The Heart of the Matter
Jesus and Jewish purity laws
Announcements for August 28, 2021:
Registration forms for our religious education program are available online. Please bring them to the rectory this week.
OLMC School kicks off the 2021-22 academic year on Monday. Please remember our families, faculty, and staff in your prayers as we prepare for another year of educating children for lives of eternal purpose!
Our 2022 Mass Book will open in September. For more information and to request Masses (limited to three requests for now) visit our Mass Intentions page online or check out the form in the narthex of the church.
Thank you to all who volunteered, donated, and shopped at our OLMC Flea Market last weekend. It was a great success!
Visit our Parishioner Portal for up-to-date announcements.
Dear Saints,
Having spent the last five Sundays in Jesus' Bread of Life Discourse, we're now getting back to the Gospel of Mark. You'll remember, from before our brief interlude, that Saint Mark's Gospel is a real page-turner. This weekend's Gospel passage is, likewise, enthralling.
We can't know for sure what caught their attention - was it Jesus' healing on a sabbath, his raising Jairus' daughter from the dead, or his feeding 5,000 men with five dinner rolls? - but the Pharisees and scribes come out in force to scrutinize Jesus, the supposed renegade, and his rebel movement.
Jesus is powerful and popular. To the religiopolitical rulers of his day, Jesus is a force to be reckoned with, a threat to established order. When the scribes and Pharisees find some of Jesus' followers failing to perform ritual purifications they have all the evidence they need -- Jesus is a traitor to God's cause; left alone, Jesus will lead Israel astray.
Jesus suggests, in response to his opponents' accusation, that the purity laws point beyond themselves to a real need for deeper purification. Any agenda that doesn't take this into account - including the agenda of the scribes and Pharisees - is play-acting, plain and simple.
Jesus' agenda gets to the heart of the matter. Wicked thoughts and deeds well up from within, from our inmost depths, but Jesus offers in himself a cure for what ails us. With Jesus' own life of love at work in us and working through us, our hearts are remade to beat more purely for God and his purposes.
Jesus, the truly human being, pioneers and makes possible for us the way of renewed humanity, the way of love. By trusting and following Jesus at all times, by going the way of self-gift no matter the opposition, we find our place in God's plan to raise up his fallen world.
I love you, my friends, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Christ's Peace,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
Preparing for Mass?
Check out this weekend's readings:
The Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Feast in the House of Levi (detail)
Paolo Veronese, 1573