Connect to what is real
AM Psalm 87, 90 • PM Psalm 136
Gen. 47:27-48:7 • 1 Cor. 10:1-13 • Mark 7:1-23
In today’s reading from Mark:
The Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites. You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!
“Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.”
Jesus has begun to abrogate the dietary laws of the Torah. This will be only one part of dismantling the human traditions these leaders helped maintain. Their hypocrisy—pretending to be what they were not or to believe what they did not—distanced them far from God. Just as we become angered by the hypocrisy we see in others, Jesus also became annoyed and repeatedly called out those he recognized as hypocrites.
“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
Hypocrisy of those in power helps to sustain oppression of the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized. Hypocrisy of those in power helps deceive the privileged into believing falsehoods about justice, opportunity, and entitlement. Hypocrisy of power helped render Jesus to his crucifixion.
Yet every hypocrite denies being one, usually shifting the onus to the listener as having misinterpreted them. At the core of hypocrisy is inconsistency—do as I say, not as I do—which the listener judges as fake or phony. Both our and Jesus’ negative reaction to hypocrisy comes from the instinctive and essential need for authenticity. Be near a young child for a short while and you will remember the integrity and compassion we are born with. Children connect to what is real in us—until we teach them the rationale of double standards; until we force a compromise of their wholeness and integrity; until we show them how to mute the clanging discord between compassion and self-interest. As adults, our hypocrisy becomes the silent anthem of all the rationales we’ve justified until with deafness, we, too, deny our own hypocrisy.
Humility is the blessing that smacks me upside the head, reminding me to look in the mirror: what are my own hypocrises? What human law or tradition am I holding above God’s word? What am I placing ahead of Christ’s most important teaching—to love one another.
Written by Bernadette Reda
Enjoying the mystery, light and love of our world and each other, along with Frasier reruns and good puns.