People of the Law

Twenty-Second Sunday of the Year. Fr Peter Hunter ponders on the Law of the Lord.

In a way, I feel sorry for the Pharisees and scribes in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells us they are interested in externals, and have set aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions, but it would have been hard for them to see things from his perspective.

It may be that some of the details of the traditions described in this Gospel were merely human additions, but the general pattern, the idea that certain foods make you unclean, that food must be prepared in certain ways and not others, and even that it must be eaten in certain ways, are part of the Jewish Law.

That Law, the Jews were fiercely proud to have received from God Himself. We get just one piece of Scripture teaching adherence to the Law, and even pride in it, in our first reading. It is by keeping this Law which embodies the wisdom and understanding of God that the Jews will come to hear the nations round about exclaim, ‘No other people is as wise and prudent as this great nation.’ This Law forms the Jews as the great nation that they are, and makes them visibly the people of God.

And it’s very important for us to realise that this Law guides us too. It has not been set aside by Jesus, but as he tells us himself, he has come to fulfil it. When we keep the Law of God, we would do well to cultivate that same pride and delight in the wisdom and understanding of God displayed in the keeping of it.

So when the disciples do not keep to the traditions, even if they are not precisely part of the Law of God given in Scripture, and when Jesus does not chastise them for it, but rather criticises these Jews who expect the disciples to wash their hands, and even more when he goes further and categorically states that nothing which goes into a person can make them unclean, this is all very shocking. It must have seemed that he was rejecting his very Jewishness.

It is true that we Christians see a distinction between the moral law of the Old Testament, which we must still keep, and the ritual and dietary laws, which do not bind us. Those ritual and dietary laws were, indeed, God-given, but they were given for a somewhat different purpose. They were given to the Jews to keep, but for us, they point forward to new rites, to a new dispensation.

We mustn’t think, however, that this would have been a clear and easy distinction in Jesus’s time. As I have said, this is all the Law of God. The idea that some parts would remain, and other parts be fulfilled in a new way in Christ, took some time to work out. We can see the mistakes the early Jewish Christians made, some insisting on the food laws and on circumcision.

The Scribes and Pharisees think that they know the plan of God, and even what God would want for others than themselves. They hold to traditions which are stricter than required. Well, nothing wrong, yet, in that. But they criticise and look down on others who do differently, and in doing that forget the love they ought to have for their neighbour, one of the central points of the Law.

So we need to learn to love the Law of God, just as the best of the Jewish people have done for centuries. It is in keeping God’s commandments that we actively love God, and, just as it did for our Jewish forebears, that will make it visible to all that we are the People of God. This will involve an attention to what we do and what we intend, rather than getting lost in externals, and especially human traditions.

But there’s much more. The extraordinary discovery of the disciples was that the Law is, at the heart of it, a way of revealing God to us, that it held at its heart a mystery, a mystery which was further revealed in the person of Jesus. The Pharisees looked to a fulfilment of the Law, but they weren’t prepared for that, that the fulfilment of the Law would come in the person of God-with-us. That is how we find ourselves the People of God.

Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-8 | James 1:17-18,21-22,27 | Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

Image: mosaic detail of Moses from the Latin Chapel on Calvary in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP