Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-8 (RM) or 6-9 (RCL); Psalm 15; James 1: 17-18, 21b-22, 27 (RM) or 1-17 (RCL); Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23.
Rules. Law. The rule of law. Following rules may not be fun but they do provide a clean structure of expectations and outcomes. The rules can determine the winner of a game (and whether all the participants played fair.) The law and its interpretation can decide a legal case to secure justice. Following rules can save a life. I’m thinking now of speed limits, and the raft of police studies and statistics showing a sharp increase in speeding, unsafe passing, aggressive driving and road rage in the aftermath of the pandemic. A friend of mine with a lifetime of experience in long-distance trucking exclaimed, “It’s just crazy out there! What people do on the highway! It’s crazy!”
Still, it’s one thing to concede the practical necessity of rules and laws, and another to see law itself as a gift of God. This was what Moses was trying to do when he addressed the ever-grumbling, golden-calf-worshipping, never-content-with-their-heaven-sent-manna (“What’s that?”) Hebrews encamped on the plain of Moab, not far from Canaan, the Promised Land.
This gift of God was to shape the people into a morally cohesive community, always cognizant of the fact that they had been enslaved persons in Egypt, freed, safeguarded, and fed on their journey by divine providence. They were to listen attentively – “Shema Israel,” “Hear O Israel” — and observe the law reverently as a precious inheritance to be taught, generation after generation. Verse 9 (included in the Revised Common Lectionary but missing in the Roman Missal) warns them,
“But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen, nor let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.”
This passage casts a slightly different light on the Gospel reading, and may help smooth the rough edges of implicit anti-Judaism in the text. The writer of Mark did not list a number of examples of Jewish everyday ritual customs in order to ridicule them, but to explain what they were to a largely Gentile Christian community who hadn’t grown up with these practices.
Jesus doesn’t ridicule the “tradition of the elders” either – he simply relativizes it and flips it around backwards. In the process he butts heads with the Jewish religious movements of his day whose only fault, really, was to take Moses’ words at Moab very, very seriously.
At this point “law” moves beyond a set of obligations, undertaken grudgingly at times, by which the Hebrew people live in concert with the will of their faithful, liberator God. The law becomes rather an internalized, organic source of moral life that shapes the conduct of both the individual and the community. It’s not about what goes in, but what comes out, that spreads like ripples through a community, for good or ill, strengthening it or damaging it. It’s not about performance (well, not only performance) but transformation of the whole person, by which the life-giving law becomes incarnate in the living person – a transformation in the Spirit.
It is, after all, a living Word.
© Susan K. Roll
This Reflection has been lightly revised from that of August 29, 2021.
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
