MARK 7: 1-8, 14-23

Marginally Mark…Pentecost + 15…Revised 2018

Reading this passage on Tradition, Tevye’s musing on that subject in ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ comes to the fore. His soliloquy from his little Jewish cottage in his little Jewish village in big Orthodox Tsarist Russia is a musing about Tradition. Tradition, as he expresses it, is what makes it possible to keep one’s balance in life rather than lose it & fall not just from a roof top, but from God. (The Orthodox, there & then, had their own traditions, including beating up Jews!) Tevye’s soliloquy might make an appropriate Gradual for today. Get the Gospel & sermon off to a good start! This passage is really a warning against letting ‘Tradition’ take over! Making us lose our balance & fall. As ‘Satan’ once fell like lightning from heaven! Like Jesus maybe pictures the Pharisees doing!

The Pharisees might have been Jesus’ allies had they not been so hide-bound by Traditions. They weren’t bad people. Just people who’d lost their sense of balance. Fallen into the ‘falling off the roof-top’ trap, & come tumbling down! Letting Traditions they’d built up over the years take over & usurp God’s expectations of them revealed in their Scriptures. Do we need to break free from Traditions holding us back from God; from what God wants & needs of us?

Jesus is warning us not to let our own, or anyone else’s traditions, trap us into performing such an un-balancing act. Bring us falling from Grace in YHWH God’s eyes! Can we identify Traditions we keep? Personal ones? Family ones? Church ones? Seasonal ones? Sporting ones? etc. etc. Do we have just a few? or, does the list go on & on? In last week's JN 6: 56-69 passage, Jesus challenges His disciples, & now, us, to feed on Him as Living Bread & the Wine of Life. Not on Traditions! Once our life becomes a ‘feeding on Traditions’, those same Traditions are already feeding on us! Eating us away from the inside!

The Pharisees’ insistence on cleanliness no doubt starts as a symbolic expression of our need to approach God in a state of inner cleanliness. It becomes, though, an increasingly restrictive binding observance of externals. Let’s not do the same! Or we, too, will become today’s Pharisees in being thrown off balance; and fall from our various ‘roof-tops' from which we do our grandstanding! Like in vv. 14+ ?

Traditions probably have their beginning in giving us a sense of who we are as individuals & where we fit into family or the various communities to which we belong - including Church of course. There’s nothing wrong with that unless we let Traditions take over & let them squeeze God out. In the process losing our balance & tumbling from any roof-top where we’re fiddling away scraping out the tunes of life!

Afterthought: In Australia, today is ‘Fathers’ Day’. Are there Traditions relating to fatherhood, or parenting in general? What about observing God’s parenting of us all?

Brian