Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 426

Jesus said:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin,
and have neglected the weightier things of the law:
judgment and mercy and fidelity."

 

In today’s gospel we hear Jesus railing against the influential religious leaders of his time. Hypocritical “scribes and Pharisees” boasted of their scrupulous observance of the law and denounced the vast majority who couldn’t afford, or be bothered with, their pretensions.

Twenty centuries later, if we only evaluate pompous religious leaders, we might overlook the broader problems these gospel verses address. Religion is not that important to many people; there is little cachet in being super-pious. But there is still serious neglect of “the weightier things of the law: judgment, mercy, and fidelity.”

People often take the law as the arbiter of morality: "If it’s legal it’s okay; if it’s illegal, it’s not okay." They might justify their inaction by the law that makes no demands upon them. Or they justify destructive behavior like selling dangerous materials to children because it’s not illegal. They do so without reference to God’s law, the teachings of the Bible, or common sense.

Hiding behind laws justifies depriving needy persons of help. I think of those federal officials who reluctantly address the student loan crisis. Where it is clearly in our best interest as an economy and nation to encourage home ownership, many young couples with children are hobbled by the exorbitant cost of their education. Too often they attended for-profit schools that collected their federal loans and gave nothing in return. (Think, “Trump University.”)

Black Lives Matter has shown us how often arbitrary interpretations of the law are used to harass African Americans. Police readily overlook speeding, for instance, by “white” drivers but quickly pull over drivers "of color." Even teenaged pedestrians are corralled and handcuffed for being "black."

2020 might be remembered as the year of Covid-19, but this is also the year the world learned of state-sponsored terrorism in the United States. It’s being legal does not make it moral. If we neglect the weightier things of the law, we cannot expect the Divine Judge to overlook that injustice.

We remember Jesus’s opponents, the scribes and Pharisees, as particularly obnoxious. When many people felt uncomfortable with these pious frauds and wondered about their apparent holiness, Jesus called them out and fixed on them a perpetual rebuke. They disgraced the faith of Abraham and their Jewish tradition. We pray that Americans will not suffer the same everlasting shame for a senseless, arbitrary adherence to shortsighted, manmade laws.