Proper 17B

 

At first glance, this morning’s Gospel appears to be a nightmare for soap and cleaning companies around the globe. In this interchange between Jesus and some Jewish Scribes and Pharisees, we hear Jesus reject the custom of hand washing and other Jewish purity laws like washing cups and pots. Such a rejection of hand washing and pot scrubbing has to be bad press for Dial, and Dawn Soap, not to mention Mr. Clean.

 

Soon after rejecting this custom of hygiene, Jesus goes on to drop yet another theological bombshell, claiming that Jewish traditions, meant to guard the divine commandments of God, have led the Pharisees to abandon those very commandments. How can it be that questions about washing dishes and cleaning hands can lead to charges that the Pharisees have abandoned the commandments of God? Is sanitation really that dangerous? In typical Marcan fashion Jesus has turned a question by Jewish leaders into a massive debate about deeper and more important issues.

 

As is always the case when we read the Bible, this morning’s lesson takes place in a cultural and historical context which is different than our own. So before we examine what it is that the Word is saying to our community of St. John’s it would be wise to pause and understand just what Jesus was saying to the Pharisees in their original context.

 

To start with Jesus was not rejecting sanitation nor were the Pharisees putting in a plug for soap companies. What was at stake in dealing with the tradition of ritual washing was much more serious than that. It was a matter of observing a Biblical commandment found in the Torah, the Jewish Law, in Leviticus 11:45-47. This section of the Old Testament commands Israel to be holy as God is Holy. The very meaning of the Hebrew word Holy, vAdq', is to be set apart to God. Thus Leviticus was calling Israel to be set apart from the people around them. As such, Kosher dietary laws, ritual washing, observing the Sabbath, circumcision, and many other Jewish traditional observances were not about tradition per se, they were about keeping Israel holy. These traditions, guarded and promoted by the Pharisees in the midst of Roman occupied Palestine, were meant to remind Israel that they served God and were thus a people set apart—a holy people.

 

Given this context of ritual washing for the purpose of being a holy people, how, we may ask, could Jesus question such a practice? Jesus is not rejecting being holy, Nor is he rejecting being a people who is set apart from the rest of the world. Think for a moment of all the different times Jesus commands his disciples to be different than the rest of culture, to be people who pray and fast in secret as opposed to the publicly pious, Jesus calls his disciples to be people who trust radically in the providence of God rather than in money and clothing. Jesus calls his disciples to be people who take up their crosses and follow Christ, not the goals and values of popular culture. Time and again Jesus calls his followers to be different, to be set apart from the culture which surrounds them. In this sense Jesus demonstrates the fact that he is a Jewish man raised in the Pharisaic tradition, a teacher who believes in being set apart from the rest of the world to the glory of God the Father. Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees and their respect for Tradition is a glimpse at an interfamily debate between Jews, not a rejection of all Jewish tradition.

 

What Jesus is calling for this morning is that our actions and our thoughts, our whole beings not just certain prescribed actions, be set apart and holy for our good, loving, and holy God. Jesus is not challenging the idea of holiness, of being set apart unto God, he is questioning the means, the traditions, the manner in which we work to arrive at this state of holiness. What Jesus does for us today is set the bar higher than mere outward formulae and traditions. If only being set apart were as simple as washing our hands, keeping kosher, and going to church every Sunday. Instead of this mechanistic and simplistic view which is so easy to fall into, our faith is to be lived out not only by outward acts but by an inward transformation of the heart—the very source of human thought and action. 

 

This morning Jesus points us to the heart—to the place where our desires, our motivations, and our actions come from. Jesus calls us to look to the very recesses of our beings and see that it is there, in our inner depths, knit together by God but broken by human sin; that we must be cleanses and made new and filled with God’s life-giving presence.

 

Such a vision of Christian life has informed many of the great saints of the Church. St. Benedict and the entire Benedictine order, which had a profound impact on Anglicanism and our Episcopal form of Christian faith and practice, claimed that everything a person did should be done as an act of prayer. As such, when I spent two weeks living in a Benedictine monastery in Chicago I was challenged by the monks time and again to see all of my actions, all of my work as prayer. That was easy as I prayed the daily office seven times a day with the monks, or as I read and journaled in my cell, but it was more of a challenge as I cleaned out bathrooms, scrubbed floors and swept out dusty old basements. And yet, in the midst of this physical labor I found that Christ was with me even in the midst of these common place actions. When I practiced my work as a form of prayer, when my heart was reoriented towards God I found that God was with me in the midst of even the most everyday action.

 

What Christ calls us to today is that we our lives intentionally. Seeking to see all of life, not just our exterior actions, not just our “religious moments” as a form of prayer, a form of spiritual communion with God in Christ. The moment that we begin fragmenting our lives into religious actions and secular actions, the moment that we look at the only religious part of a meal being the washing of food and hands or in our case the saying of a prayer we have missed Jesus’ point. Jesus is calling us to see all of life, even the most menial chore, even the most repetitive job, as a place to be oriented towards God, a place for our heart to be drawn ever deeper into the communion of love which we were baptized into.

 

It is in this place of openness to the power and presence of God that outward actions become filled with inner meaning. It is in this place of realizing the depth of God’s call on our life, the totality of God’s desire for us to be a holy people, set apart to love and serve the Lord, that every action we do can take on radical and incredibly important significance.

 

As we go forth from this time of worship and prayer, this time of deep and life giving action and reflection, may we be assured that God calls us to live lives that are completely set apart, completely holy, lives that are intentionally focused on Christ. In the midst of all of our actions and thoughts no matter how repetitive or mundane God calls us to live in such a way that all we do, all we say, all we think is marked not by mere ritualism, not by mere tradition, but by a deep and incredibly powerful belief that Christ dwells in us and is working to transform our hearts into his own.

 

Amen