August 29, 2021 “Clean?” – Mark 7:1-23

Mark 7:1-23
“Clean?”
August 29, 2021 – Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Orthodox Jewish practice, halakha, still requires hand washing like we just read about. A Jew is to wash hands before eating bread. It’s often done with a two-handled cup. You pour water twice or three times on the dominant hand and then on the other. As one then holds wet hands in the air, a blessing is said, the Netilat Yadayim: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and commanded us concerning the washing of the hands.”

In our Gospel text, Jesus was confronted about His disciples’ failure to perform that hand washing ritual. Verse 2 says Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem, “noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.” They asked Jesus in verse 5, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

In pandemic times, the more cautious among us might take the Pharisees’ side. Why, indeed, would Jesus let His disciples do something so unhealthy as eating with dirty hands? If Jesus were on earth today, would He just walk past the hand sanitizer and let His followers run around without masks in indoor public spaces? Is it true, as some churches claim, that religious, spiritual concerns take precedence over matters of public health? The answer to that depends on what you think religious faith really is.

Ten years ago I learned what a “tea towel” is. My daughter Susan briefed me on protocol for her visit here with our then new son-in-law. Andrew grew up in Canada with not just one towel hanging in the kitchen, but two. One was for drying hands, the other, the tea towel, was for drying dishes. Children had it drilled into them, “Don’t dry your hands on the tea towel!” They used a more lowly cloth for drying their hands.

Susan and Andrew did much of the cooking and cleanup while they were here, so I quietly suffered this incursion of Canadian housekeeping. For three weeks, you could find me standing in our kitchen with wet hands, wondering what I was supposed to do. When Andrew and Susan departed, I quickly reverted to my old slovenly one-towel-for-all way.

Tea towel versus hand towel is a result of regional and family tradition. It’s not a matter of huge importance. Andrew’s family accepts us in spite of our hygienic failures. We find them delightful people despite being fastidiousness. Yet problems and misunderstandings arise when such concerns are elevated to the level of moral principle.

Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem came and found Jesus’ disciples violating the family tradition. They were shocked at how they ate with “defiled hands.” As I said, some of us may be on the Pharisees’ side or on my son-in-law’s side. Washing your hands and not drying them on the same towel that wipes the dishes could be good hygiene. But both Jesus and those Jewish religious leaders had a different concern. They were focused on what makes a person clean and acceptable in God’s eyes.

Mark wrote in part for people who were not themselves Jewish. So he explained the Jewish context. In verses 3 and 4, he tells how Pharisees taught Jewish people to observe a complex tradition of ritual washing, which often included washing more than once during a meal, and immersing eating and cooking utensils to cleanse them as well. It may have had an unrecognized health benefit for the Jews, but that wasn’t the point. For them it was an attempt to faithfully, carefully observe spiritual cleanliness before God.

When Jewish leaders came down on the disciples for not washing, their worry was that followers of this new rabbi Jesus were not observing basic rules for healthy spiritual life. It was not public health measures, but long-established religious tradition handed down from “the elders,” from previous generations who created it as a way to maintain spiritual purity.

Even today, it is pretty obvious that the Jewish Netilat Yadayim observance is not about hygiene. The same is true when a Christian priest in a liturgical church dips hands in water before celebrating Holy Communion. No soap is used. There is no attempt to scrub, for twenty seconds, as we all learned to do last year. No, the purpose is symbolic and spiritual rather than sanitary. It’s about expressing a desire to do all God commands, as we heard in our reading from Deuteronomy today.

The problem was not the tradition as such. Whether it’s hygienic or not to wash hands before eating, the spiritual point makes sense if you wash with a desire to honor and thank God for the blessing of food. No, the problem was as Jesus said to the Pharisees on another occasion in Matthew 23:23. They had focused on small points and “neglected the weightier matters of the law.” As we say today, they had “majored on the minors.”

