SEPTEMBER 2^nd 2012, TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

GOSPEL: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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Don Fabio challenges us to read this text as if it were directed personally to us today. The modern world is as obsessed with external “ablutions” as the Pharisees ever were. The preoccupation with physical and mental wellbeing has become the religion of our day. There is a tendency to believe that all of our problems have been caused by external circumstances, and that they can be “healed” by altering these external circumstances. But this preoccupation with what is external never brings the wholeness or healing that is promised. It is from within that we must be changed. This can only be achieved by opening ourselves in the depths of our being to the love of Jesus which is capable of transforming us completely.

We might think that Jesus’ critique of the ritualism of the Pharisees is a topic that has nothing to do with us today, but we are wrong!

This discourse of Jesus is concerned with a subject that seems to have little relevance for us nowadays – the ritualism of the Pharisees. But the issue, in fact, is extremely relevant to us. The Pharisees washed their hands and vessels for meals in particular ways, were attentive to the traditions of the elders, and when they returned from the market they performed many ablutions. These are attempts by the human being to purify himself, to resolve his problems, to clean himself of that which makes him dirty and to set his life to rights. The human person has a persistent tendency to think that his life can be put into order and cleansed by external activity. As a result he multiples laws and rituals, and obsessively focuses on the external aspects of daily action and relationships.

The ritualism of today consists in an obsessive attention to physical and mental wellbeing

In our day the rituals we engage in often concern the care of our psyche, the maintenance of our “mental equilibrium”, the care of our body, and the preservation of our health. Physical and mental wellbeing has become a religion in which the human being tries to attain happiness and fulfilment, but he doesn’t succeed. Happiness does not consist in physical or mental wellbeing, and the human being is not cleansed by external preoccupations of this sort. In this passage Jesus says, “Nothing entering a man from without can make him impure. It is the things that come out from man that make him impure.” It is a waste of time changing house, changing job, changing friends, changing our external habits, unless we are changed also from within. It is from within that things are rendered impure, and it is from within that they are cleansed. Jesus, by means of the Cross, has changed from within the meaning of suffering. Incredibly, the man who redeemed the world was in a horrific situation as far as the ritualism of the Pharisees was concerned. Jesus was the condemned outcast; he was dirty and covered with blood. Even though he was unclean from a ritual point of view, he becomes the one who purifies others.

I can be transformed only from within, not by a focus on the alleged external “causes” of my behaviour

Things are changed from within. For as long as we refuse to touch the true origins of our problems, which are the delusions that lie in the deepest parts of our hearts, our lives will remain disappointing, exactly as they are. But our lives can equally become magnificent from the inside. The most ugly of experiences can be transformed from the inside once we learn how to love. This is done, not in forcing ourselves to change by the power of our will, but by a simple exposure to the truth. The human being is responsible for the ruination of his own life, and the source of this ruination is in his heart. Our generation sometimes seems incapable of understanding this. There is a wholesale tendency nowadays to consider ourselves to be victims of the past and of our social and family circumstances. We have developed a refined system of psychological and sociological “explanations” that seek to justify all of our errant behaviour and frustrations. These structures are supposed to heal and change me, but they cannot, because the real me is never really engaged by this focus on what is external to me.

Wholeness of life can be achieved, not through external ablutions, but by allowing the love of the Lord of Life to enter into the depths of my being

This passage denounces a problem, and at the same time announces the solution. It denounces the practice of seeking wholeness from the external aspects of my life, and it proclaims the liberty that is only possible through Jesus Christ. My life comes from God, and if I wish to have life, then I must ask God for it. Until I truly ask for life from the Lord of life, who is Jesus Christ, then I will continue to attribute the source of the problems that surround me to other things, instead of recognizing that it is my lack of adhesion to the Lord of life that is the source of those problems. If my problems really came from without, if I were truly a victim of my circumstances, then I would be condemned to remain exactly as I am. But Jesus instead has proclaimed our liberty, has proclaimed our capacity and responsibility to transcend our external circumstances and take our lives in our own hands. How can this be achieved? By looking at my life from within rather than without; by asking Jesus who is the Lord of life to give me life; by opening myself in the depths of my being to the love of God, and through this to transform whatever situation in life I find myself in.