22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Dt 4:1-2, 6-8
Second Reading: Jas 1:17-18, 22-22, 27
Gospel Reading: Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“Now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe,” Moses warns. “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.”
However, there follows something different. “You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the nations.”
“The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul; the decree of the Lord is trustworthy, giving wisdom to the simple,” says the psalmist. “The ordinances of the Lord are true, all of them just. They are more precious than gold … sweeter also than syrup or honey from the comb.”
We can understand someone saying this about God’s goodness, mercy, or even attributes, says C.S. Lewis. However, the psalmist is talking about God’s laws and commands, such as “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
We “can and must respect these statutes, and try to obey them, and assent to them” in our hearts, Lewis writes, but how can we call God’s commands “sweeter than honey”? Surely we could compare them more aptly to “the dentist’s forceps or the front line” in a battle.
The psalmist is not talking about the pleasures of a good conscience, or satisfaction at having done one’s duty. He is saying: “Happy the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked, nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent.”
Surely these are not the way to happiness, we may object.
However, the psalmist rebukes us: “Happy the man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on His law day and night. He is like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade.”
Joshua, Moses’ successor, told the people to keep the “book of the law on your lips. Recite it by day and by night, that you may observe carefully all that is written in it; then you will successfully attain your goal.”
After that, the law became a school subject, with lectures and exams. It led the proud and clever to think that outsiders who did not know it were not merely “inferior to them in skill,” but also “lower in God’s eyes,” writes Lewis.
Over time, the law and the list of forbidden things grew more and more complicated, until “getting through a single day without supposed sin” became almost impossible, and the network of rules caused “self-righteousness in some and haunting anxiety in others.” True righteousness shrank into insignificance, so that legalists strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, a development Jesus condemned.
The psalmist’s delight in the law was quite different. “The order of the divine mind, embodied in the divine law, is beautiful,” writes Lewis. What should a human being do but try to reproduce it, as far as possible, in his daily life?
However, there was something more: the psalmist asserts that the law is “true,” meaning that it embodies the “real” or “correct” directions for living: “stable” directions, “well grounded.”
“There are many rival directions for living, as the pagan cultures all around us show,” Lewis notes. The psalmists assert that Yahweh’s directions are “the real, valid, unassailable ones: based on the nature of things and the nature of God.”
Their delight in the Law is “a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet” after a false route has entangled him in muddy fields.
Do we “love God’s law” in this way (little though we adhere to it), or do we consider it an irksome impediment?
Father Hawkswell’s course, “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” has now ended, but all the materials (video and print) will remain available online free of charge at www.beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until the end of August.
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