Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who imposed their interpretation of the Law on the Israelites. Keep in mind that the first Christians and the writers of the first Christian documents were all Jews, or at least people formed by a Jewish thought world. They made sense of Jesus in terms of what were, to them, the Scriptures.

Jesus himself was an observant Jew, and the themes and images of the Holy Scriptures were elemental for him. And he presented himself as the one who would not undermine the Law and the prophets but fulfill them.

All of those social and religious conventions that had effectively divided Israel, he sought to overcome and to expose as fraudulent. He reached out to everyone: rich and poor, healthy and sick, saints and sinners. And he embodied the obedience of Israel: “I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me”; “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me.”