September 2, 2018
XXII Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
On this Sunday, we take up again the lesson of the Gospel of Mark.
Today’s passage serves as a dividing line: it is, actually, between the two accounts of the multiplication of loaves. Immediately after today’s reading, Jesus will step outside the boundaries of Israel and will enter heathen land, “unclean” land. Just for them, for the heathens, it will be the second multiplication.
It seems the passage today prepares us for this transition, putting the questions to us: what is unclean? What pushes us away from God?
The pretext comes to Jesus from a question that is addressed to Him by the Pharisees and Scribers, hailing from Jerusalem, or rather, from the holy place par excellence. These individuals, custodians of tradition and the Law, are scandalized to see how little the disciples of Jesus observe the ritual prescriptions, and they ask why is this so (Mk 7:5).
For them, the line between clean and unclean is clear and unmistakable. It is so for those who observe meticulously the prescriptions and precepts handed down by the fathers. Such a criterion had a particular advantage: there was an external criterion, precise and easily verifiable to establish who was right and who not, and this criterion was precisely the observance of the laws and prescriptions of the fathers.
Jesus, instead, recalls His listeners to another standard. He wants to bring them to another level that was also present in the intentions of the old law, but which were neglected: the purpose of the laws of external purity had an important social role, it was to remind the believer of the necessity of purity of heart. And it is that which Jesus recalls in this passage.
Jesus distinguishes between traditions and commandments. The rules come from men, the commandments from God; observance of these rules are countable and measurable, not so obedience to the commandments; the rules as ends in themselves give security and can make us succumb to the presumption of doing this by ourselves; whereas the commandments establish the way, make free and open to God.
The commandments, in short, touch the human heart, its profound reasons; traditions remain superficial.
The risk in observing so many precepts is, by this, to think of oneself being close to God; and failing to observe that the heart is distant, as Jesus says citing Isaiah’s prophecy (Mk 7:6-7).
Human traditions can become an pretext for avoiding observance of the only commandment capable of giving meaning and fullness to the life of man, that of love. But there is more: these traditions, giving the person the illusion of being right, prevent him from looking at his heart and seeing that from out of the depth of this heart comes evil.
And it is precisely in this regard that the second teaching of Jesus is concerned: to say that the human heart is subject to every ambiguity and every possibility of evil: not what is outside us leads us to sin, but within us dwells the inclination to all selfishness: the line between clean and unclean lives right there, and exterior worship is not enough, mere observances are insufficient to bring the heart to the Lord.
As often happens in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does not say how the heart can be healed, which therapy is necessary to restore health.
And this perhaps because the first step to being healed is to recognize being sick, without deluding ourselves that external actions are enough to heal the heart: healing must be more in-depth.
But it is only this knowledge that prepares the heart to accept the passage that Jesus will make immediately after, in heathen land. That is, to welcome the grace of salvation that reaches me where I for one, and not others, am unclean and heathen. To accept that the Lord must cross over to reach me first of all, my distance from God, because only in this way the Kingdom of God is indeed at hand (Mk 1:15).
It is, perhaps, in this way that the transition from observance to obedience happens, which heals the heart. For if precepts do not have the power to free us from ourselves and from the solitude in which we are enclosed – and it is this that later makes the heart sick – obedience puts us in a relationship with the One who has life and wants to give us life. It is the choice of living by gift, of nourishing ourselves by the bread, on which we paused at length on previous Sundays, and which lead us in a virtuous circle of charity and gratuity, which is the real and unique healing of the human heart.
+Pierbattista
