Text: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 (RSV)
Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands,[a] observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify[b] themselves;[c] and there are many other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze.[d]) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live[e] according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?” 6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’
8 You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men.”
14 And he called the people to him again, and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him.”[a]
21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Anyone who has ever had children or has ever dealt with kids knows it’s sometimes a struggle to get them to wash their hands. It seems to be one of those odd laws of nature – every small child I have ever seen seems to have an absolutely magnetic attraction to water – if, that is, it’s in the form of a mud puddle, or a sink full of water, or even the cat’s or the dog’s water bowl – but ask them to wash their hands before a meal, and they act like water’s some kind of acid! If I had even a nickel for every time I had to remind my little lambs to wash up before a meal, I’d be living in retirement in the South of France or someplace!
But, even though the initial focus of this passage has to do with washing hands, that is not the real, underlying issue. It is actually about tradition.
Or, more accurately, about the misuse of tradition.
Originally, for the Jewish people, the Law meant just two things – first, the Ten Commandments, and second, the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch. And although the Pentateuch contains a lot of detailed regulations and instructions, in the matter of moral questions, it simply paints the moral canvas in broad strokes – it outlines great moral principles which individuals had to interpret and apply to themselves as best as they could.
For a long time – centuries, in fact – this was plenty good enough. But, as they say, “nature abhors a vacuum”; and about 500 years or so before Christ, there arose a class of people we have come to know as the scribes, who became the legal experts of Israel. They were not happy with broad strokes and great moral principles; they were compelled to define, refine, and then re-refine these moral principles – today we might say that that entire group of people suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder! The result, in the end, was that there were literally thousands and thousands of little rules and regulations governing every possible action and every possible situation in life. Worse yet, these rules at the time of Jesus hadn’t yet been written down! Imagine how utterly maddening it had to be for people in his day – they knew at any and every given moment that they were almost certainly breaking God knows how many rules without ever really even knowing what those rules were! Like weeds in a garden, these rules had grown up to the point where they had started to choke the very life out of the garden itself.
These rules were known as the oral law and made up what was called the tradition of the elders – not the elders of the synagogue, though, but rather the elders in the sense of the ancients. It’s a characteristic of human nature that rules or traditions take on authority the further back in time they go. If I were to make a rule right now, you might be inclined – rightly, I would think – to say, “Well, just who are you to make such a rule?” But if I were to say that this rule I’m quoting was laid down 100 or even 200 years ago by someone we agree on as an authority, then you might be more inclined to follow it.
The particular rule at issue here, of course, had to do with the washing of hands. But it had nothing at all to do with hygiene. Rather, it had to do with ceremonial cleanliness. Before meals as well as between each of the courses, the hands had to be washed, and that in a certain way, with a specific amount of water which had also been set aside in a large stone jar to make sure it was clean…and on it went. We don’t need to go through the entire ritual.
The point here is that to fail to perform this ritual was not just to be guilty of bad manners, but to be unclean in the sight of God. Anyone who ate with unclean hands opened himself or herself to the attacks of a demon called Shibta, and even became liable to suffer poverty and destruction. A rabbi who once didn’t wash properly was buried in excommunication; another rabbi who was imprisoned by the Romans, instead of drinking the water his jailers gave him, used it for hand washing – and nearly died of thirst because of it!
This was “religion” in the eyes of the Pharisees and the scribes – full of ceremonial practices, rituals, superstition, and thousands upon thousands of regulations. It makes you wonder how they found time to do anything else!
For just about two millennia now, preachers like me have reviled the Pharisees and scribes, laughed at them, used them as examples of how not to follow God – but, in truth, we’re much closer to them than we might like to think.
Because don’t we, too, have traditions? Don’t we also love our traditions? I know I do! Have you ever been invited to a Thanksgiving meal that didn’t have a turkey? And, if you were, didn’t you feel maybe just a little put out because of it? Thanksgiving without a turkey?! Unthinkable! Alternatively, for those of you whose traditions don’t involve a turkey at Thanksgiving and who get invited over to some friends’ house where they do have a turkey probably feel the same way…it’s just not “right.”
And that’s just one tradition. There are so many others! Every family, every club, every company, every nation, and of course every church – every human group has a set of traditions. These traditions are so much a part of us that we often don’t even recognize them.
A couple that come to mind – on Sunday mornings, I almost always wear a white shirt. Why a white shirt? Because I grew up thinking that properly-dressed men, and particularly pastors, always wore white shirts. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be. So, when I show up wearing a green shirt, or – whoa! – a red shirt, I’m really being radical!
