Homily for 1 September 2024 by Fr. Gerard Jonas

22nd Week in Ordinary Time: Purity of Heart, Not of Hands

Dt 4:1-2, 6-8; Ps 15; Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mk 7,1-8.14-15.21-23

The Pharisees were devout believers who tried to shape their lives according to their faith, the covenant faith handed down through generations. Norms on purity were taught to open the way to God. Following such laws was an expression of and never considered a replacement for faith. But this degenerated, instead of scaffolds to firm up human efforts to reach out to God, they became bars that all the more limit and segregate. They were used as a measure of faith. Instead of being a source of peace, the norms constituted a prison, a slavery.

The Scribes and Pharisees, as Jesus exposes, tend to miss the point of following the real spirit of the law by just abiding by the external rituals of the law.

In his book, Monastic Practices, Fr. Charles Cummings reminds that our external practices of the monastic life are directly connected with our search for God. He says it may happen at times that some practices may lose all personal meaning and become mere exercises to put up with, lifeless formalities to go through day after day, thus the danger of rubricism – as if following the rubrics magically unites us to God. “What does unite each of us with God,” he counters, “is the living faith, hope, and love that animate our heart and behavior.” Monastic practices can express these interior attitudes but cannot substitute for them.

To follow laws sincerely requires purity of heart. Part of this is the intention: is the deed done to be seen by other people or to simply please God as an expression of love and faith in Him? It is the hypocrisy of the former that Jesus rebukes in the Gospel. Jesus reminds that it is the purity of the heart that reaches out to God rather than the purity of the hands, the foods, and the vessels.

Thus, Jesus declares, “There is nothing outside a man that by going into him can defile him. It is the things that come out of a man that can defile him… For from within, out of the heart of a man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7:14-17,21-23).

So, how do we maintain the purity of heart? Against hypocrisy, Augustine writes: “Only he who has shrugged off human praise and in his life is concerned just to please God, who searches our conscience, has a simple, that is, pure, heart. … All our actions are honest and pleasing in the presence of God if they are done with a sincere heart, that is, with love as their goal…. Thus, it is not so much the action that must be considered but the intention with which it is done.”

In the monastic tradition, the idea of purity refers to an interior unification that is obtained by willing only one thing, when this “thing” is God. St. Bernard writes: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God. As if to say: Purify your heart, set yourself apart from everything, be a monk, that is, alone, seek just one thing from the Lord and follow it (cf. Psalm 27:4), freed from everything, you will see God (cf. Psalm 46:11).”
The worst thing that a hypocrite can do is to take himself as the standard by which to judge others, society, culture, and the world. These are precisely the ones whom Jesus calls hypocrites.

A Jewish rabbi who lived during the time of Christ, once said that 90% of the hypocrisy of the world was found in Jerusalem. The martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch felt the need to admonish his brothers in faith: “It is better to be Christians without saying so than to say so without being so.”

Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the papal household retreat preacher, has a simple reminder, saying that Jesus has left us a simple and unsurpassable means of rectifying our intentions at various times throughout the day, the first three questions of the Our Father: “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” These can be said as prayers, but they can also be declarations of intention: All that I do, I want to do it so that your name will be sanctified, so that your kingdom will come and your will be done.

May this Eucharist nourish us who are created in the image of God and intensify in us the Godly view of the goodness in each one and shut down the hypocritical view that only tends to segregate and disenfranchise. May we always look beyond the externals and see with the eyes and heart of love and faith.