‘cups and pots and bronze dishes’

22nd Sunday in Ordinary time Yr B
Gospel from Mark 7:1-8;14-15;21-23

‘cups and pots and bronze dishes’

What are these before the Lord? … nothing …
and not only nothing, but empty.

Why do you hide behind them?
Why do you make them out to be so important?
Why won’t you follow Me?

You – not the cups and pots and bronze dishes – you are the one I want, not these empty, lifeless things. They are only useful for holding and carrying, but I want you to contain Me – I want to live and be alive in you.

We are invited to give up trying to control God, trying to make God out to be what we think He should be. But, we don’t believe in God so as to be able to force His hand, to have control over how He acts, to tell Him how to be God. God is not complicated, as we make Him out to be. He has given us His Son, who is the Way the Truth and the Life. He has given us everything, and still humbly asks us neither to ‘take from’ nor ‘add to’ what we have been given – don’t try to perfect Him who is already perfect, who is God.

When I come to the Lord, then, and don’t know what to do or say, and almost helplessly cry out ‘Lord, all I want is you’, I should remember and believe that they are the same words He speaks to me: ‘My child, My beloved, … all I want is you’.

So, shake off the fear of unworthiness and unclean-ness – or, at least, be an honest hypocrite before God. Give Him the fear, but give Him yourself as well, give Him yourself first, give Him your divided heart – and if you can’t ‘accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you and can save your souls’ – yet – humbly acknowledge it and ask for the grace to receive God in all the ways He wants to love you. …
and it will be yours.