And this robe – why do I wear it? It’s really not a liturgical vestment at all – it’s called a “Geneva gown,” and it comes to us through academia. Some 500 years ago, it found its way into the pulpit through Protestant reformers like Jean Calvin and other university-trained men. They wanted to differentiate themselves from Roman Catholic clergy as much as humanly possible, so they started wearing their academic gowns in the pulpit as a way to stick their thumb in the eye of “those other guys,” who often were not university educated. And there was another aspect to wearing academic paraphernalia in the pulpit – whether they meant to or not, these Reformers were making a statement to the effect of “see, we get to preach to you because we’ve been to school and are smarter than you.” Nobody these days makes this ridiculous claim; but the symbolism behind this 500-year-old tradition is still lurking in the background.
The structure of our Sunday services, too, is a tradition which goes back ‘way farther than you might think. It has its roots in the order of worship in the synagogues! I once found a Jewish book of worship on the shelves of our seminary library – when I looked through it, I found that what they do in their worship services was almost identical to what we do!
Traditions! They make us what we are.
Have you ever seen the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”? It’s a great movie about one man’s struggle to maintain his traditions in the face of radically changing times. Right at the beginning of the musical, Tevye the Milkman says to the audience:
“A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof – trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck! It isn’t easy.
“You may ask, ‘Why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous?’ We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: Tradition!” After the musical number that follows, Tevye mentions a couple traditions – wearing hats and prayer shawls – and says, “You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you – I don’t know! But it’s a tradition, and because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do!”
Such is the power of traditions. Traditions help us to fit into our world and to understand it. Traditions help us, like Tevye, to know who we are.
But following our traditions too closely can also become a cage. And because we have created that cage, we don’t even know we’re trapped in it. We get so used to peering between the bars that we don’t even see those bars anymore.
Enter Jesus.
Jesus was up against these pervasive and crushing rules. The scribes and Pharisees considered these rules to be the very essence of religion. It didn’t matter to them what was in your heart. It didn’t matter if you loved your neighbor as yourself. It didn’t matter if you cared for and about others. All that mattered was that you correctly followed the rules. Their rules. Not God’s rules.
But Jesus was never squeamish about going toe to toe with these people. They spoke in the language of their own near-sightedness, their deep-seated conceit and high-handed arrogance. Jesus spoke in the language of a loving God. The split between Jesus and these adversaries was total and irreconcilable.
In the Book of Micah, we read: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8, RSV) No mention of rules there! A person who lives like that could eat lunch with mud on his or her fingers without fear of a complaint from God!
That was Jesus’ orientation and outlook. So, he calls the crowd together, and issues a warning. That warning is – “Be careful! Being clean, being righteous, being pure, is not about a bunch of rules, rules that exist outside of you, rules you can follow without paying any attention at all to what’s going on inside of you. Righteousness is not about how you behave when people are watching. You need to pay attention to the condition of your heart!”
“There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him…For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts…”
The Shadow is not the only one “who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men”!
He’s not talking about the muscle that pumps blood, or the heart of our emotions. He’s talking about the core of our inmost selves.
The heart is where the problem lies. Sometimes, without our even being aware of it, things creep into our hearts that poison us. Did you know that you can actually poison yourself by drinking too much water? I’m not talking about drowning here, but by just drinking too much water!
So, you see, sometimes what poisons us is literally “too much of a good thing.” Think of things in your own lives that are good, in and of themselves, but which may have, at one time or another, become a problem. Somewhere along the line, these good things became toxic, and you had to step back from them for awhile, maybe for a long while. Maybe for good.
It’s no accident that one of the Psalms of David contains the lines: “Create a clean heart in me, O God; renew a loyal spirit within me.” David knew whereof he spoke! What we all need is for God to create in us a new heart. This is not a one-time-only proposition, either. It’s a continuous process; over and over again, that poison must be purged from us, so that the grace of Christ can transform us.
Instead of letting our traditions control us, let us instead take them as the markers, the guidelines they are supposed to be and allow them to help us keep in mind what’s important in our lives, and what isn’t. And what’s important is loving God and walking in his ways, by showing the world that, yes, because we love the God who loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son, we are grateful and joyful and eager to spread that love to others!
That is the real lesson to be learned about tradition. As we leave here this morning, let us ask God for a deep renewal of our hearts and a transformation of our souls, so that we can truly “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God!”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.