A Reflection for Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“This day shall be a memorial feast for you,
which all your generations shall celebrate
with pilgrimage to the LORD, as a perpetual institution.” (Ex 12:14)
Sometimes we forget what rituals really mean until we are smack in the middle of one.
Today’s first reading from Exodus and Gospel passage from Matthew both deal with ritual. In Exodus, God communicates to Moses and Aaron the particulars of the Passover feast. While for them those observances and signs will serve as protection when God strikes the Pharaoh and the land of Egypt, God also mentions that this will be a feast their descendants celebrate as a “perpetual institution.” A cultural ritual, one that will be passed down, is in mind from the very beginning.
In the Gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus discusses sabbath practices with the Pharisees, who object to his disciples picking grain to eat on the sabbath. He points to Scriptural precedent to get underneath the real meaning of these observances and declares that “something greater than the temple is here.”
Does Jesus care about ritual, the kind of ritual established by God and the Jewish people in today’s reading from Exodus? He does. Is ritual part of his vision for his disciples in his day and those who will follow in the future? It is.
For Jesus here, ritual is less about purity than it is about depth of meaning. As he explains in Matthew’s Gospel, quoting from the Book of Hosea, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For him and for the Christians who follow him, rituals should be purposeful and directed toward their physical and spiritual needs.
2000 years after Jesus, what do rituals mean for contemporary people of faith? Do we achieve the same kind of purpose Jesus desired, or the kind of cultural and intergenerational connection God desired for Moses and Aaron’s people? At weddings, funerals, graduations, birthday parties and liturgies—religious and secular rituals alike—we participate in something that a people laid out long before us. If we approach them intentionally, we can meditate on what these traditions meant to our ancestors who began them, and by participating in what they authored, we can connect to them too.
In our current world, resisting tradition and ritual, throwing it by the wayside in favor of something shiny and new, is easy to do. But in our church, remembering and celebrating is the name of the game—every week. We approach the central meaning of our faith anew with feast days, sacraments and holiday traditions, and those things remind us on a human level of a constant divine meaning, one that is deeper than we can comprehend.
When we’re smack in the middle of a ritual, seeing the meaning sometimes requires stepping back and simply letting the tradition’s particulars wash over you. In these little signals of meaning, God speaks.
