Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 330

“Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

The Bible is rightly called”the word of God, and we turn to it often for guidance, reassurance, and instruction. I remind myself and the readers at Mass that God wants to speak to his people and we should enunciate each word and syllable so that God's voice might be heard. 

When people thank me for my homily I do not ask them what they heard for it will probably not be what I said. Each one hears the Voice of the Spirit speaking very personally to them, and I pray that nothing I say or do interferes in that sacred conversation.

 

But the Bible is also a human word and to understand it we study our history and language. We learn to discern what God might be saying through the vagaries of human thought and history. E.B. White, in his Elements of Style, described the reader as one swimming in the ocean of the writer's mind. If the writer's use of definite words and syntax are not very clear, the reader will be lost at sea. It's all the more difficult if the editors of an ancient text were not very sure of their more ancient authors' context and meaning.

As we read the scriptures, things are often not as they seem; there is always more to be clarified, discovered, and revealed. And yet we must decide and act on God's word, praying all the while that we are being led by the Spirit. And then -- what we do is done, and we must live with it. That is the cost, curse, and blessing of human freedom. 

The Pharisees resisted Jesus because they feared the loss of their sacred traditions. They could not understand where he was coming from. It would take his passion, death, and resurrection to prove to his disciples that God preferred his teaching to the Pharisees'; and that the story of freedom and blessedness had entered an entirely new epoch. And yet we know that God has not rejected the Jews who would not listen to Jesus. They are, and will always be, his people.

When I was in school sixty years ago, tradition was a dirty word. I was all for the new, undiscovered, unimagined, and unthought of. And relevant. The past was not relevant. Now I fear the loss of history and tradition, People who lose their memory do not know who they are. That is true of anyone, or everyone, and any particular group. 

And I have learned and forgotten too many new ideas, theories, and formulas to suppose that any new idea will outlast the ages. Like the sins of the past, many survive only to embarrass us. 

But God's word also teaches us to expect new things:

“See, I am doing a new thing!

 Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:19

There is no magic formula to solve this puzzle. We can speak of faith or fidelity, listening and silence, obedience and humility, hope and trust. So long as we are human we know we can be mistaken. We make our choices, take our stand, and believe that God will use what he wants and discard the rest. 

In your distress, when all these things shall have come upon you, you shall finally return to the LORD, your God, and listen to his voice. Since the LORD, your God, is a merciful God, he will not abandon or destroy you, nor forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them. Deuteronomy 4:30