Identity Card Sunday: Your Behavior Matters!
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Identify yourself, please! Where is your ID (identity card)? Don’t deny it; we all have one. I am not talking about government or work related issued ID cards. I mean, the ID people see when the real you (your behavior) reveals itself to them. Let me help you. How do you make out Canadians from their American neighbors? It is easy. Each time you hear someone saying, “I am sorry,” even for doing nothing wrong, know that he is Canadian! This is not unique to American versus Canadian identity saga. Behavior is the best revealer of identity. No matter how much people pretend, patience reveals who they are. If you want to know anybody, pay attention to their behavior!
Among the many nations in the Middle East, God trains Israel of yore on how to fashion a distinctive identity through a moral code. The way you behave, argues our first reading, reveals the kind of law you live by. And, the kind of laws you live by attest to whom or what you believe in. That is, your God provides you with the rules and regulations you live by, and your behavior creates and reveals your identity to others.
Before our democracies – social/human contracts without deities – forged our identity, nations around the world subscribe to a divinity and receive their code (identity) of conduct therefrom. How that has changed!
The crisis of identity, our readings draw our attention to today, is to ask ourselves about the source of our behavior and whether God’s commandments shape our character or not. For example, our passports, driver’s licenses, voters and bank cards, etc. reveal who makes the laws determining our citizenship, driving codes, elections, and access to money. Besides all the thousand and one rules and regulations we keep or don’t keep, the question is: has God a place in shaping our identity and behavior? This is today’s fundamental question for our identity as Christians!
If our first reading emphasizes the legality (the importance of laws) of human behavior and character in accordance with God’s commandments, in today’s gospel, Jesus exposes the danger of hypocrisy – false or make-believe identity subscription of the Pharisees and the Scribes. In reality, Jesus asks the question whether there are Christians living today or atheists masquerading as Christians, just as the Pharisees and Scribes pretended to be God’s children! For instance, Jesus points out the incongruous and immoral behavior of God’s children vis-à-vis the requirements of God’s commandments as a real religious disease. How often do we hear the statement, “I am a Christian, but the constitution obliges me to do …..”?
The split personality syndrome or dissociative identity disorder our democratic systems create turns us into atheists – our allegiances to our social and invented contracts exclude God’s commandments from the source of our behavior. We practice ethics without the Divine.
Our second reading provides us with the criteria for measuring a Christian theistic moral identity: “A religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). But the real challenge is: how does one keep oneself “unstained/uncontaminated by the world”?
Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes anticipated our countries and streets replete with church buildings, but our neighborhoods oozing with immoral stench and economical murderous schemes! Indeed, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.”
Nowadays, the audacity to stand up to our democratic excesses fails to find crusaders and willing martyrs! Christian leaders have become spineless before democratic ravenous wolves! By attacking the Pharisees and the Scribes – failed leadership – Jesus places the revival of Christian morality in individual and collective efforts! We must not fail simply because our leaders have! We must save our leaders from their prefabricated shackles of narcissistic atheism, not to drag down to Hell the rest of us with them! Yes, the time is right for the “little rest” to save the leadership from leading us astray!
Let us conclude with a story. A countryman had a morbid fear of chickens. He imagined he was a grain to be swallowed up by chickens. He was sent to a psychiatrist to treat his phobia of chickens. After a full month of therapy in a place without chickens, the psychiatric doctor pronounced him healed! The man got out of the psychiatric center to return home. Within minutes, he ran back into the building, panting. The psychiatrist asked him what the matter was. He asked the psychiatrist to come and see a chicken at the gate. The psychiatrist repeated to him that “he is not a grain; hence, chickens cannot swallow him up. He turned to the psychiatrist and asked, “And the chickens, have you told them that I am not a grain?”
We must confront the atheistic stance of our democracies and let our lawmakers know that there is God and that our first and fundamental allegiance is to God and not human atheistic social contracts! We (Christians) are not the sick ones, but the chickens (society)! Therefore, let the chickens know that we’re not grains!
If we live out our Christian values in our personal and public lives, the “chickens” will become converted!
Assignment for the Week :
Go find your baptismal card to remind you of your Christian identity and moral obligations!