1 The Pharisees and some Bible scholars from Jerusalem gather around Jesus. 2 They notice that some of his disciples are eating bread with profane, i.e. unwashed, hands. 3 It should be noted that the Pharisees and all Jews do not eat without first washing their hands up to the elbow, in accordance with the tradition of the elders. 4 If they come back from a public place, they don't eat without ablution with water, as well as many other things they keep from their tradition, such as washing cups and pitchers and copper crockery. 5 Then the Pharisees and Bible scholars begin to question Jesus: "Why don't your disciples follow the tradition of the elders, but eat their meal with profane hands." 6 He gives them this answer: "As Isaiah well prophesied about you hypocrites in the Scripture, which says, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.' 7 They worship me in vain, for what they teach are only human commandments, 8 while they forsake God's precept to hold only human tradition."...

14 Jesus called the crowd together again and said, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand me well. 15 There is nothing external to the human being that can contaminate him by being ingested; on the contrary, it is what comes out of the being that is able to contaminate him...

21 For evil thoughts come from within, from the human heart, as do immoral deeds, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, wicked deeds, cunning, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, irresponsible actions. 23 These are all things that can come from within, from the human heart, and contaminate it.

What are rules and laws for?

In the fall of 2021, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops published a document on the Eucharist: The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. This draft document had begun in controversy, as it originally sought a way to restrict access to the Eucharist for those who did not fully share the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine and comply with its rules. In particular, it was aimed at its president, Joseph Biden, a devout Catholic, and his nuanced position on abortion. The project's initial aim was stifled under pressure from the Vatican, and Pope Francis in particular. Here, two visions of the Eucharist clashed. On the one hand, for the American bishops, the Eucharist was to be reserved for the "pure", those who were completely in line with the doctrine and laws of the Roman Catholic Church, and became a symbol of total unity with Rome. This meant that remarried divorcees and those who supported or had undergone abortion were automatically excluded from the Eucharist. On the other hand, for people like Pope Francis, the Eucharist is for those who need help, for all those wounded in life who need support, as echoed in these words of Jesus before feeding the crowd: "He took pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things" (Mk 6:34), or to this other saying: "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick" (Lk 5:31).

But this quest for "purity" is not exclusive to Catholic Church legislators. Just think of Donald Trump's statement: "Immigrants are coming to contaminate the American race". For all the nationalists in the world, supporters of the "purity" of the race, of a tightly woven nation, all outsiders become "contaminants" who destroy this purity. So two visions of immigration clash: one motivated by fear, in which the door must be double-locked, and so the emphasis is on highly restrictive laws, and the other by faith in the ability to manage integration to create a new, organic whole, emphasizing the tools of integration; in the first vision, immigration impoverishes, in the second, it enriches.

These words "purity" and "contamination" offer us a gateway into today's Gospel.

For a biblical scholar, Mark's account appears to be "disheveled", like a quilt with various stories sewn together: first, there's the story of a controversy with the Pharisees over the Jewish tradition of ablutions before the meal, to which Jesus offers a scathing retort by calling them hypocrites, although we don't at first know why; this is followed by a general teaching to the crowd, which has nothing to do with the controversy with the Pharisees, and which deals with "kosher" food; finally, in a third story, set in the home of the disciples, Jesus takes the trouble to explain why all food is "kosher" and cannot contaminate, and why it is the human heart that can be a source of contamination, giving the example of the usual list of vices at the time.

Let's try to get to the bottom of this. Our story begins with the tradition of ritual ablutions. This is not just a Jewish rule. I had a Muslim colleague at work who, before going to the mosque at lunchtime, would go to the bathroom to put his hands and arms under running water. In Jerusalem, I used to see pious Jews doing such ablutions at the fountain before entering the Wailing Wall area. Why would they do this? It's a way of demarcating profane and sacred space, and underlining God's transcendence. Our current Bibles offer the translation "defiled hands" to designate unwashed hands, but in fact the adjective "defiled" translates a Greek word which literally means: common, i.e. in everyday use, and which we have translated as "profane". So we distinguish between the ordinary, profane world, and God's world, the sacred world, which is separate from the ordinary world, uncontaminated by it.

What's wrong with ritual purity? Actually, there are several. The first is that of considering this rule, and all others like it, as an absolute. It is likely that Mark's community in Rome had distanced itself from this rule, perhaps even among Jewish converts to the Christian faith; retaining this story helped to justify this distance. The second problem is that this rule creates two categories of people, the non-observant and the observant, with the risk of introducing contempt for the non-observant. The third problem is that of losing sight of the essential purpose of a rule: to be at the service of love and justice. This is, in fact, what happened to the Pharisees, as Jesus points out in this section, which the liturgy has omitted from our story: Jewish tradition introduced the rule of freezing an asset as a "sacred offering", which led Jews to give money to the temple that could have been used to support their parents; this is a typical case of legal but immoral behavior. The reference to Isaiah denouncing the people who honor God with their lips only, while their hearts are far from him, is aimed at such behavior. So there are rules which, instead of having an educational and constructive value for the person, "contaminate" them by directing them towards behavior that encourages selfish personal interests. We could add a fourth problem. Jesus was given the name Emmanuel, i.e. "God with us". God with us". This means that God is no longer apart, in a sacred space, but at the heart of the profane world, and so the symbol of ritual ablutions that signal the two worlds has become obsolete.

The second situation addressed by today's Gospel concerns "kosher" food, i.e. that which is proper, permitted and forbidden. As we know, Jews (and all Semites like Arabs) don't eat pork, horse or seafood, for example, which are considered impure foods. We can imagine that this question became a burning issue among the first Christians when non-Jews joined the community and began to eat together. We can understand why Mark retained this tradition, which presents Jesus' position on the subject: for him, all food is pure, "kosher", and cannot contaminate a person; in short, there are no rules in the choice of food. For us, of course, the question as posed is of little interest. But the way Jesus answers the question should be of interest to us, because he focuses on what should be our main concern: the human heart, the source of our words and behavior; indirectly, he proposes a new question: does our heart, through its words and actions, make others grow, or "contaminate" them.

So we have our answer on what is defiled and what contaminates. In the Catholic Church, it's not remarried divorcees and those with nuanced positions on abortion like Joseph Biden who contaminate it. In our society, it's not immigrants who contaminate it, as Donald Trump thinks. The only reality that can introduce contamination is the human heart.

Jesus' teaching has introduced a liberating ferment in the face of a host of rules. And he even suggests that a law can lead someone to delude oneself, because an action can be legal, but at the same time immoral. In itself, a rule has no absolute value if it is not at the service of human love and justice. To borrow a phrase from s. Augustine: "Love, and do what you will" (homily for the octave of Easter). And according to Jesus, our Father God imposes no rules for loving us passionately; his love is unconditional. It's up to us to do the same.

 

-André Gilbert, Gatineau, June 2024