22ND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B
THAT’S MY TRADITION!
All human communities develop traditions.
“Family traditions” galvanize gatherings at Christmas, fiestas and holidays. Traditions
perpetuated in schools or universities mark the distinct character of their
academes. People take part in and are proud of traditions in their hometowns
and regions. Traditions are expressive of life in society and are laden with
personal and communal significance.
The Lord Jesus slams the
hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes who take offense at his disciples who do
not follow the traditions or the conventional way of doing things. While traditions
are inescapable, the heart, Jesus says, is more important than the rote
performance of inherited or established actions. Obedience to God’s
commandments must take priority over human traditions.
This week let us try to understand
what it means when we say Sacred Tradition (note the capital T). While
Catholics teach that there is a two-fold source of revelation from God –
Scripture and Tradition – many other Christians maintain that only the Bible is
the source of truth and order in faith. All other beliefs, practices, and
teachings not explicitly found in the Bible are mere useless actions,
superstitions, and accretions (lumped under one heading – tradition) to the
original and pure Christian faith.
Note that the Lord Jesus did not
say that human traditions were bad; only when its performance supplants homage and
faithfulness to God did it become wrong. And the church does not mean human
traditions, those that Jesus condemned, when it speaks of Sacred Tradition. So what
exactly is Sacred Tradition?
The one Word of God comes to us
through two equal streams, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Scripture is
the “written” Word of God while Tradition is the “living” transmission of that
same Word in our worship, spirituality, doctrines, and disciplines. That means
that God’s Word still flows in our lives today. The Bible itself was the
product of Tradition (before it was written, it was first “orally” handed down)
and it is not the endpoint of Christian life. It is made alive and fruitful as
we bring it and use it in our acts of prayer, celebrations and relationships.
God did not say (even in the
Bible) that there is only one source of revelation, the written one. We will be
hard put to find a verse that says that. What is clear is that there are
revelations of God that have not been put to writing at all (see Lk 1:1-4, Jn
20: 30-31). For Catholics, our prayers and devotions, our charities, our
studies of God’s Word, our orderly structures, and the diverse ways of
celebrating faith around the word are all part of this living transmission of
faith – Sacred Tradition.
So you see, it goes beyond the
rituals, customs and practices to which we sometimes attach too much
importance. Do we not at time justify our critics when we become too engrossed
in our festivals, ceremonies, formalities and practices that are more “traditions”
than “Tradition?”
Let us take care to seek the Lord’s
will above all things, to receive his Word in Scripture and Tradition, and not
to be bogged down by the details and demands of our human traditions.
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