The Back Story – Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

A text – Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9   

4 “So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. ² You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you. 

⁶ You must observe them and perform them, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ ⁷ For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? ⁸ And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?

⁹ “But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children—

A reflection:

So in our Gospel text from Mark on Monday, we saw the church leaders trying to trap Jesus when his disciples were failing to observe hand washing customs or ordinances. When you read this passage of Deuteronomy, it is a little more understandable how the leaders have gotten to the place of watching and judging people for their every behavior. Here is a speech by God to the Hebrew people as they were forming as a nation, a culture. Habits of purity and cleanliness would separate them from the other cultures they were to encounter. These ways of being in the world would mark them as followers of the One True God. Other nations might find them unusual, peculiar, but the strangers would understand the faithfulness of this nation.

So the Pharisees in Jesus’s audiences were just living out Deuteronomy – they were being good. Very good. Excellent, really. What’s wrong with that? Jesus tries to tell them that although their relationship with all the rules is great, the rules are not the same as God. They need a relationship with God, and flowing from that, a relationship of caring and compassion with their neighbor. Jesus’s point was often that when one is bound to the Law and when one reveres it as the source of life’s goodness, one may get judgy with one’s neighbors and not regard them with compassion and love but rather with scorn and contempt. One might start placing the emphasis on how well one is doing the Law and then enjoy catching a neighbor out when she makes a mistake.

This passage reminds us that the Pharisees of Jesus’s day had a reason for being the way they were, just as people we might significantly disagree with today have a reason for being how they are. It doesn’t automatically mean they have evil hearts. It may mean they were taught certain laws and have never thought of things from a different perspective. If we all begin with gratitude for all of God’s good gifts to us and then overflow with that love and gratitude to the world around us, we can be patient with those who start from a different place. It might be the beginning of listening, where most good things start. Listening to God and then to the neighbor leads to loving God and loving the neighbor.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for blessing us so abundantly. Thank you for giving us rules and laws that keep society safe and help us thrive. Help us to take a minute to understand those who look at life differently from us. Help us to perceive their intentions for good so that there is room for our relationship to grow, little by little, and so that we all may find ourselves acknowledging you as the source of goodness. Amen.