Today’s readings: Deut. 4, 1-2.6-8; James 1, 17-18.21-22.27; Mk 7, 1-8.14-15.21-23.
Religion is about the deepest dimensions of being human. Yet there is always the tendency to render religion as having to do with trivialities in daily living. Very often we refer to Jesus as the founder of our religion without noticing that in itself that is a misnomer.
Jesus is the exit from religion. When religion turned mechanical, as with the Pharisees and the scribes, Jesus intervened to re-establish the real connection between religion and the heart.
Religion for many, particularly in the West, lacks the adventure and inner exploration that the soul yearns for. Many a time this yearning of the soul is suffocated with religious dogma and guilt trips. We fear so much to see people grow up and taste what true freedom is.
In the West for the past 300 years, secularisation has been relocating religion. Religion is no longer the umbrella that harbours the values and morality of society.
People, for myriad reasons, no longer trust blindly institutional religion. The churches are in crisis not because church attendance is decreasing, but because there is a crisis of authority and trust.
In the 16th century, St John of the Cross, for reasons that are similar to ours today, said: “Launch out into the deep”. There is a wisdom deep within our roots that needs to be accessed anew and that can give us strength and understanding at a critical time when so much seems to be falling apart. Today’s first reading from Deuteronomy refers to this wisdom and understanding that the age we are in yearns for but which, strangely enough, hardly transpires from our way of doing things.
In a recent collection of readings for everyday from Christian mystics, theologian Matthew Fox writes that change is necessary for our survival and it demands the shaking of our institutions.
The churches and religion in general can only recover their authority when they resume speaking to people’s hearts, addressing honestly and wholly people’s pain and hurts rather than dictating ideology.
Today’s gospel is the classic demonstration of how Jesus is the exit from religion. He almost ridicules the Pharisees and the scribes for trivialising religion so much as to render it as having to do merely with externalities as the washing of hands or of cups and pots and bronze dishes.
We’ve moved on from there. But there is still so much that we do and that we erroneously confuse with religion which Jesus himself today would easily ridicule.
I am sure Jesus today would have been a secularist. Much of what we interpret to be religion is merely culture: village festas, processions, devotions. If, as already mentioned, secularisation in the modern age has been relocating religion, today’s gospel confirms that the kick-off was by Jesus himself.
Jesus belies our judgement of the culture we live in. “It is not what goes into a man from outside that makes him unclean but the things that come from within, from people’s hearts”.
We go nowhere when we keep pointing fingers and simply blame society and culture for the evil that flourishes and that affects us.
Even James in the second reading speaks of “pure, unspoilt religion”, a religion without deceit that is located in the realm of the basic attitudes that govern our hearts and guide our behaviour.
In the gospel, Jesus uncovers this deceit, which in his timehad reduced religion merely to lip-service, opening the wayto hypocrisy.
Jesus minimises the darkness around us to focus instead on what in truth we carry inside.
As Carl Jung says: “Only the mystics bring what is creative in religion itself”. Bereft of its mystical dimension, religion is doomed to turn mediocre and loses touch with the soul.