Our Lady faithful disciple of Love, pray for us. Amen.

I continue to recover from my surgery. This homily was given back in 2006. May God bless you all. Thank you for your continued prayers.

Homily on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Twenty-second Sunday

Today we return to reading the Gospel of St. Mark and hear Jesus confronting the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. The issue at hand is one that is actually most fundamental to our Christian belief- the relationship between what we see on the outside and what occurs on the inside. Closely connected to this, is the relationship between what we profess to believe and how we actually live. The Catechism describes it in this way:
The faithful must believe the articles of the Creed’ (that is what the Church teaches) so that by believing they may obey God, by obeying God they may live well, by living well they may purify their hearts and with pure hearts may understand what they believe.”

The faithful must not only believe with their whole minds what the church teaches, but they must live out those beliefs in order to obtain purity of heart and will, in order to be saved…Consequently then, because it is a matter of our eternally salvation, it is important to understand exactly why Jesus is so strongly condemning the Pharisees and scribes.

The Pharisees were the group at the time of Jesus who were the most devote and pious. Their group began among the Jews in exile and its members wanted to honor God and obey the Law, no matter what. However, in their zeal to try to obey the Law they went overboard, so to speak, they began to follow the law only for the sake of the Law and not as a way to show their love of God by serving Him in humility and faithful obedience. These men began to invent pious practices with mixed motives- they asked questions like, “How far can I go in order not to disobey the law? They begin to do good works to be seen by others so that they could justify themselves, and say, “look at what a good person I am.” However, they failed to have true faith, because they failed to love God and develop an intimate relationship with Him, carried out and shown by their love for one another, especially those seemingly most unlovable among them.

Today we read how carefully the Pharisees washed their hands and dishes. It’s not that this practice was necessary a bad thing, even though it was a practice of human origin, but that this act was done with an impure heart and with the wrong motives. In this Gospel then, we discover that Jesus is not condemning the human tradition as such, but instead is condemning the spirit of the how the tradition was carried out. The discipline of the washing of the dishes and hands as well as other things was originally to symbolize the much deeper need for man to have purity of heart and purity of intention, in order to adore, worship and thus serve God correctly, and this of course is good. So the intention to follow the Law by pious practices was not what Jesus was attacking. And, He also was not telling the people not to follow these practices…remember, Jesus told the disciples to follow what the Pharisees said, because they did have legitimate authority from God to teach the Law and command the pious practices well. What Jesus was really attacking was something at a much deeper level, it was at the level of the Pharisees’ intention, and so Jesus quotes Isaiah, “This people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” They don’t try to live what they profess to believe, and so they don’t really love me.

With this saying, Jesus moves our attention beyond the exterior practices alone and looks into the heart. What he desires is an interior conversion so that the exterior practices have a depth of meaning. This means that we always start with our interior attitude examining why we are doing the things we do, especially when it comes to practicing our Catholic Christian faith. Are we doing them with a truly humble heart, one that loves God over and above all things, especially over and above our own will, and with a heart that desires not only the good things of God but union with God Himself, a loving union which is shown forth through not only worship of God but through love of neighbor as well. Just as a man who says He loves his wife, and a man needs to tell his wife he loves her, he must also show that love by his actions. So too a Christian who says, “I believe in and love God,” must also try to prove, show, carry out this love of God by obeying God’s commandments and the precepts or laws of His Church, with God’s help of course. This is why St. James says, “Be doers or put into practice the word and be not hearers of it only, thus deluding yourselves.” And elsewhere, “Faith without works is dead.” Saying this, we must also say at the same time, a believer can’t just do good works in order to justify themselves, proving what a good person they are, while at the same time their heart is far from worship of God and far from His law of love..

Let’s look at an example from the practice of our faith, the Holy Mass, the source and summit of our faith, and examine the interior attitudes toward it. The Christian who truly loves God, can’t just show up for Mass on Sundays in order to fulfill the law of the Church and then spend the rest of the week, with their hearts and minds turned away from God, living a life unworthy of the name of Christian from Monday through Saturday by failing to love Christ in their brother. While its true that the Church teaches infallibly, which is another way of saying the Holy Spirit teaches through the Church, that deliberately, willingly and knowingly, missing Mass on Sundays is a failure to follow the third Commandment to keep Holy the Sabbath day, and this failure is considered a mortal sin which cuts one off from friendship with God, the Church at the same time tell us that it doesn’t do much good to come to Mass Sunday an impure intention, only to fulfill the law and without love.

So if a Catholic comes to Mass with the intention only to fulfill the law in order not to feel guilty and to avoid Mortal sin, but doesn’t come out of love for God, saying to himself, showing up at Mass is good enough, this same Catholic isn’t coming with a correct and pure intention of heart. So too however, the person who that thinks by doing good works and being a good person during the week, he can please God without fulfilling the Third Commandment of this same God which commands the believer to worship and adore Him on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. The heart that refuses to follow this Command doesn’t have an pure intention either, because this isn’t true faith; it’s the same as saying I can save myself with good works, or by being good enough, which of course isn’t true because we can’t do the works we need to do in order to be saved without the grace of Christ given to us at Holy Mass. This is an important point many misunderstand. Only Jesus can save us, we can’t save ourselves and Jesus saves us through the grace given to us by the Sacraments of the Church, especially the Eucharist, the Holy Mass. We just cannot be good enough to save ourselves apart from grace, for on our own we cannot do the works required for our salvation, that’s why we need to received the Holy Eucharist, every week.

This last point really ties it all together…By receiving the Holy Eucharist, we are enabled literally take Jesus out into our lives and allow Jesus to do good works in and through us, to love our neighbor not only with our own love, but with the love of Jesus in us. But we can only do this if we receive Jesus with the proper intention of faith, allowing Him to possess our hearts and become Lord of our lives. . St. James points this out by saying “Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.” This word, is the Word of God made flesh, it is the Holy Eucharist which is given to us at Holy Communion that is able to save our souls and save other souls through us, but only if we are pure of heart, living our lives with the help of His grace, by showing our love for God in faithful obedience to His Commandments and the Commandments and teachings of His Church…for we just can not love our brother if we are not following the commandments and the teachings of the Church and it is the Eucharist as well that gives us the help we need to be obedient to these.

Ultimately then, this week’s Gospel message really ties into the last seven weeks and the Bread of Life discourse. Ultimately, our faith is anchored in the Eucharist. A person just can’t be a Catholic without believing in the Eucharist, without believing in transubstantiation, that at the Mass Jesus through the priest changes ordinary bread and wine miraculously into Himself---the God made Man. And that only by receiving this same Jesus with faith and with the proper intention can we be enabled live out our Catholic faith, not only in word but in deed, to be practicers of the Word, and not hearers only. Lord I believe, help my unbelief.

Let us pray today that we might have a deeper interior conversion of heart that would manifest itself in our actions. We are here at Mass because we truly desire with our wills, to follow the Lord with pure hearts and minds in order to live a life of true holiness, a life free from hypocrisy, because it is lived in faithful obedience to the law in order to show our love for God by our love for neighbor. We are here, not just to fulfill the law, but to adore God by offering ourselves to Him in order to receive Him in an intimacy of Love at Holy Communion, so that we can then go out and share this love with our brother and sister, thus manifesting our love for God. May the seeds of faith we have received as a gift begin to grow and blossom more fully in our hearts. May the Virgin Mary aide us by her example and with her prayers and her powerful intercession before the throne of God. Our Lady faithful disciple of Love, pray for us. Amen.