Injustice that defiles

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23


It’s not easy to understand what is at stake in this morning’s Gospel reading. Is it really about washing your hands before eating? Yes and no. The reason that I go through the ritual hand washing before celebrating is an honoring of the purity and holiness laws in scripture. It’s not really about making my hands germ free – heaven knows that a little water poured over my fingers can’t do that – it’s a tradition that is an enacted metaphor. I step into a different place when I approach the altar to become a part of the mystery. The hand washing is a symbolic gesture that prepares me to do so, just as the kissing of my stole when I put it on and take it off – it sets apart as holy the time during which I wear it. It’s a good thing. So I don’t think that it’s the kind of thing that was at the bottom of the spat between Jesus and his critics.

While we will never completely understand each portion of the purity code in scripture, why meat cannot be cooked with dairy products or why certain animals are clean while others are not, what we do know is that the ideas behind the development of the dietary laws were to set the Jews apart from the culture of their captors while they were in Babylon. This code was a visible sign that clearly defined who belonged in the community and who did not. It was very important for the survival of a people in captivity. It’s no wonder that this sort of thing became an issue again during Jesus time. The influence of the Greco-Roman culture was a threat to the integrity of the Jewish way of life. You cling fiercely to your traditions when you feel threatened. So it wasn’t just the tradition of washing hand before eating, it was the larger tapestry of what it meant to be a “holy people”

Prolific Catholic author and theologian Jerome Neyrey explains the purity or holiness system this way; holiness is an attribute of God which comes from God’s power to bless which is achieved mainly through the creation of order. When order is maintained, the people prosper. The holiness codes seek to keep the categories of creation distinct. That included people as well as foods. The purity laws provided an organizing principle for Jewish society, some basic categories that determined your often determined place – pure or defiled, clean or unclean, in or out. In times of stress, people are much more likely to enforce such social traditions strictly in an attempt to feel that there is something you can count on.
Prof. Neyrey says that “While Mark presents Jesus challenging the Jewish purity system, he also describes him as reforming it in favor of other core values. He is "the Holy One of God" and agent of God's reform: he is authorized to cross lines and to blur classifications as a strategy for a bringing about the Kingdom of God about which he preached incessantly. As God's agent of holiness, Jesus makes sinners holy and the sick whole.” Jesus redefines holiness. He offered a broader understanding of who and what is acceptable to God.

What Jesus was shining a light on was the unintended consequence of the holiness laws – they became an instrument of classism. Consider the plight of the poor in Israel at Jesus’ time. They were barely surviving, many were malnourished. If you and your family are starving and the only food you can forage is the mussels that cling to the rocks in the Sea of Galilee, what are you going to do? Say, “Ach, shellfish are unclean, can’t do that!” or are you going have them for dinner? If you are a day laborer working in the hot sun clearing rocks out of a field where the only water is the precious little that you have saved for the hot afternoon ahead, are you going to use it wash your hands before eat your meager lunch? I think what Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel is showing how the traditions of his faith had succeeded in marginalizing a whole lot of people. In another passage when his friends are criticized for working on the Sabbath because they picked some grain while walking through a field he says, “the Sabbath was created to be a blessing to people not a hardship.” The Sabbath commandment could be the source of suffering if the only day that you have to gather and prepare food for your family is the day when you don’t have to work for someone else. In Jesus’ eyes the only way for the Sabbath to be available for everyone was for the world to be transformed into the Kingdom of God so that everyone could afford to take a day for rest, refreshment and prayer. The poor don’t have that luxury.

We generally have a sanitized image of Jesus, he would never say anything crude. Well, keep in mind that Jesus was a part of a very earthy culture, speaking with farmers and laborers and he understood how to communicate with them. He was not shy about using humor and satire so today we have Jesus, channeling his inner-fourth grader, and comparing the evil that is expressed by a class system to that which comes out of the human body. There was apparently no snappy comeback from his critics when he equated what they were doing to excrement. I mean, what could you say but “Oh yeah!” Mostly they went away thinking “Rats! He did it to us again!” Jesus did his bet work when he turned the tables on self-aggrandizing, moralizing bullies.

It’s important that we not be too hard on Jesus critics. They lived in their world and had the where with all to not have to consider the lives of the people that were flocking to Jesus, until they became so numerous as to be noticed. People in Orange County are shocked to learn that in this beautiful prosperous place, there are over 35,000 homeless people. I’ve had two conversations this week in which that information caused jaws to drop. These were not arrogant, mean, moralizing people, they just didn’t know.

I look at my life and frankly, it looks like Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of God. I am healthy and if I’m not, I have insurance that pays for my medical care, no one tells me I can’t go certain places or do what I want to do, I have more than enough to eat, as evidenced by those couple of pounds I’d like to shed before Melanie’s wedding, no one in my family is in debtor’s prison, I have a beautiful home that is full of love and peace, I get to decide what I want to do on my day off. The question for me is what is my response to such blessing? The only thing that makes sense to me and that allows me to sleep at night is to commit myself to work on behalf of those who are not so outrageously lucky. The Kingdom of God already here, it is just waiting for us to tear down the walls that are keeping people out. I pray that that is a compelling enough vision to be the reason that we come together as a community of faith. There is a lot of resistance to such an idea.

Gary Cummins is the Rector at St. Luke’s in Long Beach and he shared a story in a newsletter this week. He said, “ When I was in seminary, our very old, very thin, very traditional, and venerable Liturgics Professor always spoke in a very low voice. He enunciated very clearly or taking notes would have been an exercise in futility.

One day he quietly unfurled a story from the Sixties when our Book of Common Prayer was being revised. After the service one Sunday morning, a parishioner complained about a verse in the prayers in Morning Prayer service – “let not the hope of the poor be taken away.” The parishioner raised his voice in outrage, “That’s Communism!” Gary’s quiet professor, gave voice to his still evident frustration and shouted, “It’s not Communism, it’s the Psalms!”

I would add, it’s the Gospel, it is our mission, I hope it is our reason for being here together this morning.