Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
When I was growing up in Montana, we
used to observe “Ember Days” which came around four times a year.
The name came from from the Latin term Quator tempora, which means
“four times”. Each set of Ember Days consisted of a Wednesday,
Friday and Saturday, in memory of the betrayal of Judas, the
crucifixion of our Lord, and his time in the grave. You were
supposed to fast on those days, which meant eating only three meals,
and refraining from meat except for one meal on Wednesday and
Saturday. You couldn't eat meat on Friday anyway. The winter set
was in thanksgiving for the olive harvest, which provided the oils we
use in our sacraments. The spring set was in thanksgiving for the
flowers, which fed the bees who produced wax for our candles. The
summer set celebrated the wheat harvest, which provides the raw
material for the bread which becomes Christ's body. The fall set
celebrated the grape harvest which provided the material that becomes
His precious blood. Catholics began celebrating the ember days
before the third century. In the tenth century Pope Gregory VI
ordered that they be celebrated throughout the whole church.
But today, if you wanted to know when
the ember days were, only the Farmer's Almanac keeps track. You
don't find them mentioned in our missalettes or catholic calendars.
What happened? During Vatican II, the
church fathers ordered that the Church review its traditions and see
whether they were serving the purpose for which they had been
instituted. The ember days clearly were not, since no one was
observing them anymore, and no one remembered why we observed them.
So this age old tradition, older than the Tridentine Mass, was
eliminated as a universal practice in the Church.
Our readings this Sunday should be
looked at together. We have Moses telling the Israelites, including
Jesus, not to add or subtract a single thing to the commandments God
that he put before them. One of the reasons to keep the commandments
was to show the world the way a great and just nation behaves, a
nation that is so close to God that God listens to them? Now
although Moses received ten commandments on Mount Sinai, there are
many more commandments attributed to Moses in the first five books of
the bible. In fact Deuteronomy has several, including one which says
that if you come across a bird nesting on her eggs or chicks, you can
take the eggs and chicks, but not the mother; and if you do this
things will go well and you will have a long life. The rabbis
ultimately found 630 separate commandments, and of course the most
Orthodox Jews try to keep them all, for no other reason than their
belief that they came from God.
So then we get to James, who tells us
that the essence of religion is to care for widows and orphans, and
keep yourself pure and unstained by the world. So much for 630
commandments. And Jesus, of course, condemns the pharisees for
pointing out that Jesus' disciples ate without washing their hands.
Some of my grandchildren would be in big trouble.
Like the tradition of the ember days,
the traditions the Pharisees were so adamant about, all the purity
laws, for example, had lost their original meaning. The ritual
washings, the detailed way to keep the sabbath holy, the dietary
laws, the laws governing clothing – keeping these laws had become
the essence of being Jewish, and you could measure how holy someone
was by how well he kept the laws. Saint Paul even bragged about how
diligent he had been when he was a Pharisee. But Jesus might have
said to the pharisees, “why did Moses give you these laws?” And
they would have to answer, “so that through them we would give
evidence of our wisdom and intelligence and justice – and closeness
to our God? Clearly the traditions of Moses weren't doing that
anymore, if they ever did. The laws had become a way to keep the
Israelites from interacting with the world; to the extent that you
kept them, you became more and more isolated from the people for whom
you were to be an example, the people who should have been so
impressed that they too would want to follow that God of the
Israelites.
Jesus is not against tradition, nor
should we be. Jesus himself even uses a traditional mode of argument
– to quote a prophet. That would not have been helpful if he had
been arguing with Pagans. Jesus in fact, according to John
celebrated the Passover with his apostles, and probably the other
feasts of the Jewish people. But here he tells us how to look at
traditions.
First, where did the tradition come
from? Many of the laws attributed to Moses were no longer followed
in Jesus' time. If you executed your son for talking back to you,
the Romans didn't look kindly on that. If you stoned a blasphemer to
death, best do it as part of a crowd, since it was against Roman law,
but they couldn't pick one person to blame if a whole crowd was
involved. And if your brother died you might not marry his widow so
you could raise up children who would be legally those of your
brother – again, because in addition to being impractical, monogamy
had become the norm in Judaism as well as most of the Roman world.
God may have given the laws to Moses, but they had to do with a
particular time and place, and were never intended to be forever and
ever.
Second, tradition means “handing
down”. If the tradition no longer carries the message from
generation to generation, it no longer has a purpose. That's the
ember days. They were a good idea back when most people lived on
farms and most people practiced Catholicism, but for a world wide
religion a tradition rooted in western European agriculture didn't
mean anything anymore.
Finally, even if traditions are
harmless, if they aren't moving their practitioners to the kind of
religion James talks about – a religion in which charity toward the
poor and abandoned is foremost, and striving in our own lives to
overcome our faults and failings and become more like Jesus, then
maybe we need to find something else to do with our time, or at least
remember how the tradition helps us in these areas. Jesus wants us
to look carefully at our traditions – are they helping us or
standing in the way of our spiritual journey?
