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
ST. JOHN’S CHURCH
DATE: August 31, 2003

TEXT: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 – The breaking up of this lesson is not necessary, and causes the congregation to miss some of the points.
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” . . . Then he (Jesus) called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile . . . For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil thing come from within, and they defile a person.”

ISSUE: Jesus in this passage is dealing with the purity issues, not hygiene issues. The people are inclined to become too observant of the man made traditions, and less concerned with the issues of the heart. Jesus makes a radical move away from fundamentalist interpretations of the law. We are called upon to purify the heart with caring and compassion, mercy, and love.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Mark’s Gospel account in this 7th Chapter provides us with one of a most radical stance of Jesus. His approach to some of the Pharisees legalistic attitudes is another one of the reasons why Jesus is eventually crucified.
The most important value in Jesus’ time was a person’s honor, and standing in community. Jesus was increasing in status and honor as he preached, healed, and taught among the people. He became a threat to the leadership of the time, the Pharisee rulers, and they worked at controlling his increasing honorable status among the people be confronting and challenging him with questions that questioned his status. The questions that they ask of Jesus are not for the purpose of knowing more about him, and his ministry. They are challenges in the hope that he will discredit himself.
Mark reports that the Pharisees challenge Jesus because he and his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. In our time and culture the practice of washing your hands before a meal is a matter of hygiene, cleanliness. The practice of washing hands in Jesus’ time had nothing to do with hygiene was a purity issue. Pharisees had an extensive hand washing ritual before meals that was required by their law to keep them, and their food from pollution, and ungodliness. Their rules and laws were a part of what was called The Great Tradition. The following of these rules regarding washing before meals, and eating certain foods from certain vessels, and not mixing certain foods, and all the rules regarding what they could and could not eat, what they could and could not do on the Sabbath made them feel holy, and helped the Pharisees and a significant part of the Jewish community to feel right with God, and pure as they believed God wanted them to be.
Of course, many of the peasants and people of the land outside of the urban setting were unable to keep all of these laws and rules. Fishermen were always touch dead fish and animals, which made them ritually unclean. Farmers, tanners, merchants were always touching and were involved with things that the law declared unclean. Gentiles didn’t have a chance at being right with God. Check out Leviticus 11 – you’re Americans you can remember Chapter 11 – and read about all the religious dietary laws of forbidden foods. In a society where there was a limited supply of water, the hand washing rituals were difficult to keep. Thus, the Pharisees challenge Jesus about his disciples for not keeping The Great Tradition. “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” they ask. These were the scriptural traditions of the Torah, or Hebrew Law. Jesus responds with a daring insult. You hypocrites, or play actors, he calls them. Jesus calls upon another passage from Scripture in a passage from Isaiah 29:13, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrine.” They are abandoning the real commandments of God, and are holding on to old meaningless traditions. They manipulate the law for their own purposes.
For instance, instead of honoring and taking care of their parents, as the real law demands, they use the money which was take of the parents and declare that it is “Corban” or “gift” which is set aside for God. They use the keeping of the law to boost their own purity and honor rather than having sensitivity, compassion, and concern for others.
Speaking in terms of the food laws and traditions, Jesus makes the point that it is not what one takes into themselves that counts so much as what comes out of a person. It is not what you take in, but what comes out of a person is what counts. What comes from the human heart is what counts, and that can be evil condemnation of others for the sake of boosting one’s honor, or it can be motivations from love and compassion. Obviously the Pharisees are intending to discredit Jesus and his disciples in order to boost their own status and ego. They kept the law and all the traditions, but they never let that law transform them into a real child, or person, of God. They consumed the law, the traditions, the rules, and the regulations, but what came out was condemnation, hatred for others, looking at others with contempt and attempting to discredit them for their own personal gain and status. Jesus saw through that clearly and challenged them in return with their own scriptures. He challenges their whole fundamental religious tradition here in the Gospel of Mark. This riposte of Jesus is truly scathing, damning, and radical. It is most dangerous for him and his disciples. He is challenging some of the basic fundamental aspects of the religion of the time, and even some of the church’s traditions of today.
Please notice some of the dynamics that are going on in this passage. The Pharisees challenge Jesus on the basis of their Biblical interpretation of the Scriptures. They phrase it as a question: “Why don’t your disciples wash their hands?” What they mean is you and your disciples are impure because you are breaking the law of The Great Tradition. Jesus returns the punch with his own quotation from Hebrew Scripture of 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 as doctrines.” Does that seem familiar? I remember my youth when my Catholic and Protestant sides of the family would use the scriptures to beat one another over the head, and to ram certain Biblical passages down one another’s throats to make their respective points. I ask you, is that really the best use and purpose of the Bible? Human beings, religious as they try to be, turn the Holy Bible into some kind of an ecclesiastical baseball bat for clubbing the hell out of one another to make their point and to try to somehow make themselves feel that they are the saved, righteous, pure folk of God. Jesus won the battle with the Pharisees so let’s let it go at that.
I wonder why we do this sort of thing? Why is it we fight so among one another both within, and without of our denominations? Perhaps, just Perhaps, it is because we feel so desperately to be right with God. We feel that God wants us to be pure in his sight. We feel like, and learned somewhere along the way that we have to earn our salvation from God. Keeping right of the law and the traditions gives us some kind of feeling of salvation. It gives us some kind of assurance. It helps define us as the righteous people of God. But what does Jesus say? He says a resounding, “NO!” If you’ve been buying into all that stuff, and you’ve consumed that kind of religion, let is pass through the stomach, the intestines, and flush it down the toilet. It’s polluted religion. You don’t have to get right with God. If you believe and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are right with God. Jesus is God come among us, incarnate with us, and to embrace him as Lord is purification enough. Look who he came to, and who ingested him, Sinners: prostitutes, tax collectors, peasants, widows, lepers, children, sick, beggars. The already righteous and those striving desperately for honor and salvation were the very ones who rejected the grace. Just live not worrying about what you eat or what you drink or what laws you keep or don’t keep, or whether you are true to traditions; let the radical love of Christ rule in your heart with love, compassion, forgiveness, and caring. That’s the stuff that comes out, and the stuff that really counts. It’s hard, I know. It’s too good to be true. We just don’t get it. We just “have to” earn our salvation, and pay the price for our sins and shortcomings. We can’t let them go, so we strive for this illusive righteousness, and it’s already there. Run with it! Give yourself a break and be transformed from the guilt.
The church has struggled with stuff like this from the beginning. Early Church Christians from the Hebrew persuasion insisted that new Christians had to be circumcised, and had to follow the dietary laws. St. Peter supposedly supported some of these rules, until he finally had a vision where a sheet full of all the prohibited foods came down upon him, and he was told to eat. He was transformed. Paul who at one point had murdered followers of the Way becomes transformed and starts teaching the way of Christ. Just put on the armor of Christ, and what you eat and drink, and whether or not you are circumcised does not matter. You are saved and worthy of the grace of God through the love extended through Jesus Christ our Lord, who died to make it so, and to get your attention. Why don’t we get it?
v Robert Farrar Capon, a Biblical Scholar, teacher, author, and theologian in our church puts the Gospel this way in his book called The Parables of Grace: “Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion. Religion consists of all the things . . . the human race has ever thought it had to do to get right with God.
v [The Church] is not here to bring to the world the bad news that God will think kindly about us only after we have gone through certain creedal, liturgical, and ethical wickets; it is here to bring the world the Good News that ‘while we are yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.’”
What a relief it is to know that it is by the very grace of God that we are accepted and loved, not by our works. What a relief it is to know that the Holy Bible is not an ecclesiastical fundamentalist battering ram, but a book of poetry, revealing the developing insights into the outpouring of the love of God for his people.

