Leave-taking of the Feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God. Holy Priest-Martyr Autonomus (284-305).
Galatians 5:11-21; Mark 7:5-16.
Read Mark 7:5-16
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Today we receive a good reminder of one important aspect of how Christians should relate to each other. If you are reading these reflections, odds are that you are trying to take your faith seriously. Sooner or later, that will mean that you’ll notice that other people aren’t taking their faith seriously, or at least don’t appear to be doing so. This is almost inevitable, and when we keep our eyes on Christ, and his mercy towards us, we will be on a better footing to reject the temptation to judge the servants of another as if they were accountable to us.
But today’s gospel gets us a bit deeper into this spiritual problem. The Pharisees fell into the trap of judging others, and moreover, into a particularly bad version of it—the bad habit of treating a less important aspect of the faith as if it is a marker of true piety, of orthodox faith and practice. Just like they over-emphasized the tradition of eating with washed hands, so contemporary Christians can over-emphasize one or another recent tradition that we regard as a marker of correct faith. Maybe we do this with ritual things, which are vitally important, but which we must not hold over others, especially when they are so often ignorant of them. When we find ourselves going down that road, we do well to remember both the Lord’s command not to judge others, and this passage, in which Jesus points us away from treating secondary things as if they are primary.