Homily

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." These words from the letter of James, whose continued reading we start today, come to us right when a period of vacation is ending for many and people start their ordinary activities. The apostles’ words are inserted in the regular dimension of life; they are about our days in every week. This is why they are a gift for this time. We could say that they are good words that the Lord addresses to us at the beginning of this new time so that we can "keep ourselves unstained by the world" and understand what is really a worship pleasing to God. In a certain sense, they introduce us to the Gospel that this Sunday is proclaimed to us.
Jesus is still in Galilee, an area far from the capital and from the centre of religion. Here he had started his public mission, proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God to the poor and the weak. Some scribes and Pharisees came from Jerusalem in order to discourse with him. His fame clearly reached the capital, and they probably came not to accuse him but simply to talk with him. Indeed, Jesus was still at the beginning of his preaching and still too far from Jerusalem to require an urgent intervention against him. It is known that many of the Pharisees were not only observing the law (Torah), but also many additions that over the years and centuries the wise of Israel had gathered; the latter are what the evangelist calls the "traditions of the elders." These ritual prescriptions were intended to surround the mystery of God with a concrete and meticulous respect. And we should say that this attitude should not be despised. If we think of our Eucharistic liturgies on Sunday, sometimes certain superficiality in the treatment of the things of God should be blamed. John Paul II in his encyclical on the Eucharist, calls back to the dignity of the celebration. The lack of respect for the rite manifests a lack of sense of God, accompanied by a strong sense of self. It is obvious that if the ritual prescriptions do not love within a real and authentic relationship with the mystery that is celebrated, they become ritualistic, that is, gestures empty of meaning and, most of all, become cold and external without a heart .
However, the Pharisees seeing that Jesus’ disciples do not observe the purification practices before eating, feel the right to ask the teacher, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" Obviously the reproach is directed not to the hygienic norm but rather to the ritual prescription. (Originally, cleansings were required only of the priests, but then the Pharisees extended them to everyone as they wanted to be a perfect people.) Jesus, quoting Isaiah (29:13), stigmatizes the narrowness of a merely external attitude, "This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines." It is God’s lament for a merely external worship. And Jesus continues, "You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition." It is about condemning ritual practices, not favouring an intimate and individualistic religion. Jesus did not want to decrease the observance of the law. Jesus knows well what Moses ordered the people of Israel, "So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it" (Deut 4:1-2).
Jesus does not at all exhort us to disobey the law. He condemns people’s distance from God with their hearts. Jesus questions the personal relationship between human beings and God. This was already clear in the First Testament. Moses was well aware of this, so much that he rhetorically asked, "For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?" If God is so close, truly it is not admissible for men and women to turn to Him only with external gestures, without their hearts beating with affection at all. In those cases, rites and words are totally useless. Thus, Jesus, responding to the critic of abandoning purification rituals, clarifies what is really impure, that which is not proper to God. There is a first affirmation that is very clear: all that God created is proper to God. Therefore, nothing is impure. Impurity indeed is not in things but in the heart of human beings, "For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly," says the prophet of Nazareth. By affirming this, Jesus clarifies that evil does not grow by chance, as if it was the fruit of a blind destiny. Evil has its own soil that is the heart. And it has also its farmers: men and women. Each person is a farmer, at times very active, of small or large quantities of bitter grass in our hearts, grass that often poisons our lives and the lives of others.
Therefore, we are responsible for the bitterness of this world, some more and some less but no one is exempt. Thus, in order to root out evil from this world, we must change first our heart. Too often we neglect the heart, thinking that what counts is to change the structures of the laws. And yet, the central point in the struggle against evil is the heart. It is in the heart that we fight the real battles to truly change the world, and to be better. Therefore, it is in the heart that we need to sow the good plants of solidarity, patience, humility, piety, mercy and forgiveness. The way to this good sowing is marked by the Gospel; we remember the well known parable of the sower who went out to sow early in the morning. Also in our days, faithfully and generously, that sower goes out and throws abundantly his seed in the hearts of men and women. We have the task of welcoming that word and making it grow so that it may not be suffocated by our burdens, but rather it may bear fruit. The apostle James, almost commenting on Jesus’ words, says, "welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves."