Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-march-8-2024
Mark 7:1-8, 14-23
Clean and Unclean
1The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean,” that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)
5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”
6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
7 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’
8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can make them ‘unclean’ by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that makes them ‘unclean.’”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can make them ‘unclean’? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”)
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what makes them ‘unclean.’ 21 For from within, out of peoples’ hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.23 All these evils come from inside and make a person ‘unclean.’”
I remember sitting in a meeting of session four years ago this month, when people were just hearing reports about a new virus called “covid-19.” One of the elders said they had just been in a doctor’s office where the staff was handing out detailed instructions on how best to wash your hands to protect yourself against infection.
I’m wondering whether we read this story from the life of Jesus differently now than we read it before the pandemic. Jesus and his disciples are criticized for failing to strictly observe the Mosaic rituals for cleansing themselves before eating. Particularly after having survived covid, we probably tend to think about hygiene issues when we read this story. Maybe we always did, but it’s a little more the case now.
It seems important to remind ourselves that the Hebrew purification rituals were not so much about hygiene as they were about symbolically washing away all traces of the outside world. Any contact with a gentile or with a dead body or with certain animals or blood or any number of other things, that contact was understood to make a person “unclean” – ritually defiled. And the purification rituals had to be performed in very specific ways. You could have rubbed your hands with Purell (if it had existed back then), but if you hadn’t performed the rituals, you would still be considered ‘ritually unclean.’
But when Jesus and his disciples were criticized for not observing these rituals, Jesus responded in a way that probably shocked his Hebrew listeners – he said the system of ritual purity is in fact of human origin, not something God thought up. Think about that from the Hebrew perspective. The rules of purity were based on the Torah – the first five books of the Bible. Jesus seemed to be saying that some of what’s in those books is actually of human origin.
That’s actually an idea that a lot of Christians would find surprising, too, if they stopped to think about it. There are things a lot of Christians condemn because they’re forbidden in the Torah – like homosexuality, for instance.
So what are we supposed to make of what Jesus says here? Well, it seems to me that we should be very humble and careful about applying some of the detailed rules and regulations in books like Leviticus. For instance, there’s an ordinance there that says we may enslave people as long as they don’t share our faith. And another that says our soldiers may seize beautiful women from among the enemy and force them into marriage. (Interestingly, it says only beautiful women – which clearly tends to reinforce the idea that this rule was, as Jesus puts it in this passage, a ‘tradition of men.’)
The ordinances we come across in those books of the law, it seems to me, should always be held up against the life and teachings of Jesus and the greatest commandments – that we wholeheartedly love God and our neighbor. Those rules that don’t square with that standard might well fall under the heading of human customs rather than God’s revealed will.
In our reading, Jesus makes a very important point – he says that the things that really defile us come from the inside, not the outside. For those of us who have read this passage before, that’s not a particularly surprising idea. But it would have been very surprising to the Jewish listeners who heard Jesus say it. In fact, we can tell it was surprising because the disciples ask him about it when they have a chance to speak to him alone. It’s important to remember that they were Jewish, so even if they weren’t that strict about keeping the purity rituals, they still had the traditional Jewish understanding that defilement was something that came upon people from outside.
This passage seems to me to have two important “So what’s” for people like us.
The first is that we bear full responsibility for our own defilement. That was apparently a disturbing idea when Jesus first articulated it, and it’s not really a popular idea even now. We tend to excuse our own sins by pointing to outside factors and blaming them. It was our upbringing that made us do it. Someone was abusive to us once. The system is unfair. The devil made us do it. But this teaching by Jesus calls us to look in the mirror for the source of our own defilement. Because the truth is, like any addict trying to get clean, we’re not going to escape our addiction to sin until we take personal responsibility.
The other idea that’s interesting here is that we are not defiled just by the sins that the world judges most harshly: murder, theft, adultery, sexual immorality. Jesus also lists evil thoughts, greed, malice, envy, slander and a bunch of other things that lots of good church-going people (and yes, even preachers) are guilty of regularly. So there doesn’t seem to be much room for us religious types to judge ourselves less defiled than others.
In all the ways that count, all of us defile ourselves through our own sins. So we should probably be praying for the Holy Spirit to be cleansing us of all our unclean thoughts, words and deeds and making us steadily less defiled in God’s eyes. And recognizing how defiled we are by our own sins, we should stop worrying about the sins of others around us.
Let’s pray. Lord, protect us for thinking that evil is something the world puts upon us, and remind us daily that the most dangerous evil is what comes out of us. Day by day, cleanse our hearts and minds so that we might glorify you more faithfully. Amen.
Make time to rest and have fun this weekend,
and worship joyfully on Sunday,
Henry
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