ベネディクト聖書ブログ ・ Benedictine Bible Blog

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

” ‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.’

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”

And he said to them: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!

Mark 7:6-9 New International Version

The people who challenge Jesus in today’s gospel are trying to shame Jesus in public. Pious people washed their hands before eating, but not to remove the germs (nobody knew about germs then). They did this to cleanse their spirit like a person washing hands before praying at a Shinto shrine or like a Catholic taking holy water while entering a church. So these challengers are saying that Jesus, who claims to be God’s messenger, doesn’t even require his disciples to do what every pious person does.

But after verse 8 our reading this morning omitted five verses. And in those verses Jesus reminds them that some of their “scribes” find a clever way to relieve someone of the obligation to support their parents as they grow old in that ancient world, which had no pension system. They said that a person only had to say something like the following: “Today I vow that any thing which I may decide to give to my parents in the future, I shall give to God in the temple instead.”

Jesus shames his opponents by saying that they show their hypocrisy by making a big issue for his disciples about a custom that is never mentioned in the Bible, but at the same time they ignore a horrible violation of the fourth commandment (Honor your father and your mother), which would make the last years of the lives of one’s parents bitter.

I suppose that the elite practitioners of every biblical religion (the rabbis, pastors, priests, religious) have a tendency to get too obsessed with specific rules about diet, fasting, saying certain prayers, avoiding alcohol. We forget to check each of these against the two great commandments: love of God, love of neighbor.

Surely for most Catholics this obsession has been sex. Of course there can be profoundly serious sexual sins. Adultery, rape, abuse of children can terribly wound the offended persons for life. But when we were young we were told that no sexual sin was a venial sin. Even if no one was harmed, even a dirty thought or impure touch of oneself was a mortal sin. If one was aware that it was serious and if even so one freely chose it, it was always mortal.

They convinced me by their confident assertion, but I suppose I was never really convinced by the reasons they gave us. And I must confess that it’s only in my old age that I have at last felt free to think it through clearly and challenge this.

Suppose a husband and wife share the depth of their love with each other—but do what they must to keep from getting pregnant now, What a blasphemy it is to say that our God is the kind of god who could send them to eternal damnation for this! A high school boy is frustrated by his awkwardness and failures and seeks pleasure by himself. Can our God really be so offended by that, that He won’t allow the boy to come to communion until he goes to confession and really is sorry and really decides never to do it again? What kind of a petty God would that be?

Technically, even the latest revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published by the Vatican, still holds that all of these ways of acting are objectively mortal sins. However, this catechism does acknowledge that very often they become venial because the person really does not make a free choice because of overwhelming passion or ingrained habit.

Our God, as revealed to us in Jesus, is a God who is full of compassion for the weak, the poor, the abused, the depressed, the lost. Our God seeks out those who exploit these people and calls them to repentance. And calls us to come to the aid of his afflicted people.

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At big ceremonies at the Vatican they often sing the words from today’s gospel, the promises to Peter. However, if I ever become Pope (!!!) I shall make a decree. I shall order that at big ceremonies they are to sing not from this gospel, but from Isaiah’s prophecy, which is the source on which Jesus modeled his words. This would be a reminder to me that the Pope’s job is a dangerous one, and that if I fail to be a faithful servant to Christ, I will have to answer for it.

There have been popes who failed miserably. The Sixteenth Century saw a massive division of the Western Church between Catholics and the various separate churches, each seeking its reform of the Church. The immensity of this division were directly due to the failure of the Church leadership, and specifically of the popes, to seriously respond to the many many calls for reform. Saints and sinners, kings, priests, and lay people, begged for better education and behavior of the clergy, use of the peoples’ languages in common prayer, giving lay people access to the bible, better (and less) use of money in the Church, improving the way that decisions were made in the Church, and so on. Meanwhile the Popes, bishops, clergy were too afraid to try new ideas, feared losing their income and power (e.g. the chance to appoint their nephews to well paying and influential jobs). Meanwhile a well-meaning reformer like Martin Luther had to raise a rebellion against Rome or risk having his reform crushed by Rome.

It seems to me that in our Catholic Church the “original sin” of recent centuries has been the refusal to make decisions collaboratively. Religious superiors, priests, bishops, popes, if they were going to make consultation at all, have tried to appoint counsellors who would agree with them. But in the beginning of the Church the most serious problems were solved collaboratively. For instance, when the first gentiles wanted to follow Christ, twice the Jerusalem Church was called together to decide if they could do so without becoming Jews first. Now, this became the norm for the first thousand years, but had been mostly lost by the 1500’s. We are really only beginning to learn it again since Vatican II. At that council the bishops refused to accept the agenda and documents that had been prepared by the Church bureaucrats to help the bishops’ discussions. And Pope John XXIII and Paul VI let the bishops decide which issues to discuss and let them write up their conclusions.

Like Eliakim, we will all be judged by our faithfulness to our Master. This is true whether we be leader of the whole Church, a religious community, or a local church; or whether we are a member of a church, a bishops’ conference or a synod. It is our responsibility to help to make the Church a more vibrant witness to the message and work of Jesus Christ.

