PENTECOST 12

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: PENTECOST 12
PROPER: 17 B
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 3, 2000


TEXT: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 - “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

ISSUE: - Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees for the impurity of his disciples and himself. He cannot be identified as a Jewish observer. But he responds that the human laws abandon the real law of God in the commandments. It is not what goes into us that defiles, rather what comes out of the human heart which is itself defiling. The purity rules can be a cover-up for being truly a person bound to God. Loving God and neighbor is important for Jesus. His ministry clearly rebels against some of the purity laws when he reaches out to others: eating with sinners, touching corpses, etc. The passage is mission oriented, as God in Christ has come to the defiled and the expendable. The passage is a challenge to all of us today to reclaim the love of God and God’s commands, and to be inclusive and respectful in our relationships with others.
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The Collect for this Sunday sets the theme that is expounded upon by the passage from Mark’s Gospel account. We prayed “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works.” May we all come to know what true religion is.

Jesus knew considerable conflict with authorities through out his ministry. Today the Pharisees in their constant effort to discredit him or dishonor him, and his disciples, challenge Jesus and his disciples for not washing their hands before they eat. Be clear about this, folks. Washing you hands before you eat may be an issue of hygiene today, and an acceptable practice, but the issue here is not hygiene. It is purity. The elite Pharisees and Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time had many rules related to purity. You washed your hands before you ate. You only cooked certain foods in a certain way in certain pots. You ate only those things which were kosher, according to Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. If you broke the purity rules, you were considered defiled and unclean. Thus, if Jesus’ disciples are not following the rules, they are considered to be unclean. What’s more their identity was in question.
The purity rules were significant to the Pharisees and the Jewish elite. They were designed for a specific purpose. They identified you as a Jew. The Jews believed that God was Holy, that God was pure. Then Israel, the Jewish people as the chosen people of God were expected themselves to be pure. The purity rules, what was known as The Great Tradition, then, it what helped to define them as God’s people. Keep in mind, however, that the Pharisees and the Jewish elite were really a very small part of the overall population of Israel. The overwhelming population of the people were peasants, farm workers, some fishermen, some artisans, and merchants. This larger population was unable to keep all the purity laws. For one thing, water was quite scarce. A poor family may not have had the ability to own all the pots required for cooking, nor the facilities required. Fishermen and merchants had to touch things that by purity laws and standards made them unclean, and unable to keep all the purity laws. Their uncleanness excluded them from Temple worship. Jesus and his disciples are thus challenged as to their identity and worthiness as men of God who were abandoning the Great Tradition of Israel.
Jesus responds to the challenge with an insult. He quotes Hebrew Scripture from the prophet Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts and doctrines.” According to Isaiah, Israel was supposed to be a light to the nations of the world. Isaiah 42:6 -“I, the Lord, have called you and given you power to see that justice is done on earth. Through you I will make a covenant with all peoples; through you I will bring light to the nations.” But, instead of being light to the nations, many of the purity laws had become the be all and end all of a national self-righteous exclusiveness. With the lips and the purity rules they honored God, but internally their hearts were far from God’s intention. Thus, Jesus clearly states that it is not what we put into us that defiles us, but what is coming out of a person’s heart. What is often coming out of the human heart is fornication, theft, murder, evil intentions that are far more defiling of a truly religious person. Religious people take the commandments of God into themselves, the command to love God with all you heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor. This command is what the Ten Commandments are all about, loving God and having a right and just relationship with everyone else.
Notice that Jesus was quite rebellious in his time when it came to the purity laws. He touched lepers and corpses. He ate with sinners, and tax collectors. He touches menstruating women and associated with them. He dared to heal a man on the Sabbath. Jesus did not abandon the law, the commandments, but he broke it open for all to see at a greater depth what it means to be identified with God, and as a person or community of God. What’s at the heart of this passage from Mark, is the inclusiveness of Jesus’ mission. From the Pharisees and the elite authorities, who had become so entrenched in the unique identity that their purity laws gave to them, the rest of the world was seen as impure, unclean, and alienated from God. Jesus challenges that condemning outlook on the world and the purity rules that sustain it. Their lips and practices honor God externally, but their hearts are missing the point of what it really means to serve and love God.
