Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 331

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 Roman Catholic Church, especially since the Second Vatican Council, can modestly boast of its catholicity; that is, its openness to everyone. I say modestly because it is God's graciousness and the nature of the Gospel to invite every human being. If we the Church, given our fallible, opinionated membership -- who are often wrong but never in doubt -- can practice that supreme degree of hospitality, we should boast of it. 

Today's Gospel signals Jesus's clear intention to invite everyone. He altered the received religion of Abraham, Moses, and David. One of the old strengths of this ancient religion was its dietary practices. These rules, which sound arbitrary and odd to gentiles, are persistent, daily reminders of the Jew's standing before God. They are a holy people unlike any other nation. They must obey God's laws and none are forgotten or outdated. If they were given to nomads in the Sinai desert, in gratitude and respect Jews in the ghetto find a way to eat kosher in the crowded city.  

Eating only "clean" foods and refusing "unclean" inculcates a strong sense of identity in the worldwide Jewish community. In Jesus's day, scattered from India to North Africa to Spain, speaking different languages, comprising different tribes and nations with only some of their genetic ancestry being that of Abraham and Sarah, they were bonded spiritually by the Love of God and religiously by their dietary laws. So long as a Jewish pilgrim or merchant sought bed and board in a Jewish neighborhood of any distant city they could be sure of clean food. 

But Jesus's new religion would not be bound by rules that seemed arbitrary and, in some places, wholly impractical. His religion would be bound internally by the Holy Spirit and by sacramental signs, especially by the Baptism for the forgiveness of sin, and the Eucharist of his body and blood. Their Eucharistic fellowship would be united as one -- "that all may be one" -- within the authority of apostolic leadership. They could speak any language, wear clothes appropriate to the environment, and live under any form of government. They would not be bound by philosophical ideas or economic ideologies. Given that the world was already rife with political parties, they should join any party that honored human dignity and supported their freedom to do penance and worship God.  

Responding to the question of clean and unclean -- that is, fitness to be in God's presence -- Jesus's disciples should be scrupulously conscious not of what they eat but of what they disgorge: 

"From within the man, from his heart,

come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,

adultery, greed, malice, deceit,

licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

All these evils come from within and they defile.”

It needn't be said that the Jewish religion was equally aware of evil borne of the human heart. Also, disciples would undergo a complete "circumcision of the heart" as Saint Paul added, 

In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not administered by hand, by stripping off the carnal body, with the circumcision of Christ. You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

If circumcision hurt the infant boy, the circumcision of "the carnal body" is a continual dying to self for Christian men and women throughout their lives. This daily, intense practice should identify the follower of Jesus as holy in God's sight as certainly as kosher rules. 

Historians raise the question of Jesus's intentions. Was he a reformer whose disciples were finally expelled from the synagogue after he died? Or did he intend to start a new religion with an open invitation to all Jews? History's answer appears to be neither. Rather, God called many nations and peoples to be disciples of Mary's Son while Jews remain "until the full measure of Gentiles comes in." 

Since anyone can speculate and no one can imagine how that Pauline prophecy will be fulfilled, we remain under Jesus's final rebuke to Saint Peter, 

“What if I want (them) to remain until I come? What concern is it of yours? You follow me.”