Human Precepts vs. Divine Doctrine

Human Precepts vs. Divine Doctrine
Homily for Sunday, August 30, 2015    
Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time - B
by Dcn. Bob Bonomi

When I was a kid, I remember distinctly my mom making me wash my hands before dinner.  I wasn’t a big bible reader back then, and that’s probably a good thing – because I’m sure I would have pointed out this gospel passage to her.  And knowing my mom, I probably wouldn’t be here today to talk about it.
 
But is Jesus really saying that it is not important to wash our hands? Or, for that matter, would Jesus tell us that the precepts of our faith today are not important, either?  I don’t think so.

Listen to the first reading.  Moses says to the Israelites: “Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you to observe.”   Moses told them to carefully observe the laws and statutes because they came from God – GOD gave them to us.  They are “just” – a sign of wisdom and intelligence, a sign of a great people. 
So, is Jesus contradicting what Moses said?  Again, I don’t think so.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus did not say that Jewish Laws and Traditions were bad.  He did not say that they were to be ignored.  He did not say that they were not important.  In fact, look what Jesus said in chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel:  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.  Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
 
That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?  So, why is he chastising the Pharisees and the scribes? He should have been praising the Pharisees and the scribes for pointing out the faults of some of his disciples!
 
Let’s take a quick look at Jewish law and where it comes from.  (I got this from several Jewish History Websites on the Internet, and we all know that the Internet is trustworthy and accurate.)  There are two main parts to Jewish law: the Written Law, also known as the Torah.  We know it better as the first five books of the Old Testament.  And there is the Oral Law, from which we get the 613 laws that we commonly hear about and which is itself derived from the Torah and from the traditions which were handed down from generation to generation.  The Oral Law was just that - in fact, Jews were forbidden to write it down, for by passing these statutes down orally each generation was forced to memorize the laws, and thereby take them more to heart.  It wasn’t until well after the destruction of the Temple in 70AD and the subsequent dispersal of the Jews that the oral laws were written down in what is known as the Mishnah, in order to preserve them for future generations.
 
But during the time of Jesus, these Oral Laws were exactly that – handed down orally, with their foundations based on the teachings in the Torah.  They derived from the Word of God, and so the Jewish people should have known them and followed them.  It was one of the jobs of the Pharisees and scribes to pass on these oral laws. So why does it seem that Jesus was condemning them?
 
St. James gives us a clue: “all good giving and every perfect gift” is from God, and that we need to be “doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deluding ourselves”.  He goes on to say, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
Therein lies the key.  It’s not just that we need to follow the traditions of our faith – we need to understand WHY we do.  We need to know what it is that motivates us to be doers of the Word, to follow the law.
 
And that has to be LOVE.
 
Remember when Jesus was asked about what was the greatest commandment?  His reply was: “Love God”.  He said that the second greatest commandment was “Love Your Neighbor”.  He went on further and said that all of the laws and the words of the prophets were based on these two commandments. 
 
The problem faced by the Pharisees and the scribes, and in fact what many of us face today, is that we lack understanding of how everything that we are commanded to do by God has to be based on love.  If we strip away love, then we risk stripping away the divinity in God’s laws and we replace it with our own personal interpretation of the meaning of the law. 
 
Those of you who work with your hands understand this.  We all “know” in our heads that it is better to wash our hands before eating, otherwise something unpleasant may occur – the food may end up contaminated; it might end up tasting bad; or worse, it might make us ill.  

But sometimes it is impossible to take the time or find the soap and water to wash with before we eat.  A friend once told me about how, when he was younger, he had to work in the fields of his father’s farm.  When lunchtime came, there wasn’t any water to wash with, so all they could do was wipe their hands on their clothes and eat.  It was either that, or go hungry.
I used to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, and come lunchtime we might only have hand sanitizer to clean our hands.  But all it would do is make mud out of the dust and dirt so we’d just skip it and eat with unwashed – “unclean” – hands.  If we had refused to eat unless we washed – well, a couple of things might happen.  First, we’d go hungry.  But more importantly, we could be insulting the very people who had gone out of their way to provide food for us!  We would not be acting out of love, but out of a misguided notion of being “right”.
 
In today’s Gospel, Jesus points out to the Pharisees and the scribes that they have taken the good and perfect gifts given to them by God – His statutes and decrees – and have defiled them by stripping away love and compassion from them and replacing them with a self-righteous judgment that ignored the greater commandments of God.  And it concludes with a command to the crowd – to all of us – to hear and understand; to think about WHY we do what we do, and why we believe what we believe.    Do we take particularly difficult teachings of the Church and impose a self-righteous attitude to condemn others who fail to follow them, even as we struggle with them ourselves?  Do we take the moral laws given to us by God, all good and perfect in themselves, and twist them into signs of hate and condemnation, defiling them in the process?
 
We must understand that the Divine Doctrine of love underlies ALL of the precepts of our faith.  We cannot pay lip service to them and treat them as being mere human precepts that we ourselves created.  When we deal with others who may have problems understanding or following them, we must allow the goodness of the Lord to flow through us to help them.  We must live those divine precepts with love. Otherwise, we risk defiling them and us by the evils which lie in our hearts.