Remember the why

In this episode, Fr Richard Healey reflects on a passage from the Gospel of Mark, highlighting the importance of understanding the purpose behind the commandments. He explains how Jewish traditions and the 613 mitzvot shaped religious practices, but emphasises that Jesus calls us to look beyond mere ritual observance. Jesus challenges us to focus on the transformation of the heart and a deeper relationship with God. Fr Richard invites us to embrace this profound message, recognising that true holiness comes from within and is reflected in our love and actions towards others.

00:00:00  Now, if you were following along right now, you would have noticed I didn’t read the text exactly as it was set in the lectionary. I read the full passage, rather than this odd kind of selection that the lectionary gave us. And it’s interesting, the bits that the church leaves out are about condemning those who do things by tradition and nullify the Word of God, which is an interesting kind of thing. Now, when we get to a teaching like this, and it’s very unusual in the gospel of Mark to hear something like this, maybe some of you have seen a red letter Bible. It’s a version of the scriptures where in the Gospels the words of Jesus are written in red ink, so that you can easily see which of the the important bits, which are the words of Jesus. And what’s the commentary? What’s the other sections? And until this point in the gospel of Mark, there’s been mostly black text, because it’s mostly Mark describing the kinds of things that Jesus does, this healing, the way he moves about, the way that he offers teaching.

00:01:18  But it hasn’t focused on the actual teaching of Jesus. So if you’ve been reading along, this is the first time you get any chunk of red text at all in the gospel of Mark, there will be a few more places, but this is the first time you get a chunk of red – a chunk of the actual teaching of Jesus. So clearly something is important that is happening here. And so I think it’s good to read it in full, to hear the words of Jesus. Now we also need to make sense of when he’s talking about things like the washing of hands and cups and pots and kettles. You know, we will have certain images come to mind when all of that is happening, but we need to remember the context from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the Jews at the time. Now, when you read from the middle of the book of Exodus until the end of the book of Deuteronomy, which is where we drew our first reading from Deuteronomy today, over those three and a half books, you find what is the the mitzvot, the commandments of God.

00:02:31  And if you are carefully going through and beginning to count the different commandments, you find a total of 365 things that you shall not do, things that you know we’re commanded against doing. So you know, don’t murder, don’t kill all of those kinds of commandments are there. But in addition to those, there’s another 248 things that you shall do. So prescriptions, not prohibitions, but prescriptions. Things that you shall do. Keep holy the Sabbath day. Honour your father and mother. A good commandment to remember on Father’s Day. So in total 365 plus 248 at 613 of these commandments. But when the people of God lost everything at the time of the exile, so 600 years before the time of Jesus, when the Babylonians had swept in and destroyed both the city of Jerusalem and the temple, there was this movement that began to develop from about the fifth century, of the development of what we now hear and notice. The scribes and the scribes began to look at the commandments and the teachings, and realise that even though there are 613 of these things across those three and a half books of the Old Testament, they’re really not full enough.

00:03:53  They’re not complete enough. You know, they tell you to keep all the Sabbath day, but it doesn’t give you all of the descriptions about how to do that. There were prohibitions against divorce, but almost nothing about, well, how do you live marriage? Well, and what were the grounds? All of that was kind of left vacant. And so the scribes began to fill in the gaps, begin to provide other teaching, oral teaching traditions that began to complete the law. None of it was written down until another 2 or 300 years after the time of Jesus, in the Jewish texts that we call the Mishnah. And so that’s where all of these different interpretations that the scribes developed began to be actually compiled and written down. So until this point, all that we have is traditions, oral teaching. So you don’t find any of these rules or regulations in the scriptures, but it was part of the ethos, part of the air that everyone breathed. And so the scribes total these things, even though they didn’t actually come from Scripture.

00:05:08  So, for example, the washing of hands, this wasn’t about hygiene, it wasn’t about providing descriptions. You know, we’ve all become very good at washing our hands, hopefully after Covid. You know, we all know how to kind of wash our hands. But at that point you and it was still a pretty dry kind of place. So you didn’t waste a whole lot of water, but you would take a small measure of water. It was defined as a cup and a half of water. And so you first you would hold your hands upright and either yourself one hand and the other, or your host would pour just that small amount of water over the fingers until it ran down to the wrist. So that was what that description of the hand was about. And then you would grab the fist or the other hand and you would smash it into your wet hand. And then with your right hand was now wet, you would use the fist of your other hand to wash it.

00:06:05  Now both of your hands have been wet, but they’re still ritually unclean. So you then need to do a second washing again with the ritually clean water that you would take from the stone jars that are kept for this purpose. And so the same measure of water you would have. But now your hands are down. And so you begin at the wrist and just pour water so that it dripped off the fingers. And after the second cleansing, your hands were now clean. Voila! It’s all good. And so you will again, not by hygiene, but this was just this sense that we need to be clean. And it was part of that rule, part of that system of the scribes to invite people into into this way of cleanness and life, and all of it was about trying to avoid the exile again, trying to avoid that kind of punishment that they believed God had inflicted upon them because they hadn’t been faithful to the commandments, to the covenant, to the desire of God to bring forth a people.

00:07:09  It was one response, one way of trying to be faithful to God. But Jesus is saying, look, this is not nearly enough. This is not what the rules or the regulations are about. You know, Jesus would have agreed with Moses in our first reading. You know, Moses is almost in this ecstatic kind of place, you know, pondering upon the laws of God, saying, look how wonderful they are, how amazing it is that God has called us to receive these laws, these rules, these regulations to be bestowed upon us. You know what other people have of God that is drawn so near to us that he’s able to be revealed in these teachings, in these rules, in these regulations. What kind of people are able to experience the depth and the presence of God like we can? Because God has drawn me. But Jesus is saying that that hasn’t really been fulfilled and achieved. But what we can do is understand why the rules existed in the first place. Now, what were they trying to offer to us? So often we’ve just got caught up in the rule itself and not understood what it was trying to achieve, what that purpose was about, you know, what was this offering to us? A new way of living.

00:08:28  And so Jesus is describing this possibility of living in the kingdom, living in that grace of Eden. It’s always going back to creation, always going back to that first experience of being loved into life, being called into that freedom, and that’s what we’re invited into. That’s why we’re able to experience this presence of God, not by the washing of our hands, not by fulfilling outward observances, but by this slow transformation of our hearts, by recognizing that that’s the source of true evil. It’s when we fail to recognize the presence of God in other people. When we deny someone, when we condemn someone by the colour of their skin, rather than by this eternal gift of God’s grace and God’s truth, we’re invited into this deeper reality of surrendering to God, of being called more fully and more completely into his love. So let’s indeed embrace the gift of God to invite us into freedom, to invite us into his life, and to recognize that he’s inviting us to be the people that he’s called us to be.

00:09:39  He loves us so much that he wants us to find this freedom and this life that we can only find in God.

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