[This] shows you the importance of justice instead of the tradition or practices that harm some in the community

We've mentioned here already how there were ways in which both Jesus and Paul changed their traditions. They rejected practices that had come before. And when I looked at them carefully I noticed that there were patterns to how that happened.

And the first one is that Jesus considered the impact of an interpretation or a practice on the marginalized, those who had ordinarily been ignored. (These are in your booklet and just to make sure I have enough time I won't focus on them as carefully as I might because you have them in your books.)

I assume she means the texts she shows in the slides so I will type those in.

Then he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!  Mark 7:9-13

But the first - think of this question, what are the consequences of an interpretation or church policy.  And that's a really important one, Jesus did over and over again.  And this is a great text from Mark Chapter 7 where there's a practice of tithing to The Temple  which means people of limited funds had a difficult time supporting their families and paying the tithe to The Temple.  And Jesus rejects that, he says: You are rejecting a commandment in order to keep a tradition.  So he's clearly saying it's far more important to keep these commandments but it means that he looked at the consequences on those who had less, those who would have had difficulty to do that.

Jesus's new interpretation is grounded in the Biblical tradition, itself.  I think that someone has already posted this already, the Matthew 23

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law:  justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.  You blind guides!  you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!
Matthews 23:23-28

But he doesn't take this out just from the environment, he takes this, he grounds this in the Biblical tradition itself.  And I'd like to remind you of these words from Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  
Amos 5:21-24

[This] shows you the importance of justice instead of the tradition or practices that harm some in the community.  

This is another point that Timothy Luke Johnson made in his talk which I've been referencing.  

Fifth conviction:  Obedience to the living God trumps Scripture.  As a medieval author said, "They name is "Truth," or Lord, not tradition."  If God is The Living God, if God's creative activity continues at every moment if God discloses God's-Self in the Resurrected Lord Jesus, discloses Himself in the fabric of our existence, in the stories that we live, then our obedience is to that Living God not to the words of Scripture or, heaven help us, of our previous understanding of those words of Scripture.

Though Cheryl Anderson quotes Jesus as referencing Scripture to overturn an embedded traditional practice of interpreting Scripture.  I think that the failure to make that distinction, between what Scripture actually says and the traditional, often enforced sectarian traditional meaning imposed on it, is one of the things that has led to the discrediting of Christianity.  It certainly has made it vulnerable to the opportunistic attacks by its enemies, fashionable and otherwise.  Not that some of the academic revisions of that reading are much of an improvement on the actual texts when read on their own terms.  I've become extremely skeptical of the historical-critical racket which wants to impose yet another sectarian filter on it, that of 18-21st century secularism and scientism.  

In terms of politics, this being a political blog,  it's as or more true in the right-wing reading of the United States Constitution by a majority on the Supreme Court that reigns us instead of what we've learned in the two hundred thirty years since that thing was written down, that that attempt, which always, dishonestly asserts that the wishes of the members of that Court are what the words as written means, is generally accompanied by a denial of the experiences and lives of those who are other than them and their sponsors.  It is an absolute certainty that the Republicans on that court are there as servants to those who enjoy the benefits of that "mythical norm," the wealthy - most of all, the white - almost as much, the male and the straight.  That the mindset of American secularism leaves us all as enslaved to that privileged minority and there is nothing in secular law to get us out of that should be seen as impeaching the established order we live under in secularism even more so than it does in the relatively disempowered churches, many of whom are far more flexible and far more able to break out of it and resist that established order.  I think it is one of the major reasons we find ourselves in the trouble we are in that the moral conscience of America has either been corrupted or gulled or intimidated out of resistance to it through the general secularization and Mammonization of culture.  As I said, listening to The Reformation Project and reading their material has given me some hope that nothing I'm reading in secular culture has.

I have mentioned a number of times the role an argument I had with some Buddhists over the reality of justice in my adult conversion to Christianity, I think any historical-critical assertions about the Christian and Jewish Scriptures that diminishes the practice of justice, especially the most radical justice as that asserted by Jesus and, in fact, James and Paul, etc. is far more discreditable than the texts as they have come down to us.  Though many of the denominations still traffic in the same thing as they focus on the sexual and reproductive lives of People, even those who have never accepted to profess those sectarian programs.  I think it was the focus on sexuality all along that has been the major distraction from the actual teachings of Jesus and those who were closest to him in proximity and time, those who knew him and who knew those who knew him.  

If Christianity had focused on justice all along, it would have been far more credible and far more immune to attack on the basis of corruption and hypocrisy.  And it's not as if the most nagging of sexual cops have proven to  practice what they preach, as the previous two sexually repressive papacies proved in their permissiveness to priestly sexual abusers and the conservative hierarchs who shielded them from facing legal consequences.  That was hardly a phenomenon limited to the right-wing Catholic hierarchy.  Nor is it unknown in secular contexts, either.  I would bet you that the Republican caucus in the House and Senate probably has more adultery and infidelity and sex criminals among them than the Progressive Caucus in the House.  I would bet you anything that that is true in virtually every legislative body and governorship across the country, allegedly Christian or otherwise.  

I think that anyone wanting to pretend that it's still 1953 in Catholicism or Evangelical style Protestantism (not to mention 1787 in U. S. law) should be suspected of just what Jesus warned the equivalent religious authorities and self-appointed experts of his day.  It's no accident that The Reverend MLK referred to that passage in Amos more than once in his struggle against traditional racism and the amoral acceptance of it by those who didn't like to think of themselves as racists.  I will confess, that all of that makes me suspect a range of moral depravities beneath the facade.