Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
PURE AND SINCERE HEARTS
Introduction
After the creation poem of Gen 1, we get a second version of the creation, especially of the Earth Man (Adam, drawn from adamah, earth) in a down-to-earth story. The human person breathes with the same life-giving breath (spirit, ruah) as God, at least in the sense that he or she has to breathe at the same rhythm as God. Then, the human person is placed in a royal garden called paradise, to cultivate it.
Divided too, were the hearts of the Pharisees, as Jesus points out in the Gospel; their interior attitude did not correspond to their outward practices. The question of pure/impure was very important for the early Church, as it was one of the strongest traditions of the Jews and a point of contention for them. Hence, the Christians coming from Jewry asked themselves whether they could eat from the same table with non-Jews. According to Mark, in the light of creation that sees all foods as created good and pure, in the kingdom the rules about food are abolished.
Reading 1 Gn 2:4b-9, 15-17
By the seventh day
God had finished his work.
On the seventh day
he rested from all his work.
God blessed the seventh day.
He made it a Holy Day
Because on that day he rested from his work,
all the creating God had done.
This is the story of how it all started,
of Heaven and Earth when they were created.
At the time God made Earth and Heaven, before any grasses or shrubs had sprouted from the ground—God hadn’t yet sent rain on Earth, nor was there anyone around to work the ground (the whole Earth was watered by underground springs)—God formed Man out of dirt from the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The Man came alive—a living soul!
Then God planted a garden in Eden, in the east. He put the Man he had just made in it. God made all kinds of trees grow from the ground, trees beautiful to look at and good to eat. The Tree-of-Life was in the middle of the garden, also the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil.
God took the Man and set him down in the Garden of Eden to work the ground and keep it in order.
God commanded the Man, “You can eat from any tree in the garden, except from the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil. Don’t eat from it. The moment you eat from that tree, you’re dead.”
Gospel Mk 7:14-23
Jesus called the crowd together again and said, “Listen now, all of you—take this to heart. It’s not what you swallow that pollutes your life; it’s what you vomit—that’s the real pollution.”
When he was back home after being with the crowd, his disciples said, “We don’t get it. Put it in plain language.”
Jesus said, “Are you being willfully stupid? Don’t you see that what you swallow can’t contaminate you? It doesn’t enter your heart but your stomach, works its way through the intestines, and is finally flushed.” (That took care of dietary quibbling; Jesus was saying that all foods are fit to eat.)
He went on: “It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution.”
Prayer
Father, God of the ever-new covenant,
you have tied us to yourself
with leading strings of everlasting love;
the words you speak to us are spirit and life.
May your Spirit make us look at the commandments
not as a set of observances.
May they move us to serve you
not in a slavish way, but as your sons and daughters
who love you and whom you have set free
through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Reflection:
8 February 2023
Mark 7:14-23
We believe in a forgiving God
Where does evil come from, and is there a solution to eliminate it from our lives? While addressing the issue of impurities arising from neglecting traditional rituals, Jesus focuses on the human heart, the abode of all good and bad choices. The religious leaders taught the people to observe the laws and traditions to avoid the punishment of God and to please him.
Ritual purity was meant to protect the chosen people of God from contact with anything associated with pagans – non-Jews or unclean animals. The creation story in the book of Genesis tells us that God created everything, and he saw that everything he created was good. But later, humans interpreted some people and some animals as unclean, and physical contact with them would make one impure.
Do our religious observances, prayers, and even attending Mass arise out of fear of God’s punishment? If we go to Mass to fulfil the days of obligation, how are we different from the religious scholars of Jesus’ time?
Jesus points out the source of true defilement — evil desires which come from inside a person’s thoughts and intentions. When Cain was jealous of his brother Abel, God warned him to guard his heart: “Sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7). Do we allow sinful desires to couch at our doors? Not to succumb to sinful desires or thoughts, there is no better option than to seek refuge in God. Jesus in the desert, Jesus in prayer teaches us to spend time with the Father, to confront the forces of evil. The Lord waits for us to transform and purify our hearts through his Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. Do we believe in the power of God’s love to transform our hearts?
Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that virtue is the transformation of instinct or passion. Courage and hope, for example, are transformations of the aggressive instinct; love is the transformation of desire. What comes out of a person depends on how one transforms one’s experience. Our faith is a transformation of our experience of God’s love and our response to the world, others, and God.
Thus my relationship with Jesus helps me to transform that bad stuff into good, curses into blessings and sufferings into prayer.