A clergy colleague and I were talking about our Gospel text this week and she shared about a sign that had hung in the kitchen of her former call. The sign read: “Wash your hands and say your prayers, because Jesus and germs are everywhere.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I think it’s important for me to share with you that I like this sign and I dislike this text because I, myself, am an obsessive hand-washer. No joke, I could probably be in therapy for my clean hand needs. The fact of the matter is, if the controversy in this Gospel text is really about proper hand washing, then sign me up for team Pharisee. I love Jesus, but we have a lot better understanding of germs now than we did in Jesus’ time and the sign in my colleague’s former church kitchen is right on. Jesus is everywhere, but so are germs and the Center for Disease Control recommends good hand-washing protocol as the best prevention against the spread of disease. If, as the Bible also says, our body is a temple to the Lord, who can argue with that? I mean, come on now, tradition of the elders or not, it’s just a good idea. Team Pharisee.
But I don’t think the point Jesus was making here has anything to do with the CDC. For brevity’s sake, the lectionary left out a section of this reading, but I think this section is crucial to understanding the point of Jesus’ argument. So let me read the missing verses. This is between when Jesus quoted Isaiah, “this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” and when he called the crowd together to tell them that nothing outside them can defile a person. Mark seven, nine to thirteen: “Then [Jesus] said to them, “you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, “Honor your father and your mother’; and “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban,” (that is, an offering to God)—then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”
Remember that this was a time before 401Ks and retirement plans. People lived a day-by-day existence. They couldn’t save for the future; everything they made was enough to get through that one day. And so when a person got older and was unable to work, they were totally dependent on their descendants to support them. So it was part of the Jewish law that children had to support their elderly parents, or else those parents would starve. Let’s be clear, “honor your father and mother” was not a romantic notion of respect for the people who birthed you, it was an economic commitment to care for people in dire need. But the Pharisees found a loophole in the law through a tradition known as Corban. Corban was the dedication of wealth to the temple, to God. Which is great, of course, to give of what you have to God. In fact, God commands us to do this very action. We have a word for Corban too, we call it stewardship, and we know that God asks us to give of ourselves because it makes us better people, it helps us grow. So, again, what’s the real problem here? But what the Pharisees were doing here wasn’t stewardship, though they called it stewardship; it wasn’t giving of their own wealth. Think about who was benefiting from giving these gifts, and who was suffering. The Pharisees were getting honor and praise for their great generosity to God and to the Temple, but that generosity was coming not from their own sacrifice, but out of the hands and mouths of the vulnerable elderly. The Pharisees were using the practice of Corban not to honor God but to honor themselves, at the expense of people in need. Calling what the Pharisees were doing here “Corban” would be like cashing in your parents’ retirement account as your stewardship pledge to the church and then making a big deal about how generous you are. Jesus was calling the Pharisees out on their desire to show off how good they are at being good followers of God not to draw honor to God, but to draw honor to themselves. The Pharisees were using God as a tool on their road to self-aggrandizement.
Which brings us back to the question of hand washing. The Pharisees weren’t concerned about the disciples’ personal hygiene or about whether God was being honored in the disciples’ dietary habits. The Pharisees were concerned about showing the world how much better they were than these unclean followers of Jesus. Look how great I am, look how clean my hands are, look at what a great Jew I am. Your following of the traditions of the elders isn’t about God at all, Jesus told the Pharisees, it’s about your own pride.
Because the Pharisees always take the fall in the Bible stories, it is so tempting here for us to once again get a laugh at the expense of the foolish and wrong-headed Pharisees. Of course they were stuck up on something silly like food laws and bragging about stewardship. They are stock characters in the Bible; you almost hear that wowa-wowa-wowa sound whenever they come on the scene. But we, followers of Jesus, we have been set free from such silly restrictions as hand washing and food law and all of the things that hold us captive. We are above the Pharisees. Because of Jesus we know that we don’t have to worry about those things anymore, and we are free to cast judgment on the Pharisees and their self-righteousness.
