Tuesday of Week 28 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 11:37-41

Jesus continues to highlight what is central to our relationship with God. We skip over a short passage which is about various aspects of light. In short, the Christian is to be a person full of light through and through—not like the kind of people Jesus now goes on to describe.

He had been invited to dinner by a Pharisee. Jesus apparently went straight into the dining area and reclined at the table prepared to eat. The Pharisee was quite shocked because Jesus had not first washed his hands before eating. Of course, we are strongly recommended to wash our hands before sitting down to eat. But here we are not dealing with a question of hygiene, but of ritual washing. Jesus had omitted to perform a religious ritual which was laid down by the stricter Jews, although not actually part of the Law. The rule probably had originally a hygienic purpose. By giving it a religious sanction, one made sure that it was carried out. Many other obligations, some of them contained in the Mosaic Law like those from Leviticus, seem to be of the same kind.

Most probably, Jesus, in the ordinary course of events, would have had no problem about performing this ritual, but it is likely that here he is deliberately making a point. It allows him to draw attention to what he sees as false religion. A person’s virtue is not to be judged by his performance or non-performance of an external rite.

As Jesus tells this man in a graphic image, the Pharisees concentrate on making sure that the outside of the cup is clean while inside it is full of all kinds of depravity and corruption (like the judgmental thoughts in this man’s mind and the sinister plotting that the Pharisees in general were directing against Jesus). God is as much, if not much more, concerned about the inside as the outside.

Instead, Jesus says:

So give as alms those things that are within and then everything will be clean for you.

When the inside is clean, there is no need to worry about the outside. Giving alms is a positive act of kindness to another person, an act of love and compassion. It neutralises the greed and rapacity of which he accuses them. It is not, like the washing of hands, a purely empty ritual which says little and is almost totally self-directed.

It is so easy to judge people, including our fellow-Catholics, by their observance or non-observance of certain Christian customs, which of themselves are of a non-moral nature. In the past, for instance, we might have criticised a woman for not wearing a hat in church, or a priest for appearing without his Roman collar. Today, some might be scandalised because a person goes to communion having had a huge meal well within the designated one hour of fasting, or for some still, eating meat on Friday, even though the ‘law’ does not require it. We need to recognize that most of the passages in the Gospels attacking the Pharisees are really directed against ‘pharisees’ in our Christian communities, not to mention the pharisee in our own hearts.

Elsewhere, Jesus has told us not to judge because it is very difficult for us to know what is going on within another person’s mind. What Jesus is really emphasising here is the inner spirit and motivation. Once that is right, everything else will be taken care of.

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Tuesday of Week 28 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Galatians 5:1-6

Paul continues to speak to the Galatians about freedom, a freedom they cannot find by submitting themselves again to the Mosaic Law:

For freedom Christ has set us free.

If only those words were emblazoned in huge letters in all of our churches! One finds either that people feel Christianity is restrictive of a ‘normal’ human life, or that it consists of living a restricted life for the sake of some future salvation.

By taking on again the requirements of the Law to which they are being urged by certain Judaising missionaries, the Galatians are, in Paul’s view, going backwards. They are giving up the freedom which came to them through the gospel of Jesus. This freedom is a freedom from a life based on a law of external observances, many of them clearly of human origin and not part of being a totally fulfilled person. It was this kind of legalistic mentality which was creeping back into Church life that made the Reformers emphasise the importance of faith in Christ as the basis of life:

Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

To make the Law the rule of one’s life is to undergo a kind of slavery. By trying to live up to the rigorous demands of the Law—which few, if any, people could observe in its totality—the Galatians were taking on a heavy burden, a real yoke, which could only fill them with feelings of inadequacy and guilt.

Jesus in the Gospel invites us to carry a very different yoke, a yoke which he will carry along with us (Matt 11:28-30). It is a yoke which is “easy” and whose “burden is light”. It is a yoke of total surrender to his Way of truth, integrity and love. Because of our many weaknesses, to follow such a way can at times mean the denial of our lower appetites, but the bearing of this yoke can only be beneficial in the long run. It brings us to where we really belong. And it brings true peace.

In particular, Paul tells the Galatians not to submit to the requirement of circumcision which, of itself, has nothing whatever to do with the following of Jesus. Moreover, anyone who accepts to be ritually circumcised, in practice is bound to the observance of the whole Law. The Law is a unit and one cannot pick and choose—it’s all or nothing. Consider circumcision as a kind of sacrament that expressed one’s total allegiance to the Law of the Old Testament (of course, it also has a similar meaning for other faiths, e.g. Islam).

Again, those who look for fulfilment and salvation in the keeping of the Law have in effect separated themselves from Christ. They have “fallen away from grace”. They have put themselves outside the scope of divine favour, because gaining God’s favour by external observance of the law and submitting in faith to love and service of Christ are mutually exclusive.

Those who follow the Law believe that, by keeping it perfectly, God ‘owes’ them salvation. Their model is the Pharisee in the Gospel who thanked God, that through his meticulous observance of the Law, he was not like others (Luke 18:9-14). He saw all his imagined virtue as emanating from him personally. God should be grateful to have people like him around. However, his contemptuous remarks about the tax collector behind him revealed that, while his external behaviour was without fault, he was far from that inner love and compassion that the following of Christ expects.

On the other hand, those who follow Jesus know that salvation comes as a “grace”, a freely-given gift which none of us can earn, but which is given to those who surrender totally into the hands of the Lord. Ideally, that surrender takes place all during our lives as Christians, but the extraordinary thing is that, even if it is not made until the 11th hour, that salvation is still given.

Of course, as we shall see in tomorrow’s reading, putting off the day of surrender is not a very smart thing to do, but the point is that the door is never closed until we close our eyes in death. God does not have an accountant’s ledger. He only looks at me in the here and now.

So it is through faith in Christ and surrender in loving trust (itself a gift!), that we live in the firm hope of finding ourselves right with God. It does not matter a whit whether one is circumcised or not. The Christian community that Paul was addressing consisted of both circumcised Jews and uncircumcised gentiles.

Paul, in a lovely expression, says:

…the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

Faith is much more than intellectual assent to certain truths or dogmas which we are told to accept as true. It involves the total and unconditional surrender in trust to Jesus as Lord and as the Way to Truth and Life.

When this faith is active and strong, it results quite spontaneously in a life lived in love for God and in care and compassion for all those around us. The only really free person is the one who, in all circumstances, is able to respond in love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation to all the people and situations of one‘s life.

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