Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 7:1 - 8, 14-15, 21 - 23

I had a couple of uncles who were farmers. Farming life really depended on routine; if you didn’t get things done when they were supposed to be done, you might lose the whole year. And that rigidity extended even to the hours of the day. My aunt would prepare the mid- day meal, which was pretty substantial, and when everything was ready, she would step out of the kitchen and ring a bell. My uncle and the farmhands would drop everything and come to the house, where they would step into the washroom and scrupulously wash their faces and their hands before sitting down at the table. I’m sure if one of them had avoided this step he would have received a serious lecture. So I have a little sympathy for the Pharisees who want to know what is going on with Jesus’ dirty apostles.

Well, it turns out Jesus and the Pharisees are not really worried about dirt. Moses had long ago passed on God’s laws. We think of the ten commandments, but there were a lot of other commandments Moses gave the people which you can find in the first five books of the bible. Some of the laws seem to make little sense; in Deuteronomy, for example there is the commandment regarding birds: “Should a bird’s nest appear before you on the way … and the mother is resting on the chicks or the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the chicks or the eggs.” It goes on to say that if you do this it will go well with you and prolong your days. I’ll have you know I’ve never broken that commandment. The point was that as the Jewish people were conquered, went into exile, met other misfortune, the laws of Moses became more and more important as the way to be a good Jew, and the Pharisees made new laws to clear up any ambiguities in laws like the one about the birds. The cleanliness laws were like this -- not there to clean you, but there to separate you from those who were not Jews.

Washing your hands involved an elaborate ritual, involving several rinsings and holding your hands in precise ways. And there were similar rules for the dishes you used. And if you broke a commandment, washing usually was part of the ritual for getting back in good graces with God and the Jewish religious leaders. There’s a chunk of this scripture that we didn’t read in which Jesus gives several examples of this kind of thinking, including the idea that if you pledged money to the temple, you could not use that money to take care of your parents.

Do we still do these kinds of things? I think we do. In our society which is tearing itself apart, by the way, you have indicators of your particular tribe, or in most cases we belong to more than one tribe. We Catholics define ourselves by how diligently we “practice” our religion. Do we get to Mass on Sundays and Holy days? Do we get to confession at least once a year? Do we support our church in some meaningful way? And when we do these things we are “good” Catholics. Rules are important for us as they were for the people in Jesus’ time.

And just like the Jews, most of us feel most comfortable with people like ourselves. We may not think we have a prejudiced bone in our body, and maybe we don’t, but a little tiny alarm goes off when we meet someone whose looks, behavior or lifestyle is sufficiently different from our own. That’s normal, that’s natural; for most of human history it was important to be able to separate us from them.

Jesus is not condemning rules, or saying that the Jewish rituals were wrong; in fact he probably practiced them himself. He is saying that rules can obscure what they were meant to highlight in the first place, and he reminds us that sin is ultimately the product of our hearts,

We ask ourselves a simple question: Is what comes out of us -- out of my heart, my mind, my mouth, my actions -- is it goodness? Or is it something not so good. Sometimes it’s hard to know which.

But we have two criteria. The cross symbolizes our Christian life. Jesus said “IF anyone wishes to come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.” The cross means that we respond to evil with goodness; when someone does something bad to us, we try to find a way to overwhelm that act with something good. It’s not easy. But it can be done. Jesus also said, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our dwelling within them.” We have God within us. And Jesus also said, “Whoever believes in me, as scripture says, ‘rivers of living water will flow from within them.’” The goodness of God which is in us, is meant to pour out from us on the world, and the more it does, the greater it becomes.

It’s a struggle every day to find that goodness and pour it out -- a call to check up on someone you haven’t seen in a while; a sincere compliment to someone who had done a job well; being a willing ear to someone who has a lot to get off her chest; taking a genuine interest in what a five year old is trying to tell you. But as we develop these habits of pouring out goodness, we begin to see the effect not only in the world around us, but in ourselves. Because God dwells in us, we can become rivers of living water.

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

 John 6:60- 69

Mother Theresa wrote to her confessor that she often felt as though there was no one listening to her prayers, that she had doubts about the existence of God. Her letters from the time she began tending the poor of Calcutta to nearly the end of her life contain frequent mentions of her doubts and her torments -- despite the fact that she became an icon of holiness and love of God during that same time. And yet the Church recognizes her as one of the saints in heaven. The Church does not proclaim someone a saint to honor him or her -- they don’t need that. The reason the Church names saints is so that we have someone to imitate. So what do we see in the life of Mother Theresa that we are called to imitate? Despite her doubts which tormented her, she was faithful; she took to heart the words we’ve just heard -- “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

We all want eternal life. None of us would welcome the loss of our very selves, or far worse, an eternity of emptiness, which is really what Hell is all about. And there are so many competing voices, unfortunately, many within scripture itself.

Paul says in the Epistle to the Ephesians “by grace you have been saved through faith … it is the gift of God”. In Second Corinthians he says “For he made him… to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him”. IN Acts, Peter says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you and your household will be saved.” In John, Jesus says “... whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.” In Romans, Paul says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” These statements are not different ways of saying the same thing. And we haven’t even discussed the Gospel of Luke, where often Jesus seems to be saying that what we do is more important than what we say or believe -- the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example. Or Matthew’s story of the coming of theSon of Man who will divide the sheep from the goats -- on the basis of “whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers that you do for me” even though the doers did not know who they were doing for. And Jesus of course tells the rich young man that he should keep the commandments.

What I’m trying to say is that if you go by scripture, or by the lives of the people we know are in heaven, the ones we call saints, there is no consistent answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved?”

But I think there is a clear answer. Jesus told his apostles, “Receive the Holy Spirit, what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” And right from the beginning, the Apostles began to form the Church, the living body which would create the clear and straightforward path to eternal life.

We have to be baptized; we have to accept God’s forgiveness for our sins taking advantage of the sacrament of reconciliation, at least for those sins that separate us from God. We have to feed on the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. We have to love God, at least a little bit; and love our neighbor, at least a little bit. We look at some of the great saints and see that they were on fire with their love of God; and we see some of them equally on fire with the love of their neighbor. But we see Saint Serafina who became paralyzed and spent her life in bed, or Saint Dismas, the good thief, who was assured by Jesus himself that he would enter paradise with him.

So there are minimal requirements for eternal life. It’s fairly straightforward. It’s being a faithful son or daughter of the Church, even on days when you only half-[believe, like Mother Theresa or Saint John of the Cross. You keep coming back to the basics, knowing that what you lack will be made up by the sacrificial death of Jesus, whose complete and total abandonment to the will of the Father makes up for everything lacking in you and I, and even in the great saints, many of whom wrote and preached about their own sinfulness, even when by my standards they were pretty much free of sin. So when you and I have doubts, when the world pulls us one way or another, when we look at the scandals in the Church or feel that our Pope has lost his way, as some people do, we might feel tempted to throw up our hands and leave. But to whom shall we go?

When I was growing up, in the days before Vatican II, there was a priest from Boston who preached that you could not be saved unless you were a member of the Catholic Church. He was excommunicated, but we were all left with the impression that while maybe you could be saved it wasn't very likely. On the other hand, Karl Rahner, a famous theologian, said that you could only be saved through Christ, but there were lots of anonymous Christians out there. But the truth is, we don't know, and if we love someone, we would want them to know about the way Christ left us.

Because we know that the Church, the body of Christ, has the words of eternal life.