Tuesday in the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, February 8, 2022

Mark 7, 1-13

When the Pharisees with some scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands. (For the Pharisees and, in fact, all Jews, do not eat without carefully washing their hands, keeping the tradition of the elders. And on coming from the marketplace they do not eat without purifying themselves. And there are many other things that they have traditionally observed, the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.) So the Pharisees and scribes questioned him, “Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?” He responded, “Well did Isaiah prophesy 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 as doctrines human precepts. 

A theme that we find throughout St. Mark’s Gospel is that the Lord Jesus protects and defends his followers.  In this Gospel, he has already done so when the Pharisees attacked the Apostles for seemingly breaking the Sabbath by plucking and eating the heads of the standing grain.  We have also seen him calming the storm that threatened to capsize the boat in which the he and the Apostles were sailing at night.  While he himself was perfectly content to sleep with the boat filling up with water, the Apostles were bailing frantically.  He ordered the wind and the waves to cease for their sake, not for his own.  Here, the Pharisees who have been sent by the authorities in Jerusalem are looking for something to report, and they think they have found it in the lack of attention some of the disciples pay to the Pharisaic rules for ritual purity.  The Lord steps in now, as well.  He does not answer the Pharisees, “Go ask them”, but defends them, as they are only following the example of their Master.  He goes so far as to turn the tables on the Pharisees, addressing them as “hypocrites”, which translates a Greek word used in the Septuagint that translates a Hebrew word that means “the ungodly”.  He defends the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and hair (Luke 7, 44-48).  Days before his Death, he defends Mary of Bethany when she anoints the feet of Jesus, telling the indignant Judas Iscariot, “Let her alone, that she may keep it against the day of my burial” (John 12, 7).   And he protects his Apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane when he is arrested, demanding that they be allowed to go free.

These examples of his protection of those who believe in him show him fulfilling Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall want for nothing . . . though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they have comforted me.”  With his rod he fends off wolves and other predators — the ungodly of all the ages — while with his staff — his Law of love — he guides his flock.