But are we really? Or were my judgmental words about the Pharisees really just another form of the exact same thing. The truth, brothers and sisters, if we are honest with one another, if we are honest with ourselves, is we still struggle with this. There are still people who come to God with what we see as unclean hands, and we turn away in disgust. We are guilty of the same sin as the Pharisees. I know I am.
But there is good news for us in these words from Jesus. As I read this Gospel text for this morning, the first thing that caught my attention was what Jesus did immediately following his calling out of the Pharisees. Jesus turned to the crowd, those who had been judged by the Pharisees, those who had been cast aside, called less than because they could not live up to the draconian purity standards ascribed to them, and he said to the crowd, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile.” Listen and understand, Jesus said to the crowd, there is no restriction that some outside person can put on you that can keep you from being welcome in God’s community. There is no rule that someone can hold against you that you can fail to live up to so much that it will make you unworthy of God’s love. This is good news for those of us who have turned away, who have felt ashamed, unwelcome, unworthy in the judgmental eyes of those who cast themselves as Pharisees. Jesus says to the crowd, you are welcome here. You are not defined by what others think of you. There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile them.
There is challenge here too. Jesus goes on to tell the crowd and the Pharisees, “It is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” Then he gives that laundry list of temptations that sound distant and ominous and all too familiar. These things, these evil things, are inside of us, they defile us, and Jesus knows it and Jesus calls us out on them.
But even in the calling out, even in this list of evil, here too is good news for us. Because in Jesus we have a God who loves us enough to call us out on the evil within us. Jesus didn’t let the Pharisees get away with their judgmental ways, didn’t ignore the Pharisees, didn’t turn his back on them. Jesus loved them enough to look them in the eyes and say to him, these things that you are doing, these things are sin. They defile you, and they will destroy you.
Sisters and brothers, this is what grace, true grace looks like. Grace is not always rainbows and unicorns and soft fluffy kittens. Sometimes grace is looking someone in the eye and saying, yes, that thing you are doing, that thing is sin. It is dark, it is ugly, and it is wrong. It hurts to say it; it hurts to be told it. It hurts to have our brokenness held up before us by God as in a mirror. We would prefer that Jesus gloss over the messier realities of human existence, that Jesus just tell us we’re doing a great job, give us an A for effort and a participation sticker, but Jesus simply loves us too much for that. Jesus loves us too much to be nice. Jesus loves us so much that Jesus has to speak truth.
And in this love manifest as challenge, Jesus loves us enough to not leave us alone. You may not have caught it but there’s a very subtle anatomy lesson going on here. Jesus makes a distinction between two main systems in our bodies, our hearts and our stomachs. Evil intentions, Jesus said, come from the heart. But things that go in—food—go nowhere near our hearts. Food goes to our stomachs. Now, you could argue that food energy powers our hearts, but that is a depth of anatomical knowledge that is really beyond first century Palestine. Basically, the argument Jesus makes here is that food cannot defile, because food is just food, doesn’t affect our hearts.
But there is one food that can cross the stomach/heart barrier. There is one thing that comes in from the outside that ends up nestled in our hearts, right in the midst of all that brokenness and hurt and, yes, evil intentions. That food is the food we eat around this table. That food is Jesus. Through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, Jesus enters into our hearts and transforms us from within, changes us from the very heart of our brokenness, and makes us new. So when Jesus, in his grace, calls the crowd, the Pharisees, us, out on the evil that comes from within, Jesus does that knowing that he is already at work within us, bringing us peace, changing our hearts, making us new. So come to the table. Bring the things you think belong, but more importantly, bring the parts of you you wish you could hide. Bring the grubby parts, the messiness, bring your unwashed hands and your thirst for the rules. Bring all of these things to the table of the Lord, and feast on the one who pours himself into our unwashed hands and makes us new. Amen.
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