Traditions

Homily for Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

One particular perspective on our human behavior is encompassed in the saying: “We have always done it this way.” When I was a much younger man and a relative newcomer to Sacred Heart Province, I recall that the older friars express to this thought in German: “Immer so gewesen.”

There is nothing wrong with tradition or traditional practices. However, there comes a time when such traditions and practices have to be rethought. This is the lesson that we are learning from St. Paul’s missionary activity. There were two traditions in Judaism that caused a great deal of distress in communities where both Jew and Gentile Christians dwelled together - circumcision and certain dietary laws. Jewish Christians maintained that in order to become Christian, one had to be first Jewish. This was a particular stumbling block for Gentile converts and cause no end of division within such communities.

Many of St. Paul’s letters feature discussion about these two issues, but none so stridently as the Letter to the Galatians. St. Paul advances several different arguments to set aside these two areas of Jewish tradition in order to accommodate the life of Gentile Christians. While these two issues are obviously no longer a problem for Christian communities today, there are still issues which divide us. In fact, it may be that we are even more divided as a community at this time than we have ever been before.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of St. Luke features Jesus confronting such division over yet another detail of Jewish tradition; namely, the tradition of ablutions before sharing a meal.

I find it interesting that the church offers Psalm 119 as the response in today’s liturgy. This particular Psalm features nine different ways to speak of the commands, ordinances, statutes, and laws that are found in the Book of Leviticus. The 613 commandments of Leviticus are summarized in the Gospel by the twofold commandment to love – love of God and love of neighbor. The challenge for all of us is the willingness to set aside traditions and traditional practices when they get in the way of our ability to love God and love our neighbors by living together in unity.

Once again, we are called to communion, a word which, as I have mentioned before, literally means “with unity.”