Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear Friends,

In today’s Gospel Jesus confronts the Pharisees – and implicitly each of us – with the truth of their religiosity: “You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” The external rituals developed as aids for the observance of God’s commandments have gradually taken the place of God’s commandment and have become like ends in themselves. It’s always easier to fixate on the external signs of religiosity and to seek our security and self-affirmation in their observance, rather than to seek out the Lord’s will and fulfill it with an open heart that welcomes his commandment like hunger welcomes bread. The Pharisees, rather than seeking the Lord in his commandment, seek themselves in it. They don’t receive the commandment like the mysterious gift that it is, in and through which they can encounter God and his love, but rather wear it on their sleeves, wield it like body armor, and make themselves impermeable to the Lord with the human traditions they have built up around it.

In the reading from Deuteronomy Moses sets out the original intention of the Lord’s commandments, issued in order “that you may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land which the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you.” In order to stay the course and enter the land the Lord is gifting them Moses tells them: “you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” Jesus calls out the Pharisees for doing precisely what Moses enjoined them not to do.

The history of the distortion of the Lord’s commands is as old as the history of sin; from the very moment of the fall in Genesis, Eve’s supplementing of the Lord’s command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with “or even touch it” (Gen. 3:3) reveals the war that rages in every human heart between trusting in and acting on the unadulterated Word of God on the one hand or relying on our own strength and our own thoughts on the other.

As Christians we know that “the land which the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you” is Jesus Christ and eternal friendship with Him. Trusting in Him and acting on his Word, we live in Him and with Him and through Him.

-Alan El Haj, SCV