Jesus invites me to consider how I follow God in my heart.

Good morning, happy Tuesdays, and many blessings.
 
Whenever we encounter the Pharisees and the scribes, as we do in today's Gospel (Mark 7:1-13), we have a tendency to stereotype them.  We tend to think of Pharisees as these old, stubborn, pompous, men whose main goal in life was to make themselves look good and everybody else look bad.  Because of this, it is good from time-to-time to examine the image we have of the scribes and Pharisees and get a little clearer picture of who we are really dealing with in passages like today's Gospel.
 
First of all, it is good to remember that not all Pharisees were enemies of Jesus.  We have the Gospel record of Joseph of Arimathea who claimed Jesus' body after the crucifixion and placed it in his own tomb.  Joseph was a minority member of the ruling council.  He had tried to stop Jesus' crucifixion.  Then there was Nicodemus who helped Joseph prepare Jesus' body for burial.  In addition, there are many accounts outside of the Bible of Pharisees who saw how Jesus fulfilled the prophets and believed him to be the promised Messiah. 
 
The scribes were people who wrote things.  They didn't have word processors or printing presses or photocopy machines in the first century.  If you wanted a copy of something, someone had to do it by hand.  If you didn't want to deal with the tedious monotony of copying documents, you hired a scribe to do the copying for you.  If you were writing a letter to someone, you might have a scribe take down the letter at your dictation.  Temple scribes spent their days making copies of the Holy Scriptures.  You can imagine that that you would get to know the Scriptures pretty well, if you spent day after day copying it from one scroll onto another.
 
So, not all Pharisees and scribes were enemies of Jesus.  The problem is that the hypocrites among the scribes and Pharisees had gained control.  The hypocrites set the agenda for them as a group and it was the hypocrites who set out to discredit and eventually kill Jesus.
 
Jesus condemned these Pharisees for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness.  He cited an example of their hypocrisy: He said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!  For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and, 'Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.' But you say, 'If a man tells his father or his mother, "Whatever you would have gained from me is … given to God — then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.  Here Jesus tells these Pharisees that they had played so many word games with the Holy Scriptures that they had actually developed a tradition that allowed them to break the clear word of God and yet declare that they had kept God's Law.
 
Today Jesus invites me to consider how I follow God in my heart and cautions me against being distracted by human traditions. I review my habits and patterns of activity, asking God to help me to recognize where they lead me to life. The Pharisees were concerned, not because the Word of God was being violated, but because the traditions were being violated. The Pharisees multiplied religious laws and rituals to such an extent that it was impossible to know them all, much less observe them. So, Jesus accuses them of putting petty regulations above the law of God, the law of love and compassion. Am I, like the Pharisees, inclined to be judgmental and censorious at times?
 
 Blessings,

Fr. Luis+