Tuesday, 2/7/12
Thirty-five years ago I was
pastor in a parish ninety miles south of here, and an ex-priest there loved
dropping in for coffee. One day he showed up, all excited. “Tom,” he said, “I
just read Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of his temple, and it was
powerful. I say, powerful.” Right enough. It is. But let’s turn to the Gospel.
In the past you might have
heard me speak about “the traditions of the elders” which are the subject of
today’s Gospel. Forgive me for going through it again. The Babylonians enslaved
the Israelites from 600 to 530 B.C.. What happened then was that the Persians defeated
the Babylonians; and they not only freed the Israelites, they also helped them
complete a new temple in 515 B.C..
Even with Persia’s help the
Israelites did poorly for the next seventy years. In 545 B.C. the Persian
Emperor deputized two Jews living in Persia to go to Jerusalem to straighten
them out. The two men, Ezra and Nehemia, found the roads and walls in bad
shape, and they found the morals of
the Jews in worse shape.
Their novel recommendation to the emperor was that the
Jews should take the ancient Law of Moses as their civil law. The Persian lawyers
okayed the plan, but they made two conditions. They said that Ezra would have
to read the full Mosaic Law to the people, and secondly the Jews needed to take
amendments that would bring the law up to date. Ezra and Nehemia accepted
amendments that forbade marrying foreigners and buying produce on the Sabbath,
and they stipulated the paying of a tax to the temple. Those new laws were
reasonable. But, then, with each year and century the priests approved of further
amendments. By Our Lord’s time these new laws, known as Mishna filled a whole law of their library. A false assertion came
to be made that the Mishna had come down orally from Moses.
Jesus put aside the
traditions of the elders that contradicted God’s law, and he objected to there
being so many of them that no one could keep them all.
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