TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
29 AUGUST 2021
As
a parish, we are getting to know Father Augustine. He is young, full of joy, and extremely
energetic. Since his arrival at the
parish, he vigorously repeats the phrase, “Just do it!” over and over again. Father Augustine is well aware that he did
not invent this phrase. Nor is he trying
to sell Nike shoes and clothing.
Instead, he is expressing his intention.
After many years of preparation, he is excited about putting into action
what he has been trained to do: serving
the people of this parish with love.
The Letter
of Saint James gives us the same message.
Saint James tells us centuries before Nike came into existence: “Just do it!”
In instructing us to be doers of the word instead of just hearing it, he
is calling us to act on the word of salvation we received at baptism. In telling us to act on this word, he knows the
difference between hearing and listening.
It is easy to hear something, to allow the words of another to enter
into one ear and go quickly out the other.
Listening involves giving the gift of our attention. The root of the word attention means “to stretch.”
To attend to someone or something literally means to stretch
toward. In hearing God’s word, we attend
to it and even become subject to it, like attendants in the courts of kings and
queens. In attending, we are letting
ourselves become pliable, stretching, and softening in response to the
invitation of the word and the needs of others.
That is the
message of Moses in first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. He tells his listeners that they are a very
special people, because God has chosen them to be his own. God has given them the gift of wisdom, which
is the conviction that he is always present and active in their daily
lives. But they also need to be
intelligent, or understanding. Intelligence
results from a serious process of discernment.
In being intelligent, they acknowledge that they cannot immediately and
completely grasp what God is doing in any situation. Intelligent people allow their personal
assumptions and opinions to be challenged.
Intelligent people do not speak or act like they are God.
That is the
problem with the Pharisees and scribes in today’s Gospel. They have taken the Law of Moses, and put a
fence around it to include 613 individual laws.
These traditions make the Law of Moses a burden, not a gift. They are so complicated that only the
professional scribes can sort them out.
The Pharisees and scribes are urban dwellers. They can easily purify their hands or
vessels, because water is readily available.
However, more rural peasants do not have ready access to water. Fishermen are unable to avoid contact with
dead creatures as they sort out their nets.
As a result, the Pharisees and scribes question their holiness, as they
question the holiness of the disciples of Jesus.
Jesus
responds to their questioning and calls them “hypocrites,” citing the prophet
Isaiah who criticized the hypocrisy of religion devoid of human
conviction. Because the root word for hypocrisy is to act, Jesus is accusing them of acting as if they are putting the
Law into practice. Their oral laws concerning
the use of water to purify do not address the root causes of sin that cause
separation and division. Jesus replaces
their oral law with the freedom to love.
We can
exercise that freedom to love and “just do it.”
In this time of deep divisions, we can listen more attentively to the
Word of God, allowing it to make us more pliable. Then we can listen to each other, stretching
ourselves to understand where they are coming from. We do not need to agree with one
another. But we can soften our
response. We have witnessed the masking
wars at PHM. Now we have those wars in
our school. If we can listen more
carefully, we can learn to live with one another more completely when this
pandemic is finally over.
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