11 February 2025 - Tuesday of the 5th week in Ordinary Time
Homily
In the Gospel, Jesus reminds both the crowds who come to Him and the Pharisees and scribes that the purity that counts before God is not the ‘ritual purity’ with which ancient religions, including that of Israel, were concerned, and which they strove to achieve through rituals and cultic practices, but the purity of the heart.
There is a spiritual dimension to the human being that cannot be ignored. A certain form of religiosity, linked to an agrarian period of civilisation - and which had been perpetuated for several millennia - was to some extent swept away by the development of the industrial and technological revolutions and then by the arrival of the communication and information age. Instead of moaning about the decline of one form of religious ‘practice’, we can see it as a challenge - a challenge to allow the newness of the Gospel to develop more fully in our day, so that the spiritual dimension of the human being is expressed ever more fully in the authenticity of everyday life, in particular through works of justice and sharing, rather than through rites linked to another cultural stage of humanity.
Jesus had already explained that purity of heart, which manifests itself in every facet of daily existence, must replace the ritual purity of primitive religions, which implied a distinction between the profane and the sacred and a distinction between pure people and... others. This distinction between the sacred and the profane was what allowed Israel to consider itself superior to all other peoples. In today's Gospel, Jesus' disciples are accused of not respecting this separation between the pure and the impure. Jesus calls us to overcome this form of religiosity.
Let the Word of God penetrate our personal and collective ‘today’ and challenge us to an ever-renewed conversion of our way of being.
Armand Veilleux