First let me begin by saying that it is important that you wash your hands regularly. In our country where safe water is plentiful and usually available simply by turning on a tap in multiple places in our house, most of us can access safe water 24 hours a day, seven days a week to drink and wash our selves, our clothes, our pets, and every other item in our lives. We know that simply washing our hands can prevent much illness. Sharing of germs that can be not only disruptive, but dangerous for young children and older people. We are wealthy beyond measure due to this one resource that we have in such abundance. But certainly we realize that these resources are not available in much of our world. Most of the world’s people do not have access to clean safe water. Obtaining just enough water for one day to drink and cook requires backbreaking physical effort and hours traveling many miles to collect this precious and life giving necessity that we so often take for granted. I have been in countries, in Haiti and in the Palestinian territories, where water is extremely scarce and both difficult and dangerous to access.
Jesus in the story today in the Gospel is aware of this disparity and responds to the religious leaders who criticize some of the people who followed him. He knew that these laws were created by people with easy access to water and lifestyles and occupations that allowed them time to attain ritual purity before worship and before eating. The “Great Tradition” as it is called by modern anthropologists or the “tradition of the elders” as it is called in Mark, was largely developed and practiced by small, elite groups in towns and cities.
Today we hear Jesus speaking to the Pharisees and their scholars, called “scribes.” They expected and, indeed, demanded that every Israelite please God in the way these groups believed they must. And so they viewed unwashed Galilean peasants and fishermen as unclean—as defiled or polluted because they did not follow this purity law.
Keeping purity laws was a near impossibility for peasant farmers, who may not have had access to water for bathing. And like fisherman, they would have come into daily contact with dead fish and dead animals that were considered unclean. The people who traveled with Jesus, walking long miles, sleeping out in the open, or staying only briefly in places of shelter, would have found it difficult if not impossible to maintain ritual purity.[1]
Jesus saw these purity laws as ones that were created by elite religious leaders and did not conform to God’s laws. He saw rules that excluded some and determined that some were unworthy of God’s love—-as being far from God—as actually abandoning God’s commandments and embracing instead human made doctrine that was actually empty worship.
By all means, wash your hands! We live in a time when we know that simply covering our mouth when we sneeze and cough and regularly washing our hands prevents the spread of disease. But Jesus is talking about a different illness and this illness is what comes from the heart when we fail to love God and love our neighbor.
In many churches today, there are separate entrances for those who are considered the washed and those who are considered the unwashed. People who are able to dress finely and can drive comfortably to worship often enter a separate door and are given access to a different level of membership in the community than are those who wear what has been found in second hand bins, push their worldly belongings in front of them in a borrowed grocery cart, and must constantly move throughout the day to avoid arrest. I have attended churches where ushers are constantly on guard to shuttle to the back those who do not attain a certain decorum in dress and behavior. How often we provide services for those in need, but then neglect to invite them to worship alongside us. Even though our hearts are in the right place in wanting to help others, how important it is that we go that extra step to welcome them fully into our community.
This was what Jesus saw that day. He saw religious people who set human standards to shame and set aside people. He called the religious authorities “hypocrites,” a word from Greek drama, meaning that they only played the part of loving God. But actually their hearts were far from God. Rather than seeing these people as children of God, worthy of welcome and respect, they stood as judge, calling them “unclean,” flawed and unworthy.
Jesus knew that God does not dismiss people based on the cleanliness of their hands or the condition of their clothes. God does not reject people based on their age or their income, their gender or race or nationality or who they love. God does not turn away people who “act up” in church. God loves and welcomes all into God’s mercy and grace.
God looks on our heart and sees what is inside us and calls us all to forgiveness and redemption. God seeks to shine God’s light and love through us into the lives of all. For God seeks each of us as God’s beloved. God is the shepherd who goes looking for the one lost sheep. God is the woman who sweeps the whole house seeking one lost coin. God is the father who runs to welcome home the wayward child. God does not place obstacles in our path to salvation. God makes the path broad and straight into God’s loving embrace. Jesus using the words of the prophet Isaiah, rebukes the religious people who follow doctrine created by humans to distance themselves from God’s children and then indeed from God
Today when Lyla and her family and godparents are invited to join me at the place of baptism, they will be asked to renounce on Lyla’s behalf, Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God. They will be asked to renounce the evil powers of the world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God and they will be asked to renounce all sinful desires that draw them from the love of God. Some of these evil forces are a betrayal of the 10 commandments. The sins that Jesus today notes, the evil intentions that can come from the heart, refer to four of the 10 Commandments—You shall not covet. You shall not betray and be unfaithful. You shall not kill. And you shall not worship any god other than the God of Israel.
We can look at these sinful desires as being those things that cause us to harm ourselves and others. But much of the evil that we must renounce are those things in us that cause us to fail to see God in ourselves and in each other. How much evil is done because we fail to see others as beloved? How much wickedness occurs because we do not recognize the dignity of every human life? How much sinful desire comes because we fail to see the needs of others and respond by standing along side all in their struggle. How much evil is unleashed because we fail to see that often our diminishment of others is the result of our own failure to truly see ourselves as beloved children of God?
Jesus calls the religious authorities to task because they want to build a human made wall, they want to set themselves apart from those who are deserving and those who are not. They seek to use rules to keep those they see as unclean from being welcomed into the community and in doing so they turn from God’s commandment to love each other as we have been loved. They fail to see that each of us is a part of God’s beloved family and each of us have logs in our eyes that must be removed so that we can see the beauty of every creature of God.
In preparing for today by reading and praying over this reading, I found it humbling to think of who I piously consider to be unclean, contaminated and far from God? We each have our list, don’t we, if we are honest with ourselves? How have I distorted the self-sacrificing love of God into self-serving superiority? What boundaries do I wrongly build or need to courageously shatter? I pray to experience what Marcus Borg calls a “community shaped not by the ethics and politics of purity, but by the ethics and politics of compassion.”
As humans, it is a part of who we are to categorize, to notice our differences more than attend to our connections, to turn first impressions into immutable assumptions, to set ourselves apart from those we do not understand or see as other. Every day we stumble and often do those things that we regret later. Jesus invites us all into a kind of humility recognizing that we have only one hope—being in relation with God who sees our heart, who knows every thing about us, yet loves us faithfully, forgives us, and calls us home to God in love.
In God we are called to turn our hearts away from anger, jealousy, pride, cruelty; towards that which is just, true, honorable and kind—to turn towards the God of love, opening our hearts to the peace of God that passes all understanding. Jesus, alone is our righteousness and the Spirit guides us when we listen.
Today as we welcome Lyla into the promise that God’s love never ends, of God’s constant attention to our every need, of God’s continual presence that never abandons us or gives up on us, we too are invited to remember this promise for us in our lives. In our baptismal covenant we are asked to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself and we respond that we will with God’s help. Thankfully, in Jesus Christ we can strive to move beyond boundaries and human made walls that keep us from loving God and loving each other. Jesus is constantly at work in us transforming our hearts, opening our hearts to God’s perfect gifts, so that our doing may be blessed, so that our hands may be his, no matter how dirty they are.
You are above me, O God,
you are within.
You are in all things
yet contained by no thing.
Teach me to seek you in all that has life that I may see you as the Light of life.
Teach me to search for you in my own depths that I may find you in every living soul.
-From Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter. John Phillip Newell
[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2003, 175-176.