Lifting the Load

IN CHOOSING portions of Saint Anthony’s scriptural commentaries as a starting point for this monthly article, I am hampered by the fact that the modern three-year Sunday lectionary does not match with the one familiar to the Saint. This year is particularly difficult, being the year of St Mark, because Mark’s Gospel was far less used pre-Vatican II than Matthew’s or Luke’s. Bear with me, then, dear readers, if I seem to ramble far and wide!

 

Purity laws

 

One of the passages never treated by Anthony is now set as the Gospel for the twenty-second Sunday of ordinary Time, the first part of Mark, chapter 7. It concerns a controversy between Our Lord and the Pharisees regarding ritual purity. You and I (I hope) remember to wash our hands before handling food as a matter of hygiene, but in ancient cultures it was not just a practical expedient, but carried religious sanctions with it. The Old Testament Law has something to say about washing and bathing, especially for priests about to carry out their liturgical functions, and also for others who were reckoned ritually ‘impure’, for instance by touching a dead body, or coming in contact with blood. These were not regarded as moral faults in our sense of the word, but they disqualified a person from religious worship until they had undergone the physical purification.

Later on, Rabbinic tradition codified the ‘purity laws’ to cover a much wider spectrum, but we may imagine that in Our Lord’s time many ordinary people, such as fishermen and workmen, were rather casual about such things. Religious ‘experts’ were therefore critical of Our Lord’s disciples in this regard: “You call yourselves religious, but you don’t do X, Y and Z.” They got short shrift from Our Lord, who reminded them that what God really cares about is the moral purity of the heart, rather than the physical cleanness of the body. It’s not what goes into your mouth that you should worry about, it is what comes out of it!

 

Outward and inward

 

In his commentary on the Gospel for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Unless your justice abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, Matthew 5.20), Anthony remarks that “the justice of the Pharisees was a matter of restraining hand rather than heart.” The scribes and Pharisees typify people of any religion who set great store on outward respectability and conformity, and feel entitled to look down on those who fall short of these standards. On the other hand, says the Saint, “The justice of the Apostles abounds in the spirit of counsel and in the grace of God’s mercy, so that it not only holds back the hand from evil action, but also the mind from evil thoughts.”

Washing hands and utensils, wearing the right garments, architectural niceties and a multiplicity of rules and regulations are all very well, he says, but “the justice of true penitents consists in spiritual poverty, in fraternal love, in sighs of sorrow, in afflicting the body, in the sweetness of contemplation, in despising worldly success, in willingly embracing adversity, and in the intention of persevering to the end.” Even today, there are plenty of religious ‘experts’ (lay at least as often as clerical) who still seem to fret far more over points of liturgical or canonical correctness, than over weightier matters of justice and charity! Arguments about the shape of vestments or the arrangement of the altar are not the be-all and end-all of the Faith!

 

The wicked steward

 

In his commentary on the Gospel of the wicked steward (the ninth Sunday after Pentecost), the Saint reflects on the way we should seek to reduce one another’s debts, to lighten their loads and forgive their offences. Anthony daringly suggests that, while the steward himself was unjust, he was commended by his master for the way he helped his master’s debtors. The debtors would have been, probably, tenant farmers who paid their rent in kind – so many barrels of oil, so many sacks of wheat, and so on. The suggestion is that the master was a kind man, who did not mind too much not getting his full entitlement, as long as the good intention was there. A priest or a bishop, says Anthony, may be a bad man himself, yet “because he counsels sinners, expounds the word of the Lord, and shows what each person should render to God and his neighbour, as far as he can, and gives prudent instruction, is praised by the Lord.” (Sermons, II, 228) He is not praised for the bad things he does, but because even a bad person can at times do good and show mercy.

 

Culture of blame

 

One of Our Lord’s criticisms of the scribes and Pharisees was that they placed heavy burdens on others, but did little to help those others to carry them. At least the unjust steward could not be accused of that! There are plenty of similar cases today, where we may be quick to point out to others where their moral duty lies, but do little to help them fulfil it. A teenage girl becomes pregnant: what do we, as a society and as Christians, do to help her cope? An unemployed lad gets into trouble with the police: what can we do to help him make a fresh start? A colleague is overworked and stressed, and under pressure from employers: how can we find a constructive way forward for everyone? So often today, when things go wrong, we see a ‘culture of blame’, more concerned to identify a scapegoat than to fix the problem, more concerned to punish the wrongdoer than to heal the injury.

There are so many ways, and so many situations, where it is far easier to criticise than to give support. Yes, people make mistakes, fall short of the mark, even display real moral faults: but mere criticism will not help, unless it comes from a real desire for the welfare of everyone involved, including those who really are ‘to blame’. The most important question is not, “Whose fault is this?” but, “How can we put it right?”