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Learning how to read Gospel by living it through Jesus

Mark 7:1-13: When the Pharisees (Separate Ones with some grammarians who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals with common, that is, unwashed, hands.

The Pharisees (Separate Ones,) all Jews, do not eat without carefully washing their hands, keeping the tradition of the elders. On coming from the marketplace they do not eat without purifying themselves. There are many other things that they have traditionally observed, the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.
 
The Separate Ones and grammarians questioned Jesus, “Why do your Talmudim not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with common hands?” Jesus responded, "Well did Isaiah prophesy  (29: 13) about you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors me with their lips, (Shephet) but their hearts are far from me; There looking to me is a Mitzvah of men learned by rote.

You disregard the Mitzvah of God clinging to human tradition.” Jesus continued, “How well you have set aside the Mitzvah of God to uphold your tradition! Moses said, Hold as important your father and your mother; whoever curses father or mother shall die. You say, ‘If someone says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is dedicated to God, you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your handed down tradition. You do many such things.”
 

True communion with God refreshes the soul

Reading Torah and Gospel is much like a counseling session in the model of Doctor Robert R. Carkhuff. The counselor/facilitator is the reader. The writer/counselee is the Gospel writer. There are five levels at which we can read the text. The first is that of the student who is present as he is told to be there. Given the choice he is somewhere else. He is not present except in body and he really does not care who knows it. He is not argumentative. He does not care to learn enough to engage in debate.
 
The second reader is the rude reader. He is the atheist or at least non-religious reader who reads, not to get something out of the text, but to refute it. He is argumentative with religious people. If they are not out to refute Torah and Gospel, they are out to refute the interpretations of others who are religious. A fundamentalist who argues religion with someone who is not a member of his congregation is reading at level two. The Pharisees, Separate Ones, read Torah at level two. They are not opposed to Torah. They were not atheists or non-religious refuting the Dedicated Writings. Instead, they used Torah as a tool to impose their own traditions upon others.
 
The third reader is the person who reads the words at the superficial level. God created the light on the first day, the plants nourished by the light on the third, and the source of the light on the fourth. There is a talking snake and a talking donkey. In his better moments, this is the reader Jesus condemns as the reader who learns by rote, "Talmud" in the original Hebrew. His head can quote chapter and verse, but the heart is absent. 
 
 

True Torah is not written in stone but upon the heart

The fourth reader reads Torah and Gospel trying to get something out of it. Our Catholic Catechism speaks of four senses of the Dedicated Writings:

115: According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of the Dedicated Writings: the literal & the spiritual, the latter subdivided into the allegorical, moral, & anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116: The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, (leading out) following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."
 
117: The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God's plan, not only the text of the Dedicated Writings but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs. 1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ's victory and also of Christian Baptism. 2. The moral sense. The events reported in the Dedicated Writings ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written "for our instruction." 3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, "leading"). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland. 
 
 

True communion with God refreshes the soul

Carkhuff speaks of 7major conditions for communications. These are: Empathy, Respect, Concreteness, Being Genuine, Self Disclosure, Confrontation, and  Immediacy. We must be empathic to all the characters in Torah and Gospel as we read them. That includes, Pharaoh, the Pharisees and Saduccees.

That does not mean agree; it means we must try and understand their motivation as we read about them, seeing in ourselves those motivations . We must respect what all the characters in the story were trying to do. In John 18: 14 it says, "It was Caiaphas who had counseled the Jews that it was better that one man should die rather than the people." The flip side of the evil Caiaphas is the man who is trying to save his people from the Romans by stopping who he thought was an agitator. Can we see this in ourselves?

This is part 1. Please click here for part 2