar. The washing of your hands we see in today’s gospel, is actually not in the name of cleanliness which in our time makes sense, it is in the name of ritual purity. Second, like the issue with shaking hands across a threshold, it was not a written law but a tradition that had the force of law.
The Pharisees saw this as important and those who observed these ritual purity laws considered themselves holy. So their question really in a sense was not so much why is it that your disciples do not wash their hands, as much as, why is it that you spend time with people who reject these rules. Also realize that the force of these rules came during the Babylonian exile, where Jews externally defined themselves around the gentile population what is now modern day Iraq. These practices kept the Jewish culture alive even though they Jewish state ceased to exist for forty years.
It would be like someone considered another less holy because they did not bless themselves when entering a Church. It is not a canon law to do this, but it is part of our Catholic tradition. Yet, the most evil of people are just as capable of blessing themselves when they enter a church as the most holy. This act alone does not indicate holiness.
It is here that Jesus defines what is unholy. It is not the one who does not observe these rules, but the one who draws upon the evil in his/her heart when acting in the world.
Notice the list of sins, these are the most grevious of sins against God and neighbor and it is easy to see that no community can survive if people commit these sins even though they may do the external good thing. Think of it this way, the most vicious of criminals, when they are not being pursued will stop for a red light if only out of self interest. Yet, if he does stop at a red light, that does not make him any less of a vicious criminal.
This is always to remind us that rules are not the end all and be all of our faith. It is living the faith in such a way that we either automatically follow the rules because of the higher standard by which we live our faith or we allow the rules to lead us to deepen our faith and understanding in God. Just following the rules does not make us holy. Seeking to be holy people makes us holy.
Maybe a good example of this can be made by a question I get from time to time. Being a baby-boomer, people occasionally ask me if I ever smoked marijuana. My answer is aways, that the question is not if I ever smoked marijuana, the question is why don’t I smoke marijuana. That is because the reason why I don’t smoke has less to do with the law and more to do with wanting to a live a life that is greater than anything I could experience under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The same can be said for Jesus’ statement. The day our faith becomes nothing more than following laws, it becomes lifeless for us. It has nothing to offer us. This is why Ezekiel has the image of a dead faith being nothing more than bones. The bones represent a legalistic understanding of faith that gives no life. Unfortunately, I think many people have left Catholicism because they understood it only as a set of rules they lost a sense of our faith being a powerful life giving force that humanizes us and leads us to become fully human and alive. In fact, you will find that the most nasty and the least life giving of Catholics are the ones who can recite every rule in mass and every place that either the priest or the people have not followed the rule to the letter.
Yet, those who recognize the rule as a source of life will follow it as best they can but will see the action of the Holy Spirit behind it and grow closer to everything Christ made us.
Jesus warns us to understand the rules mean nothing if we are not seeking Christ first. If we are seeking Christ, we will repent of our sins to grow closer to him. If we are seeking external manifestation of what we do, we will show everyone our blue ribbons for following the rules, but we will be unable to show anyone our smiles for finding Christ.
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