There’s A Catch

On Sunday night over 100 million people tuned in to watch Super Bowl XLII. What many deemed an instant classic could have just as easily devolved into a rage-inducing bummer of a contest. The Philadelphia Eagles scored on not one but two touchdown catches that tip-toed a thin line between what the National Football League calls a catch and what anyone with firing synapses would call a catch. Fortunately for everyone—except the New England Patriots and their fans—the two plays held up, even after official reviews. These plays in the Super Bowl though, stirred up a multi-season long debate that has mixed the gladiatorial with the philosophical, as jocks and league officials attempt to define what makes a catch a catch. A sporting body wondering what is and is not a catch has left many scratching their heads and even more flipping the channel. Still the question remains what makes a catch a catch?

Does a player have to maintain control even to the ground? How many feet does the player have to get in bounds? How about the football does it merely have to cross the plain of the goal line if the catch is to turn into a touchdown catch? Seemingly the list of questions goes on and on, and yet, all of this makes way too complicated something that ought to be simple.

There’s a saying recently repeated by a player on the winning side of the Super Bowl that applies to this gray-area of a sport: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck!” (Otherwise known as “The Duck Rule”) This saying though applies to more than simply the rules of a game. It could just as easily apply to taking care of others as we live into the reign of Jesus, the Kingdom of God, and life in Christ!

In today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 7:1-13) the scribes and Pharisees have a problem with Jesus’ disciples. The tradition of the day stated that good followers of the Law would not eat with defiled hands, eat out of dirty dishes, or consume anything from the market that had not been cleaned. All of this seems good enough—and certainly practical enough; however, Jesus had a problem with the scribes and Pharisees criticizing his disciples. His problem though was not as much with the letter of the Law, as it was with the spirit of it.

Jesus saw those obsessed over religious law like many today might see the ridiculousness of several pages of rules to define a catch or a multi-million dollar study to tell us what a duck is. To Jesus the scribes and Pharisees had substituted the man-made practices for the God given commandments. In particular, Jesus struggled with the hypocrisy of one rule.

In this passage, Jesus pointed out the hypocrisy of obsessing over human procedure, like dirty dishes, instead of focusing on the weightier matters, like caring for the needy. Jesus used the practice of Corban to highlight how the religion of the day focused on selfish gain instead of selfless service. Corban in itself was a good thing, it was an offering to God. However, if giving that offering neglected one’s responsibilities of taking care of an aging family, then how could one possibly be doing the will of God?

When we focus upon the commandments of God we will always bring our humanity into it, but what must we do to ensure that we are not preferring our rules and traditions to taking care of the needy among us? Jesus would not advocate for ignoring one’s family, nor would he advocate ignoring giving to the work of God in this world. So, what must we do?

Following Jesus is hard. If people tell you it is easy they are lying to you or to themselves. To take care of one’s own affairs, one’s own family, and make an offering of love and thanks to God requires sacrifice. In fact though, if one goes about it earnestly one will discover that while it is difficult it is abundantly life-giving!

One might mistakenly hear in this reading that Jesus tells us to ignore tithing or giving altogether, but this is simply not the case. We are called to challenge our priorities and to give our first fruits to God proportionally and sacrificially. Then, we will find in that giving that our lives open up to how God transforms everything else into being enough for us. Selfish religious folks will very well advocate for the giving to the Church not because it would grow someone’s relationship with God, but because they selfishly wanted more for themselves. When we prioritize God first, our beloveds’ needs next, and everything else afterward we discover a great abundance in our lives.

We may fight all day long over what a catch is or is not, just like we might quibble over what are God’s commandments and what are human traditions; however, Jesus seems to have his own version of the duck test. He seems to say if it is about caring for the needy in this world, if it is about giving love to others, and if it is about sharing Good News, then it is God’s commandment. May we hold on to God’s commandments even if it means abandoning some of our traditions in the process!