Faith

Providing for our need not our greed – Saturday, 5th week in ordinary time- Mark 8: 1-10

Jesus is in the region of the Decapolis or the ten cities. He is in Gentile territory and has already worked two public miracles; for the Syrophonecian woman and for the deaf man.  Unlike a rolling stone that gathers no moss, Jesus is moving and as He does he is gathering a large number of Gentile followers.  All this must have brought a big smile to Mark’s Gentile Christians as they read the ‘Good News’; they too were welcomed by Jesus.

For three days, four thousand disciples (read men in this text) of Jesus have been following Him. They have not eaten any earthly bread but have been feeding on Jesus, ‘the bread of life’. Jesus is fully aware that while He has nourished them with His Word (as He does when we read or hear His Word) they hungered too for bread that would nourish their bodies.

The words of our compassionate Jesus, is the benchmark for every clergyman, every Christian community and every person of good will. Christ does not want to ‘send the people home hungry for they might faint on the way.’ He was aware of the great distance they had traversed just to be with Him, just to hear the Master’s voice. Their need now was bread and they had uttered not a word of protest at the lack of it.

It is amusing, if not amazing to see the incredulity of the disciples. They who had seen the miracle of the feeding of five thousand  in Jewish territory in Chapter 6, they who had picked twelve baskets of broken pieces of fish and bread now ask the Lord “ How can we feed these people with bread here in the desert?”

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Faith

‘Right’ from the start- Thursday, 5th week in ordinary time- Mark 7: 24-30

Everything seems wrong about this narration. Jesus has left Galilee alone (or so it seems). He enters a house in Tyre, a Gentile region and He is quite probably residing in a Gentile home. He encounters and dialogues with a woman, who at that time was most certainly considered the wrong gender for a self-respecting Rabbi to be seen with. She is of the wrong race and wrong religion and has traditionally been the enemies of the Jews and finally she has a daughter who is possessed. For any Jew, just about everything was wrong and yet in God’s eyes just about everything was right.

You must remember that the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus but a post-resurrection faith narrative. The principal purpose of the Gospel is not to tell us what Jesus did and where he went but to give us an understanding of the theology and rational behind the mind of the Gospel writer in presenting the historical Jesus.

St Mark is writing to Gentile Christians in about the year 67AD. This was a community that was made to feel ostracised by the Jews and their Jewish Christians brothers who looked at the Gentiles Christians like they were some lower life form who ought to have fewer privileges.

It was a known fact that a Jew would not walk into Gentile territory not only for the fact of being defiled but also because they would be attacked. Jesus walks in alone and it is clearly Mark’s agenda to show that Jesus’ ministry was meant to include all. Yet astonishingly, the kind and compassionate Jesus seems to be rude and insulting. Was he play-acting in order to test the woman’s faith as some interpreters surmise? After all it was well known that the Gentiles were referred contemptuously by the Jews as ‘dogs’ and Jesus seems to use the same analogy.

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Faith

Not what your eating but what’s eating you – Wednesday, 5th week in ordinary time – Mark 7:14-23

After this episode of today’s Gospel, Jesus will leave the Jewish area and make his way into Gentile territory. The significance of this movement and its message was not lost on the community of St Mark who were predominantly Gentiles. Mark deliberately highlights this trip of Jesus to reassure his listeners that Jesus came for all and not only for the Jews.

To the Gentile Christians of Mark’s time, many of the Jewish traditions were alien. It is for this reason that in the passage of today’s Gospel, St Mark will go to great pains to explain the traditions of the Jews but also to show them that Jesus transcended human tradition in favour of the human person.

At the heart of the argument in today’s Gospel is the spill over of the question raised by the Pharisees in yesterday’s Gospel. Their question was asked in order to indict Jesus and to embarrass Him about the lack of ‘tradition’ maintained by ‘some of His disciples.’ (These now also being the Gentiles of Mark’s community) Among this was the tradition was the washing of hands before eating and the restrictions regarding what one could or could not eat.

According to Leviticus 11:43-44 and 20:24-26, Yahweh “separated” the clean from the unclean food in order to distinguish the Israelites from the surrounding peoples. The Jews preserved their religious and national identity through practices associated with food laws, hand washing, and Sabbath keeping.

 When Jesus, in Mark’s Gospel declared all foods clean (verse 19) He prepares the way for the Gentile mission and dissolves the separation among Jew and Gentile based on dietary restrictions. And it does not end with merely a break down with what one can eat for from here, Jesus enters into Tyre, which is Gentile territory, and ministers to a Syrophoenician woman who displays more understanding of his ministry than those closest to him. The Gentiles, as it were, get the message of Christ not the Jews.

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Faith

HIS Word or our words- Tuesday, 5th Week in ordinary time- Mark 7: 1-13

As a Catholic priest I have a huge issue with human traditions hijacking God’s commandments. There are just too many human traditions that have invaded our faith making much of our faith, more man and less God.  In India we call these traditions ‘parampara’ and they are ‘religiously’ linked even to Christian life making the tradition more sacred than the law.

What evidently ails the times we live in was also an issue for time in which Jesus lived. Make no mistake, He did not come to “destroy the Law and the Prophets”, a false charge brought against Him; He simply came to fulfil them. At no time of His earthly life did Jesus come to ‘fulfil the traditions’ which had become the swan song of the Pharisees and scribes.  Jesus rejected the Pharisaic traditions surrounding the law’s observance and the substitution of human teaching for divine commandments. The Pharisees were merely using the law as a way to escape from one’s obligations.

So Jesus takes on the ’traditionalist’ head on and ensures that His argument is logical. It is interesting to note that when one does not have a case to make, one often has no other choice but to pick on incidentals around the case.  And so we are told that “Some of His Disciples were eating with defiled hands”. The fact was that great crowds ( in their thousands ) followed Jesus as His disciples, yet while most did follow the ‘traditions’ the Pharisees could only see ‘some’ who did not; their myopic agenda was clear. Their question was really meant to be a veiled critique of Jesus’ teaching since it was the duty of the master to train his disciples and evidently for them, He had failed.

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