THE HEAVENLY TRADITION OF THE CHURCH

WEDNESDAY, TWENTY FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

2 Thess 3:6-10,16-18; Ps 128:1-2,4-5; Mt 23:27-32

The Earthly and Heavenly Traditions

What are traditions? Traditions are informally understood as the various ways of doing things and living day-to-day that we have received from our ancestors. Traditions are constituted from peoples’ customs, values, worldviews, and belief systems. They form part of a people's cultural heritage. Within every tradition we encounter the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is part of the tradition that is genuinely human and general, in the sense that it is found in every human tradition. The bad is part of the tradition that accrued from the experiences of the people which were wrongly understood and resolved; the responses to such misunderstood experiences are codified and passed to subsequent generations. The ugly aspect of traditions is made up of aberrations of our nature which are evil and results of sin and sinful attachments to demons. The ugly aspect of our traditions is irredeemable because they are evil and from the devil, the father of lies. The bad aspect is redeemed by the knowledge of Jesus Christ and the light of the Gospel that enlightens every human person who believes. The good aspect is re-established on a solid foundation of the Eternal Word, who assumed our nature to enlighten it with his divine nature. Thus, the goal of the Church’s inculturation of the Gospel is to uproot the ugly, correct the bad, and re-found the good on the divine foundation and enhance it with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We see this goal at play in our Lord’s attacks on the scribes and Pharisees in the Gospel. First, he understands their practice of tithes as good, but not well rooted in good religious understanding and awareness. Second, he corrects their practice of external religiosity, such as washing the outside of cups and dishes, as a misunderstanding of the demands of the Law and the Prophets. Third, he judges and rebukes them for their decoration of the tombs of the prophets as evil practices in the same trajectory or continuous with the killing of the prophets by their fathers and ancestors. “Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who build the sepulchres of the prophets and decorate the tombs of holy men, saying, ‘We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our fathers’ day.” Our Lord rightly pointed to hypocrisy and insincerity as the evil root within their tradition that breeds ugly aspects of their traditions. “You who are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of corruption. In the same way you appear to people from the outside like good honest men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” We have proposed interior repentance and prayer as the foundation of our spiritual journey into Jesus Christ that will destroy the roots of evil in us.

Evidently, the cause of what is ugly in the traditions of the Jews, as seen in the scribes and the Pharisees, is not localised, but universal to our nature. Original sin, which introduced the seed of sin within us, has made it easy for us to live and act out of touch with our true self. The Gospel tradition mandates interior and exterior work to establish a steady spiritual walk with the Holy Spirit into Jesus Christ. Saint Paul reminds us of this. “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we urge you, brothers, to keep away from any of the brothers who refuses to work or to live according to the tradition we passed on to you.” The true and effective preaching of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ consists in living out its heavenly tradition. This is what Paul admonished us to do: “You know how you are supposed to imitate us: now we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we ever have our meals at anyone’s table without paying for them; no, we worked night and day, slaving and straining, so as not to be a burden on any of you. This was not because we had no right to be, but in order to make ourselves an example for you to follow.” We must preach the Gospel in this manner every day of our lives so that people will experience its transformational power. We must pray as if everything depends on it, and work as if everything depends on it. The psalm echoes the same lesson. “O blessed are those who fear the Lord and walk in his ways! By the labour of your hands, you shall eat. you will be happy and proper.”

Let us pray: O God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.