August 30, Pentecost 13
Song of Solomon 2:8-13, James 1:17-27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
How clean are your hands, right now? What have you touched since you washed them? These are serious questions! I’m writing this at the height of the Swine Flu scare.
Hand-to-hand contact is one of the most effective ways of passing on everything from the common cold to deadly infections. We’re told to wash vegetables and fruit thoroughly before we eat them, to cleanse them of all kinds of contaminants. Supermarket shelves stock anti-grease, anti-chapped hands, anti-odour, and anti-bacterial dishwashing goo.
People in Jesus’ day worry about cleanliness, too. They don’t know the science of communicable viruses and bacteria. Their water and food are filthy by our standards. We turn up our noses at their kitchens, tables and waste management provisions.
The issue for Jesus’ people is purity, and how to maintain it in order to keep a proper relationship with God. A righteous person, and everything he or she touches, eats, or offers to God has to exist in this purity. A big chunk of the book of Leviticus, called the purity code, is both help and hindrance.
Generations of practical teaching add to the code, to help people avoid breaking it by accident or omission. Some sects of Pharisees wash far more than necessary. they don’t just wash before dinner. they wash between courses. Some wash between bites!
Jesus and his friends don’t have time to keep all the rules. Jesus heals on the Sabbath. His disciples pick grain in the fields on the Sabbath. They have to keep moving. They’ll come to any table where they’re welcome. Without visiting the village well to let their bucket down seven times, bring it up, and pour water from finger tips to elbow, and elbow to fingertips. They might not even stop at the rain barrel for a quick dip before going into the dining room.
Jesus figures it’s more important to announce the advent of God’s righteous rule than to follow the traditions of ritual cleansing. Besides, hands, food, and dishes can’t communicate first or second degree impurity. Only liquid can do that.
After meeting the Pharisees, Jesus calls a crowd together. He doesn’t say concern about spiritual health is foolish. It’s the way the purity police—the pre-Taliban Taliban—live that angers Jesus.
What makes a person unclean? Jesus says, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come …” There’s this condition—call it sin—that can bring all manner of impurity out of the
heart and into the world. No amount of handwashing, hand-wringing, or ritual regret can change that. There’s no diet to cure it, and no anti-microbial soap to wash it away. And we can’t catch it from anyone else. We can’t avoid it by avoiding people we think are unclean, unworthy of God’s love, or ours.
Jesus doesn’t ask why it’s possible for all of us to sin big time, but only some of us do; and some sin big time, all the time. He just believes we’re all alike inside. Period. So he dies for us all. Period.
James reminds us, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” James knows how easy it is to speak religion, theology, tradition … to talk clean and live dirty.
Our reading from the old testament reminds us of the purity of human love. The gift we twist the most. Given clean, taken in, and sent back into the world dirty.
Passion for the people we love is good, and pure. Passion for the God who loves us … Passionate living in imitation of God … Compassionate service in the footsteps of Jesus … that’s what we’re made for.
Living that way sometimes means we break rules. Like Jesus, we have important
work to do. Too important to take the time to fuss over things that will lead us into hypocrisy.