Jesus began His critique of this mistaken focus on minutiae by quoting Isaiah 29:13 in verses 6 and 7, to the effect that people were giving lip service to God, but were not at all devoted to Him in their hearts. To wash hands before eating was a way to appear holy without actually doing the things which really make for holiness.

Suppose Andrew and Susan enforced the rule about the tea towel, but neglected even more important hygiene like brushing their teeth or washing their hands after using the bathroom. Their kitchen would be hygienically “holy,” but they would still carry around a collection of germs. That’s like what Jesus said about the spiritual life of the Pharisees.

At first glance, the example Jesus offers His critics in verses 9 to 13 feels very much off-topic. Instead of talking about hand-washing, Jesus began with another Pharisaic tradition. But it too showed how a person could appear to be righteous and keep all God’s commands, but in fact be completely wrong in relation to God.

We don’t know much about the practice of “Corban.” It was a way to make an offering by dedicating part of your wealth to God in the future. It was like setting up a trust for a charity or your church, which is a good thing in itself. But Pharisaic tradition twisted that good intention of dedicating a gift to God. It allowed a Corban vow to make it wrong and impossible to use that money or property for any other purpose, including, notes Jesus, caring for one’s own parents.

In verse 10 Jesus quoted the Ten Commandments, “Honor your father and mother,” and the bit further on in Exodus 21 which says that cursing father or mother is a capital crime. By using Corban to evade responsibility to parents, the Pharisees set up a tradition you can’t find in Scripture to “make void,” as Jesus says in verse 13, what’s obviously in Scripture, the Word of God.

Corban was just an example. The accusation of verse 13 goes on, “And you do many things like that.” The Pharisees had a regular system of doing what verse 8 says, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” It’s not the tradition that was bad. It’s that they put the tradition over what was clearly more important.

Jesus talked about honoring parents to clarify what matters to God. It’s not scrupulous attention to details of religious rituals. It’s good relationship between ourselves and God and between each other. Jesus taught what the Hebrew scriptures taught. The greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. But Pharisees regularly ignored that second commandment via regulations not even found in the Bible.

Let’s relate all this to current debates about public health measures. Some argue that washing hands, wearing masks, social distancing are all minor matters that are not as important as doing what God wants, like meeting together for worship. But Jesus says God wants things like taking care of parents, watching out for each other’s welfare. And wearing masks and getting vaccinated are right in line with caring for both the oldest and youngest among us. On the other hand, it is insisting on the American human tradition of a right to do whatever I please which can actually cause us to “abandon the commandment of God.”

Jesus seems to contradict both common sense and modern medical understanding when He says in verse 15, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile…” He, along with ancient people in general, knew very well that consuming filth would lead to sickness, even death. But he meant to say that a cleansing ritual does not have the power in and of itself to render pure a heart or soul that is not in right relationship with others.

As Beth quoted Frederic Buechner last week, let’s listen to the questions Scripture asks us. Let us ask ourselves when we ourselves do what the Pharisees did. How often do we put minor matters of correctness and the usual way of doing things over our relationship to the people around us? What if Beth and I had decided to argue about tea towels with Andrew and let that come between us and him and even between us and our daughter? We didn’t do it, but how often do we do things like that? How often do we insist on having things the way we’ve always done them, or the way that makes us comfortable, while ignoring the feelings and even the physical or emotional health of others?

Long ago I learned from some Christians around me to use inclusive language when talking about human beings, to avoid making all my pronouns male and to say “brothers and sisters” rather than just “brothers” in Christ. I try to do that when I speak and in the Bible versions I read aloud. I think it’s the right thing to do. But inclusive language is a human idea of what’s good. It’s not a specific commandment of God.

Years back I listened to an older scholar read a paper at a conference. He hadn’t adopted inclusive language. His talk was full of generic “he”s and “him”s. Part way through, someone stood up, interrupted, and expressed offense. He apologized and said he would try to change it as he read. But further on he slipped and read “him” instead of “him or her.” The person stood and corrected him. He went on, a little anxious now. It wasn’t long before he did it again. He was corrected again, loudly. He was so flustered that he lost his place and became unable to continue. Someone’s zeal for a good practice took priority over what was more important. Seeking dignity for female human beings, the dignity of a that particular human being was pushed aside.

