Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sometimes it is made very clear to me what I should preach. This past Monday, when I looked over the readings, I was immediately drawn to the Gospel where Jesus talks about how the practice of washing hands is not about what happens outside the person, but what happens inside the person. It struck me that the Pharisees went through the ritual motions of religious life, without letting those actions take root in their soul. As Jesus says, it is not what is outside the makes one unclean (that is, unfit for worship in the Temple) but what comes from the heart: all our passions that we give in to.
But, as I sat down to write my homily out on Thursday, I found myself drawn to a similar topic, but going in a different direction (how symbols are supposed to be sensible things that communicate an invisible reality). I had my hook. I was going to talk about how we misunderstand words, like when English speakers make the mistake of thinking that the word for embarrassed in Spanish, embarazado is a cognate–a similar sounding word–when it really means pregnant, leading to numerous embarrassing moments when a man says, Yo soy embarazado. I had my main point, how symbols are meant to communicate the invisible through what we can receive through our senses, and how what we do in religious symbols should reflect what is truly going on inside our hearts and souls. And I managed to talk about all of this and expand on the main topic in the usual Fr. Anthony homily duration (I’ve been told I preach a bit longer than our deacons).
The second thing we talked about took me back to what I first thought I was going to preach on, and caused me to totally rewrite my homily on Saturday morning, between altar server training and confessions. He asked me about the experience he’s had of Catholics who say they can do whatever sinful thing they want Monday through Friday, then they go to confession on Saturday and Mass on Sunday with a clean slate, and then get back to serious sinning on the weekdays; rinse and repeat. Clay said that it makes no sense.
Clay is right. And I explained to him that we can’t cheat God. Yes, we have the Sacrament of Penance to cleanse us of sin, the Sacrament established by Jesus in Matthew 16 and John 20 when He gave the Apostles the authority to forgive sins. But I also told Clay that the Church teaches that, for the Sacrament of Penance to be valid, the penitent (the confessee, as it were), has to be truly sorry for his sins and has to make a firm amendment to not commit those sins in the future. Certainly we sometimes fall into the same sins week after week that we don’t want to. But if we’re not truly sorry for what we did Monday through Friday, and we fully plan on doing the same thing again the next Monday through Friday, then our sins are not forgiven. We can’t cheat God.
And that’s precisely what our Gospel is about. Jesus did not condemn ritual purification and ritual actions. But He taught us that the ritual is meant to have an effect in our lives, not to be a meaningless gesture. Washing hands without washing souls means little in our relationship with God. And sometimes doing the rituals without the meaning behind it becomes a scandal, an obstacle to other people believing in the Catholic faith. I’m sure Clay is not the only Christian who thinks that the way some Catholics treat the Sacrament of Penance betrays the fact that these Catholics think that the Sacraments are magic. They’re not magic. They are meant to convert us, to change us, to become more like God. If we’re not open to having God change us, God will not force His grace–His life, His love, His peace–on us. We can go through the motions, but we won’t receive the effects that those actions are meant to have in our souls.
Jesus gave us the Good News to help us draw closer to God. The Good News He teaches us today is that while we can struggle with the same sins each week and be truly sorry, if we are trying to treat the religious rituals like a get out of Hell free card, we’re in for a not-so-pleasant surprise. This is Good News because it gives us a chance to truly have a change of heart, a metanoia, a conversion, and ask God to purify us from the things that really make us unfit for the Temple. God wants to truly cleanse us of those things and wash, not our hands, but our hearts. Will we allow God to wash our souls with His cleansing grace?
