On the one hand, I think it
can be a little difficult for us in twenty-first century America to imagine and
understand the religious scene of the world Jesus and his disciples inhabited. Like
our own culture, Jerusalem and the surrounding Jewish territories teemed with
different groups and races of people, many of whom were just trying to make a
living and survive the policies and programs of whatever political regime was
in office. However, at least in the towns where many of the people were Jewish,
life was dominated by a long list of ancient codes that revolved around ritual
cleanliness. Many of those codes and laws about ritual cleanliness were written
in the Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and our Old Testament—but
many more were piled on top of those and recorded in various other books and
scrolls that were pored over and memorized by the Pharisees and scribes.
Recent research has suggested
that the ordinary Joe and Josephine, working to make ends meet in the market or
in the fields, may not have been quite as keen as we have traditionally
believed at actually maintaining ritual cleanliness, but the concern was still
out there in society, wherever they went, and the Pharisees liked to remind
people of it. The list of what could make one “ritually unclean” was quite
extensive. Touching corpses, for example, could do it. So did coming into
contact with most kinds of bodily fluids, including blood. Skin diseases,
money, livestock…and the list goes on and on.
Mark the gospel-writer tells
us about some of those rules and regulations in the reading this morning. True,
Americans wash things they buy at the market in order to rinse off pesticide residue,
perhaps, but not so some pastor can declare it safe. Ritual cleanliness, you
see, wasn’t so much about preventing the spread of infection as it was about
delineating who was in the community and who was out. It was about setting down
some order amidst a chaotic existence: everything and everyone had its place. Ultimately,
however, it was about declaring who was on the side of God’s good life and who
was, at least for the time-being, cut off. The Pharisees would, among other
things, make a big deal about washing their hands before they ate to underline
the fact that they were “in,” and those who didn’t were “out.”
On the other hand, I’m not so
sure our own society—religious and secular—is
all that different in this regard. We may not use the words “ritually unclean”
to describe many people, but we do pretty much treat them that way, often in
the church. I suspect many people don’t attend worship in a church on Sunday
mornings because they think they might be judged, or because they believe that don’t
have the right clothes to wear, or feel their race or sexuality or past
indiscretions make them unwelcome. Others may come once or twice to worship but
never return, feeling we’re too obsessed with certain aspects of worship that
seem pointless, like the correct order for lighting the candles on the altar (p.s.:
there isn’t one), or the fact that you’re supposed to enter the sanctuary
through the side doors and leave through the middle ones (you’ve all been doing
that wrong since I got here three years ago).
Ritual and tradition, just
like anything else, can become an idol. What really honks Jesus’ horn in this
morning’s story from Mark is that the Pharisees and other religious types choose
to follow certain rules and regulations that are not really written in
Scripture and then create loopholes around other ones that clearly are. So he
calls them hypocrites. Jesus does his part to dismantle the system of ritual
cleanliness but he is also trying to point out the inconsistencies in their
religiosity. They make a big show of washing their hands—maybe like a surgeon
going into the operating room—and criticizing others who don’t follow suit, but
then find no problem in circumventing more serious parts of the law that Jesus
points out elsewhere.
In ancient Greek, “hypocrite”
was another word for an actor, someone who played a part. When Jesus calls the
Pharisees and the other rule-followers hypocrites, he is pointing out that they
“play the part” of having faith in God by following through with certain showy
traditions—but their skirting of other parts of the law reveals that they are
only in it for themselves. In doing so, the Pharisees have essentially picked
and chosen which rules and laws apply to them and which ones don’t, and their
religion has become vanity. Early Church theologian St. Augustine put it this
way: “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t
like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.”[1]
The Pharisees are easy
boogeymen in the stories of Jesus. They’re the ones who get it all wrong, the
judgmental, legalistic, power-hungry brokers of religion who attempt to keep
the good, humble, righteous people down. But really, Jesus’ criticism of the
Pharisees and the scribes is a criticism of everyone who picks and chooses from
God’s Word, who conveniently rejects the parts that make them uncomfortable and
keeps the parts that make them feel good. Truth be told, at some point we all
end up “playing the part” of someone who has it all right, who’s figured out
exactly what God wants, of someone who knows exactly where those boundary lines
are and on which side we stand.
