Hear the word of the Lord:
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 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."
. . .
When he had left the crowd and entered the house . . . he said to them [his disciples], "Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 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."
If Jesus thought that the Pharisees were obsessed with washing and cleanliness, I wonder what he would think of us? For us, after all, it is not enough to clean the inside and the outside of the cup – we have to sterilize it. With clean water. Water cleaner than anything that they had to drink in the first century except for the newly-fallen rain. And when the very fact of our humanity requires us to come in contact with those things that might contaminate us, we immediately conceal and dispose of that uncleanness. This is much more obsessive compulsive than anything the Pharisees could contemplate.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m really into clean. Yet this modern compulsion to cleanliness is too often parallel to our concerns for spiritual sanitation. Remember that this was really what irritated Jesus in the first place. It wasn’t that Jesus disdained cleanliness; it was that Jesus hated arbitrary human rules about cleanliness keeping people separated from God.
Like the five-second rule that some have for dropping food onto the floor, do we have a “five-second” rule for dealing with the “sinners” in our world? Are we concerned that our reputation is so fragile that the mud-slinging foul name-calling of a fool is going to shatter it? Are we afraid that our emotional control is so limited and our temper is so devastating that we avoid people who irritate us with their stupidity or make us angry with their wrong-headedness? Or do we believe that our faith is so weak that five minutes alongside a companion with evil in their heart and profanity on their lips is going to corrupt our good morals? Maybe we’ve been able to move on from these self-obsessed fears.
Only to find ourselves protecting others that we love from this “uncleanness.”
Evil comes from our choice of evil.
Yes, we may be genetically predisposed to
certain things that might be evil,
but we still have a choice.
Perhaps something in our history means
that we have been traumatized
so that we tend to react in certain ways,
but we still have a choice.
Perhaps we are surrounded with rudeness, crudeness, and evil
as some sort of cruel community, some evil environment,
yet we still have a choice,
and we still have a responsibility for those choices.
Jesus spoke about the heart in another place, too.
“The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good,
and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”
May we trust in the overflow of our heart.
Blessings,
Ron
Mark 7:1-23 – Luke 6:45 – NRSV
