Thoughts on Trinity 13

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

Mark 7:21-3

After a brief summer sojourn in chapter six of John's gospel, we're back with Mark for the rest of year, beginning with a passage that is more prone to be misconstrued than a celebrity's Twitter account.

Modern readers of the verses cited above, that is all of us, are likely to read Jesus' words in the following way: what really matters is what's inside, your thoughts, your intentions. Those are what make you good or bad. We might feel even more confident in this reading given what has happened already in chapter seven of Mark: Jesus has disputed with the scribes and Pharisees, criticising their hypocritical observance of the Law. Isn't what Jesus is saying here, we might ask, that religion is an inner thing, a matter of the heart, not a matter of what you do?

The problem with all this is that it makes Jesus too modern, too much like us - or at least some of us. Not only does the first century Palestinian Jew, on this account, have religious views which sound like they've come straight out of 16th century Germany, he also has ethical views that would fit nicely on a Radio 4 discussion programme. One of the most dreary commonplaces of contemporary thinking about right or wrong is that being good is very much an inner matter, primarily to do with intentions, conscience, thoughts, beliefs - that kind of thing. We can disagree about what to do, but we can both be right, because we are well motivated. Our hearts, as we say, are in the right place. You believe in bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age, I don't; but let's agree to differ, and accept that we both mean well. There's all sorts wrong with this view, as was summed up rather nicely by the Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, "Butler exalts conscience, but appears ignorant that a man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things."

Anyhow, this view is wrong. On the contrary, as a reading from the epistle of James set for today's Mass puts it: "be doers of the word, not merely hearers".

Thankfully, the Jesus of Mark's gospel is considerably better at ethics than your average radio pundit. Two things are going on in this part of chapter seven.

First, we have an insight into the debate about the observance of the Jewish Law, which was raging in the early Church, and would have been very much of the moment for the first hearers and readers of Mark. We get Mark's particular spin of Jesus' teaching. "Thus", we are told about Jesus' words in a verse the lectionary compilers neglected to include, "he declared all foods clean".

More relevantly for us, we have an attack on hypocrisy. And understanding this suggests a better way of thinking about right and wrong. The hypocrite is someone whose life lacks integrity, whose actions are inconsistent one with another. The hypocrite's life lacks shape and vision. Rather, he or she does on any given occasion the thing that best serves her interests. He or she will manipulate doctrines, religious or otherwise, to his or her own ends. The hypocrite might sometimes do what we would describe as 'the right thing', but it isn't being done as part of a life lived well. The hypocrite lacks the habit of doing the right thing. The hypocrite isn't someone for whom doing good is second nature.

An old fashioned word for the habits which make our lives good and characterised by integrity is 'virtues'. As human beings, let alone as Christians, we will only come to flourish through possessing virtues. And coming to possess them is no easy business. To use another old-fashioned turn-of-phrase, we need to form our characters. This can only happen in a community, through which we learn and interact with others, developing alongside one another, and learning the skills that make for good human living.

There are many such communities: families, community, and political groups. Sadly, our present society as a whole, based as it is around competition and profit, is not an example. Uniquely however, the Church is a community in which we are called grow in virtue not simply by our own efforts, but with the help of God's grace given to us in Jesus Christ. Through this grace, given to us above all in the sacraments, our weaknesses, our tendencies to shy away from virtue, can be overcome. More than that, we are called within the Church to possess new virtues - faith, hope, and love - the habits by which we share in the very life of God, by which we flourish as human beings in new ways, given to us as a sheer loving gift, and which foreshadow our eternal flourishing, our sharing in the vision of God.