“There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.”
You may notice in this reading from Mark that Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees. They are the people in the New Testament whom everyone today loves to hate. If Jesus is the peace-loving, friend-making, rule-ignoring rebel healer, the Pharisees are the mean-spirited, narrow-minded religious authorities who stand in his way. And as such we find it very hard to identify with them or understand them.
But it’s important that we do so if we hope to understand what Jesus says about the human heart. The Pharisees were not the monsters we might want them to be. They were, as they saw it, the guardians of Jewish religion and culture. They were half political party and half religious order: they were teachers and spiritual leaders, scholars and legislators. They knew the Jewish scriptures inside and out, and their goal was to share and preserve that knowledge in a world that seemed to be falling apart. Things that might seem fussy to us—questions about exactly what to wear and how to wash one’s hands and so on—these were for them ways of preserving the identity of an ancient culture in the face of the Roman Empire’s expanding authority.
I have to say: I find this all very familiar, and I wonder if you do too. As Catholics, we put a lot of energy into teaching and following the rules. We have rules that make us unique, rules that preserve a certain distinctive culture that can, we hope, be shared with the world. When to sit, stand and kneel, when to make the sign of the cross, when to fast, when to abstain, how to make your confession, how to receive Holy Communion, how to get married, how to calculate the date of Easter. These rules at times seem arbitrary, yet they function within an organic system whose goal is the health of the whole community. Add to this our heritage in the Ordinariate: a certain speech idiom in prayer, a culture of fellowship, a notoriously dry English wit, our own particular prayers, and a liturgical culture that we think is a treasure worth preserving and sharing. In external terms, we are much more like the Pharisees than we are like Jesus’ roving band of misfit disciples.
Some people, reading what Jesus says to the Pharisees, may jump to the conclusion that, if we are like the Pharisees, then we must change: we should do away with the rules and the rituals and seek some kind of purer, more internal version of Christian practice, some less disciplined and more relaxed version of Church life. But this reaction misses the point of what Jesus says. Let’s hear that key phrase again: “There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.”
What, after all, are rituals for? Jesus doesn’t tell the Pharisees to abandon their tradition. But he does insist that external things, external rituals, do not make us good or evil. Wearing the wrong vestments at Mass or making the sign of the cross in the wrong place, or forgetting to abstain from flesh meat on Friday, is probably not a moral failure unless it is an intentional rebellion against authority. But the ritual matters, because ritual forms us internally through external habit. Following the Church’s precepts and her liturgical law will not automatically make you into a good person. It may, however, mold you in such a way that the choice to do good will be easier, more natural, than it would otherwise have been, because here you get used to the existence of standards and expectations outside your own imagination and understanding.
So what, then, is the warning for those of us who, in so many ways, resemble the Pharisees of Jesus’ day?
I’ll leave you with two thoughts.
First, the Pharisees seem to have forgotten, much of the time, what ritual and rules were for. The law in itself does not make us holy or good, and the Pharisees therefore used it too often as an excuse from truly good work. The modern Catholic Pharisee might say something like this: As long as I’m not breaking the rules, anything I do is fine. Or: As long as I show up at Mass and avoid any scandalous public sin, I’m doing what’s required; it’s not necessary for me to pay attention, or participate, or put in extra effort. Frankly, when non-Catholic Christians accuse Catholics of Pharisaism, this is what they mean: the Catholic who checks all the boxes but couldn’t care less in his heart about loving God or his neighbor, who treats the Church as just another institution whose rules have be followed, not categorically different from the DMV.
Second, the Pharisees probably did understand, at least in a theoretical way, that the law and the ritual were designed to bring them closer to God. And yet when God stood in front of them, in the person of Jesus, they missed it. They were so scandalized by the notion that God might meet them in some new and unexpected way that they missed it. They missed, in one sense, the whole point of all their training in scripture and tradition and ritual, because they were so focused on getting it right that they never actually let themselves be changed by it. They were so focused on following the rules that they never let the rules transform their hearts.
That’s a hard lesson, and again a relevant one: we can run the risk of focusing so much on getting it all right—whether that means following all the rules, or standing firm against the shifting sands of secular culture, or making our fundraising goals, or creating the perfect parish program—that we forget to let all these good things be means to a greater end. We need to do those things; we need those rules and those goals. We need them not because they will themselves make us happy or good, but because they train us, in their own particular ways, to recognize and finally take hold of the perfect happiness of the saints in God’s kingdom.
So, as the Lord tells us elsewhere, “the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do” (Matt. 23:2). In other words, observe the law, respect the tradition, but, even more importantly, let it transform your heart.