In church, especially, let us ask ourselves if we are being Pharisees. Whether it’s music or a Bible version or meeting in-person versus on-line, when and how are we guilty of putting human tradition over God’s command to love each other?

Jesus got directly back on topic starting in verse 15. In verse 14 he called the whole crowd to hear what He had to say about washing before eating, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” It’s not the food going in your mouth that makes you unclean, it’s what comes out of your mouth.

It’s what we heard James 1:26 tell us this morning, “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.” James got that idea from Jesus Himself, from what Jesus was about to explain. What comes out of our mouths, and out of our hearts, is much more dangerous than what goes in.

In verse 17 the disciples privately asked Jesus for an explanation. In verses 18 and 19 Jesus recited the simple human physical process of eating and elimination of waste. Food goes into the stomach and on through, but does not touch the heart. That part in parentheses, “Thus he declared all foods clean,” is Mark’s addition years later. He added it because Mark saw how relevant it was to Christian life in the early church.

Early Christians worried about what they could eat. Could Jewish Christians eat non-kosher food? Could Gentile Christians eat meat offered to idols? But the point was not the food. I tell our men’s breakfast group that bacon is a Christian privilege, because we don’t have to keep Jewish law against eating pork. But what Jesus taught was not about eating what we like. It was that what we eat or don’t eat should not separate us from others.

Instead of worrying about traditions that keep us clean and holy on the outside, Jesus calls us in verses 21 and 22 to consider all the things that come out of us that hurt and destroy others. It’s a long ugly list of 12 vices, beginning with sexual activity outside marriage and ending with plain old foolishness. It includes both active sins like theft and murder and quiet sins of the spirit like greed and envy. Almost all these vices are sins in relationship to others. Many of them are about getting something we want and causing harm to those around us in the process.

Jesus taught us that true purity is a matter of a heart that is in right relationship with God and others. In our reading from James we heard that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God” begins with taking care of widows and orphans and only then worries about getting stained by the world.

So in verse 23 Jesus says the stains generally come from inside us. We can’t blame outside circumstances or other people for our sins. The Lord and the Bible say it over and over. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Remember that the next time you hear a television or movie character say, “Trust your heart.” Jesus says you can scrub your hands, rinse your lettuce, and sanitize your dishes in the dishwasher, but it’s not so easy to clean up your heart. You can eat carefully grown organic food free from contamination, but what comes out of your mouth may still be diseased and poisonous.

Remember what we’ve heard the past few weeks, the call to eat the Bread of Life and drink the cup of the New Covenant. The Body and Blood of Jesus is the one thing, the one thing only, that can go into us and clean up our hearts. The pure, holy life of Jesus Christ cleanses us from the inside out. It’s by His grace that anyone is able to do what Psalm 15 asks: “walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart.”

What Jesus says here is no excuse for disregarding public health measures against COVID-19. It is a call to look inside, into a spiritual mirror as James says, and examine our hearts for what evil might be coming out of us, especially through our mouths.

Our family cabin in Arizona shares a well with other properties. Because it’s a somewhat crowded little community, there’s a danger the well could be contaminated by septic tanks and so on. Thus once or twice a year, the water gets tested for bacteria. The county requires us to make sure that what comes out of our taps is pure and healthy.

Ancient Christians developed a practice that’s like testing the wells of our spirits. Every evening as they said nighttime prayers, they would go back over the day, examining themselves and their hearts for just the sort of vices Jesus listed here. Had anything like that come out of them that day? That’s good spiritual practice. You and I might want to take this list and consider it now and then, asking, “Did anything like that come out of me lately?” And if the answer is yes, as seems very likely, then let us seek to be filled instead with Jesus once again, listening to His Word and receiving Him at His Table.

Amen.