Jesus’ relationship with and
to God’s law as set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures has always been complicated
to understand. We can run the risk of “playing the part” like the Pharisees, of
boiling down our faith into rules, regulations and restrictions: Christians
don’t do that. Christians don’t
associate with them. Christians light
the candles on the altar this way,
not that way. Christians don’t vote for that
political party…and so on. Yet, a relationship can never be reduced to just a
set of expectations, of do’s and don’t’s, and a relationship is really what
faith in God is about.
Likewise, followers of Christ
have also been tempted to boil down faith in the other direction; that is, so
that the practice and meaning of faith in God is just about some fuzzy notion
of love. If ritual and laws can be so misused, then why not get rid of them
altogether? And if Jesus can dismiss laws outright—like when he declares all
food clean—then why not just ignore any old law that God issues? It really
doesn’t matter what you do as long as love is there, however one wants to
define it. While it’s true that Jesus highlights love of God and neighbor as
the essence of all of the law and the prophets, he never intends to nullify all
regulations and restrictions. Many of those laws help show us the shape love is
to take, how our true faith and love is to perform. For example, we honor father
and mother. We watch our speech and don’t take advantage of the poor and needy.
As James points out in our second reading, true religion keeps our devotion
focused on the orphans and widows and
others who are unable to care for themselves.
Two weeks ago Melinda, the
girls and I spent a week of vacation with the families of our closest friends
and godchildren. We do this every year: we find a place that can fit us all and
have a good time relaxing, cooking for each other, and filling each other in on
the last year. This was our tenth summer trip, and we spent it in a distant
cottage far back in the hills of southwestern Virginia. There were thirteen of
us, in all—six adults and seven children, all under the age of 8 (Don’t it just
make you want to go with us next year??). A fourteenth guest came along this
year for the first time: a nasty stomach virus. And because we were all in such
close proximity with each other—sharing those bronze kettles—well, you guessed
it: most of us got to share that, too.
Let me tell you: I started washing
my hands like a Pharisee, ritually, after I touched anything that might make me
unclean. We went through an entire jumbo-sized container of Clorox wipes. I
followed our daughters around, cringing every time they came into contact with
something that might be infected (“Don’t touch that!”). But despite our
efforts, by the time the last night rolled around, about half the group had
come down with it.
Caroline, our two-year-old
goddaughter started feeling ill right after our last supper together. In fact,
she got hit the worst. Unable to keep anything down, she rolled around on the
bathroom floor in agony. Caroline’s mother, who had plenty of other things to
do for the family—run another batch of clothes through the laundry, pack the
luggage for the long drive back to Wisconsin, dry her wet hair—decided the best
place for her to be was on that bathroom floor with her. Clean and showered, and
in freshly-washed clothes, Carla sat there the whole night right in the mess of
it all, cradling her puking daughter who was unhappy, scared, and unsure of
what was happening to her. Carla was not going to let the filthiness of her
precious little one keep her—or her love—away.
That, my friends, is the good
news of the cross. God is not going to let the filthiness and sinfulness of his
precious ones keep him away. Rather than keep the distance, rather than devising
new rules and regulations that might clear all this messiness up somehow, God
decides to come down to the bathroom floor and be in the midst of it, himself. On
the cross, God’s holiness encounters—and, in fact, embraces—our dirtiness, so that we may be brought through the long,
cold night of loneliness and made clean.
You see, in Jesus’ death and
resurrection, God finally accomplishes what the law first set out to do; that
is, make us clean and reconcile us to the one holy God. No amount of
hand-sanitizing or rule-following or boundary-drawing will do it. God doesn’t
choose the parts of us he likes and then reject the rest! He takes us whole,
cradles us there at the center of that eternal love, and in the holy waters of
baptism, applies this deep cleaning to us all.
May this new relationship be
the basis for your faith in a God who loves you. May you learn to honor God
with your heart and your lips, and then may you be freed—freed to touch the
world with compassion and mercy as doers of a word that heals and saves.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
Good job and well said, Phillip. I was especially touched with your story of Carla and Caroline. Very good example of the power and the love God shows us from the cross.
ReplyDeleteHope you are feeling better and that next year will be virus free.
-Jonathan