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Writer's picture: Immersed in ChristImmersed in Christ

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Fifth week of the Year

Mark 7:24-30; Genesis 2:18-25; Psalm 128:1-5 (Lectionary 332)

 

When he sent his disciples out on mission, Jesus told them, “If they refuse to hear you, shake their dust off your feet as you leave, as a testimony against them” (6:11). This may be what he was doing when, after his last frustrating encounter with the scribes and Pharisees he “went away to the region of Tyre,” a Gentile province of Syrians and Phoenicians. Or he may have just been putting some distance between himself and the “clerical triumphalist legalists” (see Tuesday’s reflection) who were bent on silencing him at all costs, even through murder (3:6).

 

Jesus had “entered a house,” which may mean he had friends in that area, but he was keeping a low profile, because he “did not want anyone to know he was there.” Still, a Gentile woman came in and asked him to heal her little daughter. Jesus’ response seems rude and totally out of character. “It is not right,” he said, “to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

 

What was his tone of voice when he said this? Was he smiling? The words are shocking, but he was certainly leading her on. This woman was no wilting violet. Her response didn’t express any sense of being inferior because she was not Jewish. She just gave Jesus’ words right back to him. If that was the way he wanted to play it, it was fine with her: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

 

If we take her words at face value, what Jesus had led her into was a profession of faith! She acknowledged that God, for whatever reason, had chosen the Jews to be his special people. That didn’t make them better than her own people; it was just a fact. And Jesus left it at that. He didn’t exhort her to change religions and become a Jew (which also would have meant, at that time, changing her nationality and culture). He just complimented her on her answer and told her that her little daughter was healed.

 

When he used the word “dogs,” Jesus also may have been talking almost to himself, echoing the triumphalist attitude of those he had just left, for whom being a Jew “in good standing” was to belong to a religious elite. This is what they would have said. How would she answer?

 

The good news here is that Jesus accepts people as they are. So should we. Having the “right” religion does not necessarily make us the “right kind of people.” Jesus looks deeper: at the faith, hope and love in one’s heart.

 

Initiative: Be open to the goodness in everyone, no matter how it is packaged.




Writer's picture: Immersed in ChristImmersed in Christ

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Fifth week of the Year

Mark 7:14-23 Genesis 2:5-17; Psalm 104:1-30 (Lectionary 331)

 

Do we see it as good news that Jesus calls us to focus on our hearts?

 

He had the Jewish laws about “clean and unclean” foods in mind when he said, “Listen to me, all of you: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out of a person’s heart are what defile.” But when his disciples asked him about it he expanded: “It is what emerges from within a person — that and nothing else — that makes one impure.”

 

Jesus puts the focus on intentionality. “It is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” (Or “evil thoughts,” or “wicked designs”). The point is that all the things Jesus lists as bad behavior he is seeing as examples of something evil in a person’s heart, as revelations of something wrong inside of the person.

 

The list itself is very interesting. The translators cannot agree on what all the words mean. Some are clearly actions — “theft,” murder,” “adultery”  — but some seem to describe abiding states of mind, such as, “greed,” “malice,” “envy,” “arrogance,” and just an absence of moral values (“folly” or “an obtuse spirit”). The basic point, however, is clear: God looks, not so much at a person’s actions, but at the person’s heart. No matter how bad (or good!) a person’s actions might be in themselves, objectively, what God sees and judges is the attitude and intention in the heart that is behind them. And we don’t always know what that is. Hardly ever for another; and much of the time, not even for ourselves.

 

Oddly enough, falling into sin can sometimes be a positive experience! It is a common discovery among priests that in hearing confessions, it is not so much sins they hear as ideals. For example, someone says, “I have been using bad language a lot.” What is the person really saying?

 

The fact that someone cusses is hardly a revelation. The revelation is that this person, who may think of himself (or even herself) as just a dirty mouth, is aware in the act of confessing it that he really has a higher ideal than has been evident in his conversation. You can’t look down on anything unless something in you has risen above it. So when you call a sin a sin, that tells you — and the priest — that your ideals are higher than your behavior.

 

Jesus teaches in this reading that God would rather see us embracing his ideals from the heart, even if we fall down in living them, than see us doing good because of some external pressure or motivation, but not from the heart.

 

Initiative: Think the second thought. Ask what feeling guilty says about you.




Writer's picture: Immersed in ChristImmersed in Christ

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Fifth week of the Year

Mark 7:1-13; Genesis 1:20 to 2:4; Psalm 8:4-9

 

It is disturbing to realize that in the Gospels the people who opposed Jesus the most were the ones most identified with religion: First were the scribes, who, though without official authority, “after long years of study, around the age of forty” were given the status of reliable interpreters of the Jewish Scriptures. Their word was generally accepted, literally, as law. Then came the Pharisees, who tended to make observance of laws the narrow focus and main goal of religion. Finally came the priests, whose leaders, the “high priests,” were “members of the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem” (Léon Dufour, Dictionary of the New Testament). 

 

Their abhorrence of Jesus alerts us, first, to the corrupting force of power — especially, perhaps, of religious power — against which there is almost no defense. Second, it reveals the insidious infection inherent in focusing on religious laws. Third, it exposes the blinding delusion of rejoicing in prestige, individual or ecclesial. All three of these groups share the three undermining attitudes rejected from the outset by the bishops who gathered for the Second Vatican Council: juridicism, clericalism, and triumphalism. (See Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of the Church Expanded Edition, Doubleday Image Books, 1987, p.39).

 

The Good News is by nature locked in a fight to the death against these three attitudes, as Jesus literally was. Isn’t it strange that the people most pre-occupied with religion in Jesus’ time were the ones who resisted most adamantly being evangelized by Jesus himself, Son of God and Word incarnate!

 

The “profile” of Jesus’ enemies appears in this reading. 1. They “gather around” Jesus, not to learn from him but just to “check out” his orthodoxy. 2. They cling blindly to the “customs of their ancestors” without evaluating these in the light of God’s loving will. 3. They ignore the commandments that call for deep changes of mind and heart and focus instead on external, even superficial behavior. 4. We have already seen (3:6) that they are more concerned about silencing those who oppose their narrow “orthodoxy” than about helping people to grow in knowledge, love and life. God says of them the worst thing anyone could hear: “their hearts are far from me.” They have been the entrenched enemies of the Good News from the time of Jesus until now.

 

Forewarned, we may find seeds of these attitudes in our own hearts. If we look.

 

Initiative: Study Phariseeism the way doctors study disease: to avoid it.




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