The Log in Our Own Eyes
In the first reading today we have Yahweh telling the people: “ You must neither add anything to what I command you, nor take away anything from it”. This seems to be a clear commandment not to change anything that has been handed down as the commandment of the Lord. Yet, in the Gospel we have a Jesus, who openly challenges the purification rituals that were part of Jewish religious law, just as at other times he challenged the Ten Commandments-based all important law of the Sabbath, and numerous other Jewish laws. Later, we have Peter and Paul who follow Jesus’ example and set aside the rules of kosher/divinely approved foods (Acts 10:9-15) and the rule of circumcision (Acts 15:1-29) - both of which were, and even today still are, central to Jewish religious practice. Despite these many examples, many of us, like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, seem to forget that the Bible, like the Sabbath, was made for human beings, and not human beings for the Bible. This is an attitude we carry over into how we relate to church teachings, so that, in what has been called a creeping infallibility, we tend to treat every single official teaching as infallible and the church itself as incapable of making a mistake especially in matters related to faith and morals.
But, if our church was so incapable of making mistakes, then one would have to ask why Pope John Paul II offered around a hundred public apologies asking pardon on behalf of the Church for actions that we must remember were justified on the basis of Papal/church teachings or instructions in their respective times. These included asking pardon for the Church’s role in the burnings at the stake and horrors of the Inquisition, the killing of Muslims and others during the Crusades, the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation, and the actions taken to oppose science as in the case of Galileo. Coming to more recent excesses, John Paul II also apologised for the behavior of Catholic missionaries in colonial times who, when they had the power, showed contempt for and destroyed the religious shrines and sacred objects of the people they subjugated . Aside from these many apologies by John Paul II , history also shows that Pope Gregory XVI (19c) condemned the idea of freedom of conscience as an "absurd and erroneous teaching or rather madness"; whereas Vatican 2 clearly supports the importance of the freedom of conscience of every individual. Then we also have Pope Leo XII (also 19c) who opposed the equality and participation of citizens in civic and political life because he taught that the people are "the untutored multitude" that must "be controlled by the authority of law", whereas today, the Church itself supports democracy and the voting rights of every citizen.
With such a chequered history as our own, it is surprising that we do not offer the same tolerant attitude to the excesses found in the history of other religions, especially Islam. Our own mistakes are attributed to a few bad apples, but the ones made in other religious groups are attributed to the “essential” violence or evil in ‘their’ religious texts. I remember a ‘street’ experiment that was conducted both in the Netherlands, and in the USA, where passages from the Bible were read out from a book which had a cover that said it was the Quran. I am not sure which passages they used in the experiment, but a quick search of my own found these commands/teachings in the Old and New Testaments: the duty and right to destroy others if they did not hand over their land to the Israelites, (Deut 20:12-17), the duty of a slave to always obey his master, however bad he may be, (1 Peter 2:18) and a clear statement that a slave is his master’s property and as long as the master did not kill him, he was free to beat him senseless(Exodus 21:20-21), the injunction that if a woman did not cover her hair in Church, then she might as well have her hair cut off; (1 Cor 11: 6), and so on and so forth. After sharing these kinds of passages the listeners were asked to comment on them and what they thought of the Scriptures that held such teachings. Many were quite clear that this only showed the difference between Christian teachings and those of a violent religion like Islam, and the same people were even more shocked when they were told that all these statements were taken from the Bible.
The fact is that in many other religions too, there are teachings that are equally unacceptable to our sensibilities today. Thus, Krishna (Hinduism) uses deceit many times in the Mahabharata to help the Pandavas win the war, and, on the face of it, he is quite promiscuous in his relationships with women. The Sikh gurus insisted that every Sikh must carry a knife. Israel’s war efforts today (that have been likened to genocide) are justified by many Jews as fulfilling their God given duty to defend the land promised to them by Yahweh. But like with Christian texts, there are many apologists in each of our religions who will interpret these actions and teachings in ways that are less offensive.
It would seem that within each of the major religions there have always been two types of religion, both of which co-exist in the Scriptures of all these religions. And this applies to Islam too. Richard Malka, the lawyer who defended the Charlie Hebdo magazine that published an 'offensive' cartoon, and was then targeted by Muslim fundamentalists, said this: "I discovered two visions of Islam that have coexisted since the origin of the religion, and which have sometimes been very violently opposed. The first, which is called the Islam of enlightenment, promotes reason, freedom and knowledge. For centuries, this Islam dominated and preserved enlightenment when the West was in darkness. It is the Islam of Rhazes, one of the fathers of medicine; of Geber, the father of chemistry; [and] of the philosopher Al-Farabi. It is also obviously the Islam of Avicenna, of Averroes, of Ibn Arabi and of so many others. But there is another Islam, the Islam of submission, of violence, of terror, of a straitjacket of rules that were set in the seventh century."
This double-face is true of Christianity as well, which like all these other religions have also contributed much to the world. But for whatever reason, at this point in our history, it is Islam that has got the bad press, and this of course has led to an Islamophobia that has spilt over into daily life. And so bishops of the Catholic Church in South India (Syro Malabar rite) coined the phrase 'love jihad', to say that Muslim men are targeting the conversion of Christian and Hindu women by romancing them and getting married to them. Of course, if a non-Christian marries a Christian and is asked to get baptised, that is not seen as a jihad. Many European countries too argue that Islam is a threat to the culture of their nations, and yet these very nations had no compunctions, nor have they since apologised, when they used the force of arms to destroy local cultures in Africa and Asia, while fostering their own European cultures. In India too, those Christians in Kerala who today complain about an alleged increase in the Muslim population, did not complain when the Christian population which is just over 2% in the country as a whole, increased to its current around 20% in Kerala, and to nearly 30% in the seven states of North-east India. Even in France which claims to be the bastion of free speech - despite there being several burqa clad women in every field from sport to politics to science, the full-body ‘burkini’ is banned by many provinces in public pools and beaches in France on various grounds including the argument that it ‘oppresses’ women. On the other hand, being a stay-at-home mom is a choice, wearing high-heeled shoes is a choice, and taking your husband’s name after marriage is a choice - and apparently none of them are oppressive to women.
The truth is that there is always a struggle between the oppressive and liberating forms of all religions - just as there is always an eternal struggle between oppressive and liberating forms of economics, politics and almost any ideology. Sometimes these oppressive parts are not even seen as oppressive, because we have grown so used to them. Thus we have Christians, men and women, who believe that it is a divine command that the husband should be the head of the family, and that it is a divine law that supports the patriarchy that does not allow women to be ordained in the Catholic church. And when we see this double-face of our own religion, we would do well to remember Jesus’ challenge when he said: “Let him who is without sin, throw the first stone” (John 8:7).
Eventually, whichever religion we belong to, we need to ask ourselves which of these two kinds of religion we want - one that keeps rules and tradition at its centre, and refuses to grow, or one that is accepting of differences, willing to learn and always keeps the human being at its centre.
First Reading: Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-8
“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, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you. (You have seen for yourselves what the Lord did with regard to the Baal of Peor, how the Lord your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor, while those of you who held fast to the Lord your God are all alive today.
“See, just as the Lord my God has charged me, I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. ) You must observe them and perform them, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ 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?
Second Reading: James 1: 17-18, 21b-22, 27
Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave birth to us by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
(You must understand this, my beloved brothers and sisters: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for human anger does not produce God’s righteousness.) Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and 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. (For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing. If any think they are religious and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.) 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.
Gospel: Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15,21-23
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders, and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash, and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds. So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. (Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God, then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus nullifying the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”)
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
(When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.) For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
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