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In our Benedictine monastery here in Fujimi, Nagano ken, Japan, we celebrate Mass each day at noon, and gather at five other times for other prayer services, the “Liturgy of the Hours”. These services can be from twelve to thirty minutes in length. Most religious and priests pray more or less these same prayers together or privately each day. By far most of the words that we speak or hear in these services are direct quotations from the Bible.

However, since all of the Bible was written approximately two to three thousand years ago, how on earth can we make it the basis of our prayer life in a vastly different world?

One way that the structure of the liturgy itself helps us to do this, is the choice that the “Prayer of the Church” has made of biblical passages suitable for certain times. For instance, every night at compline we sing or say the Song of Simeon (see above). In Luke’s gospel it is the prayer of an old man who has taken the infant Jesus in his arms and gives thanks for having lived to see the newborn messiah. Like many of the texts for this time of day it is an expression of confidence that in God’s hands all things are safe, and a gentle reminder (and even an acceptance of the possibility) of death. In his Rule for Monasteries Saint Benedict lists “To keep death daily before one’s eyes” as one of the “instruments of good works.”

Catholic Biblical scholars at least since the time of Pope Leo XIII over 100 years ago have been searching the historical and literary background of the ancient world in order to understand the Bible. So I will ask here a question about the situation. For Jesus and the early biblical writers , what was the greatest crisis facing the disciples after the death of Jesus?

Surely it was discouragement and despair over that death. For if Jesus was God’s Chosen One, how can we explain his death? Was God unable to prevent his death? It had seemed that Jesus was going to bring about the liberation of Israel, but now he can never do that, no?

Jesus answers this by saying that his death was not an accident nor was it a failure. It was part of God’s plan to save Israel and even to save the whole world. By dying he will become free to extend his work throughout the world by his Spirit and through his disciples.

But if Jesus is to convince the disciples he must use methods of argument that they can understand. One such method is searching the Old Testaments for passages that seem to predict current events of their own time (see the reference to Dead Sea scrolls in my article of April 9, “Catholics on Messianic Prophecies?”)

I maintain that Jesus’s purpose was to convince his hearers of certain things that they desperately needed to know about Jesus and their own relation to God and to Jesus. It was not Jesus’s purpose to teach them or us that six or seven hundred years earlier God had been making predictions about events of his time. But I will write more about this next time

Even a key text like Isaiah 7:14 fits well into its historical context as a message to King Ahaz of Judah. Two Kings are bringing their armies against Ahaz to replace him with a king who is not a descendant of David. But Isaiah assures Ahaz that in a few short years those kings will be no more. And as a sign to prove it he informs Ahaz that a certain “young woman” has conceived a child. Nevertheless, against the admonition of Isaiah, Ahaz sent to the King of Assyria, who rescued him indeed–but then made Assyria a harsh master over Judah for 100 years.
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Originally this oracle was remembered as a lesson that disaster followed the failure to heed the prophet. But later, like other prophecies that failed to work out perfectly, people began to think it was really a promise for some future time when God would very soon intervene and establish a kingdom of peace and prosperity under a king descended from David. We might claim that God purposely arranged for Isaiah to make ambiguous promises to anticipate what he would do when Jesus came 800 years later. But on what grounds?

As Catholics carefully studied the background of passages that were thought to be messianic prophecies, they found that these seemed to refer to people and events when the passages were written or the immediate future.

For instance, in 11:1-3 Hosea is obviously summarizing the miserable religious history of Israel from the Exodus to his own days in the 700’s B.C. “I called my son out of Egypt, ” refers to the Exodus. But in Matthew 2:15 after reading the escape of the infant Jesus to Egypt and his return to the Holy Land we are told, “This took place to fulfill what the prophet said,” and then the writer cites the quote from Hosea.

It is hard to imagine that anyone at Hosea’s time recognized this as a prediction of some future event. And indeed the evangelist surely uses the quote to indicate that Jesus was actually to fulfill the purpose of that “call,” which Hosea’s Israel had failed to do. But that’s not to say that what was fulfilled was a prophecy.

Recently I’ve been  studying Psalm 22 and visiting many evangelical websites. Generally I’ve noticed that evangelical believers have a lot more interest in messianic prophecies than have Catholic believers. Now, in our monastery we have the Office of Readings the first thing in the morning, and yesterday our biblical reading was Acts 8:25-40, and I’ve been reflecting on this question.

30Philip ran up … and heard [the Ethiopian official] reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
31“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32The eunuch was reading this passage of scripture:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
33In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”

34The Eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus. –NIV

Philip clearly thinks that the subject of this kind of passage is Jesus. Similarly, Matthew 8:16-17 tells us: “When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.’ ” And in that general period, in the first and second centuries B.C. in the Hebrew so-called “pesher” documents found in the Dead Sea region, similar biblical interpretation is found. For instance a certain “pesher” interprets the first two chapters of Habakkuk sentence by sentence, word by word. This interpretation always deals with a certain “Teacher of Righteousness” and his opponents.

But on top of that, the risen Jesus himself speaking to the disciples on the way to Emmaus uses this method of interpretation. “He said to them, ‘How foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer all these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Luke 24:25-27 [NIV] cf. Lk 24:44-47.

If this type of biblical interpretation was good enough for the risen Christ, Matthew, and so on , why are Catholic scholars and preachers so hesitant to use it?

I intend to answer this question soon in another post or posts.