A Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8 James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
There is a great distance between heart and lips. The Prophet Isaiah said as much, and our Lord, observing the reception of his teaching, must sadly cite him. “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mk 7:6).
We can say all sorts of things that lie far from what we truly feel. Even the truest words, expressions of real love, can find a hard entrance into the heart. It is so easily broken, so strongly guarded.
Words alone are not enough. I cannot remember my father telling me that he loved me. Being a man of few words—as we say—it is not something that he would have often said, though, often enough that I do not remember any particular instance. But I do remember the first time I felt loved by my father. It came at the close of the day.
The Sundays of my childhood were spent visiting our grandparents, both sets of whom lived a little less than an hour away. The day began with early Mass, followed by a morning drive to the home of my father’s parents. In the afternoon, we transferred to my mother’s family. A long day with lots of cousins would drain us kids, and we were fast asleep by the time we reached home after dark.
Do you remember falling asleep in the back seat of your family car? You were not quite comfortable, but you were out cold. I often crawled into the window well above our car’s back seat. They were more spacious then, and child safety had not yet become an issue. I would fall asleep up there, counting immovable stars as the highway slid by beneath us.
I would not awake until the car doors swung open and cold air filled the cabin. We were all so groggy! Dad did not expect us to awake and walk inside. Instead, he picked each of us up, carrying us, singly or in two, into our bedrooms. That is my earliest memory of feeling loved: my father’s arms carrying me to bed.
Why do words have such trouble reaching the heart? Why will the heart not be convinced? That is the power of sin in our lives. Not sin as the transgression of some commandment but its deeper meaning: sin as isolation and illusion. We do not live in God; we have lost our way.
Here are some telling examples of words that have yet to make their way into the heart. How many of us believe, deep within our hearts, the teaching that we came forth from a God who loves us and that we can rely on the same love to bring us home?
Who deeply knows in the heart what we say so often with our lips, that God gave his Son to die, washing away our failures? Words on the lips can be true and still lack roots in the heart. We have learned to say them, but do we trust them?
Consider the audacious words we so glibly repeat at every Mass. How many of them seep into our hearts? Listen to them again. Try to recapture, for a fleeting moment, what they truly mean.
“The Lord be with you.”
“The Word of the Lord.”
“Maker of heaven and earth, of all things, visible and invisible.”
“Lift up your hearts.”
“This is my body, which will be given up for you.”
“The Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
How differently would we live if these words could find root in our hearts? What is the trick, the grace, that would allow them to enter that closed chamber? Is the truth too good to be believed? That the universe is not only on our side? That it became flesh and blood to show us, to convince us, that we are loved?
Such a great distance between lips and heart! We need to be lifted into God’s arms because words are not enough. And in this life, we do that by the grace of imaginative prayer. Christ came as a man of flesh and blood so that some could remember and all those who came after could imagine being held in his arms.
The Good Lord knew that love could not speak once and stay silent. Hence the Eucharist. It allows him to speak again, to show, as he dies upon the cross, that “This is my body, which will be given for you.”
And so, we return each Sunday, a family on the way home. We see the folk and we hear the words of love and concern. We take him into our hands, into our flesh. Hopefully someday—hopefully not just our last day on earth—his words on our lips will break down the walls of the heart. That is the grace we need, the grace we long for, week after week.