One very graphic modern example, which is in the extreme is demonstrated in the motion picture, “The Godfather.” The Godfather says the rosary, and he acts as a loving god father to his nieces and nephews in the church, but is a man with a very evil unmoved heart in the other realities of his life. His devotion to God is only honorable lip service, but the heart is evil and there is no sense of Godliness or obedience to the love of God and the people of the world. The pharisees may not have been as evil as the Godfather but they were from the point of view of Jesus and the early church as far to aloft to be caring, serving, compassionate people of God.
Mark tells this story I sure because as the early church developed it was constantly wrestling with the purity issues as it attempted to embrace both Jewish and Gentile people, the majority of whom were peasants. It was a mission concern for the early church. The Christian Scriptures of Acts 10, Romans 14, and I Corinthians 8, Galatian 2:11, all deal with the issue of whether or not new Christians were required to keep certain dietary laws, and the law of circumcision.
Even now, we still live and debate the issues, the purity laws of the church, of what defines us as clearly the Christian Community, as the servant people of God in the world today. We’ve had a variety of purity-like rules over the years. They come and go. There was a time when people dressed-up for church and woman always wore hats, or at least a scarf over their heads when they came to church. We didn’t eat meat on Friday. We fasted on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We came to church regularly or Sunday, celebrating the Christian Sabbath. We bowed in reverence or genuflected if the Sacrament was reserved as we entered the pew of the church. We reverenced the cross with a bow when it came up or down the aisle. These acts of piety were and still are some of the purity rules that define us as religious people and that contributed to a sense of respectability and religious honor. But the real question is is this true religion. What’s in the heart?
We have a concept of what is religious and pure. Our concept, however, can be potentially exclusive, self-serving, and self-righteous. Like the Pharisees, we may be followers of certain religious rules, but have a very condescending attitude toward poor people on welfare. In the days of greater religious pious practices where Episcopalians were dressing to the hilt and women were wearing hats, racism and prejudice was rampant. It’s not all gone yet, sorry to say.
Today we wrestle with the issue of gay and lesbian relationships. These kinds of relationships are seen as the impure relationship by the standards of other Christian Church members. This issue is every bit as debated today, as the early church debated the dietary rules and circumcision rules of the first century. How do we ultimately decide?
There are many other issues that challenge purity standards and rules of the church today. Co-habitation before marriage by confessed Christians, including having children is no longer uncommon. For some people this lifestyle is no big deal. Some would say the stability and structure of our civilized society is undermined by these cavalier life styles. There’s a lot of unclarity as to Christian identity in the world today. It sometimes gets very fuzzy. And it’s scary in terms of keeping the church unified.
A popular notion today is to say in response to all of the plurality of the culture is that you have to follow what’s in your own heart. But keep in mind that the scripture passage says clearly that “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” Our human hearts can tell us to roll over and play dead, and let the world meet its demise. Our hearts with their ingrained self-righteousness can make us very hardhearted and call for exclusion and excommunication of people different from what’s in our hearts.
Jesus seemed to appreciate the fact that you cannot reach people from whom you become disassociated. The love of God could not be revealed to people who were led to believe that they were no good, unworthy, and expendable peasant trash. To bring about the mercy and the compassion of God, and the Law of God you had to be in a relationship. The idea of Jesus Christ as the Son of God coming to his creation was to establish a forgiving and loving relationship. Remember the parable of the Wedding Feast. The prestigious types turn down the invitation. So, the king sends out his servants to bring in everyone who will come to participate in the party, without a credentials check. Jesus did not come to abandon the law and the rules either. The Commandments are of God. But it is with mercy and compassion that Jesus show the way of a life deeply and profoundly devoted to the love, dependence, attachment and loyal trust in God. It is in his life of genuine faithful committed servanthood that he attaches himself in relationship with the people of God to show them that loving and respecting God and God’s Commandments is not some great burden of judgment, but a gift.
May God help us in our uncertainties. May God help us in our piety, and in our purity, in our self-assured righteousness, in each of our own sins to be reminded that God mercifully loves each of us, and calls us into that inclusive servanthood. At the same time, it is important that we search out and claim just what is the law of God is for people who wish to be faithful, and responsive to the bountiful grace of God.