ADDENDUM
One of the problems many people have with Scripture interpretation is in not seeing the fullness of the context and of some of the passages. For instance: People hear that Jesus taught that the church should baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This is only half of that passage. It continues: And teach them all they should know about the faith, etc. Only appreciating half of the passage misses the point that the person baptized is to be taught and continue to grow up in the faith.
Another famous passage from Paul’s writings in Ephesians deals with how the husband is the head of the wife, like Christ the head of the church. This part of the passage sure makes the men happy, but the passage continues to spell out how a man is to love his wife, as he loves his own body. The two are one, but this part of the passage is easily forgotten, or ignored.
Today’s reading about the law reminds us that indeed there are laws to be kept, but the message of Jesus throughout the Christian Scriptures is issues of compassion, mercy, etc. The law is undoubtedly important, but so is what is in the heart, like attitudes and the qualities of generosity, love, mercy, forgiveness that temper the law.


Thanksgiving Prayer after the Communion
(Selected person or persons may offer the following thanksgivings.)
O God, you have bound us together for a time as priest and people to work for the advancement of your kingdom in this place: We give you humble and hearty thanks for the ministry which we have shared in these years now past. Amen.
We thank you for your patience with us despite our blindness and slowness of heart. We thank you for your forgiveness and mercy in the face of things in which we may have been slow to, or failed to accomplish. Amen.
Especially, we thank you for your never-failing presence with us through these years, and for the deeper knowledge of you and of each other, which we have attained. Amen.
We thank you for those who have been joined to this part of Christ’s family through Holy Baptism, Holy Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, and from other places. We thank you for opening our hearts and minds again and again to your Word, and for feeding us abundantly with the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of your Son. Amen.
Now, we pray, be with David who leaves, and with us who stay. Keep us faithful to our Lord, loyal to our commitments in this parish; and grant that all of us, by drawing ever nearer to you, may always be close to each other in the communion of your saints. All this we ask for the sake of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.
(The Congregation joins in saying the following prayer.)
Almighty God, we thank you for feeding us with the holy food of the Body and Blood of your Son, and for uniting us through him in the fellowship of your Holy Spirit. We thank you for raising up among us faithful servants of your Word and Sacraments. We thank you especially for the work of David among us, and the presence of his family. Grant that both he and we may serve you in the days ahead, and always rejoice in your glory, and come at length in to your heavenly kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(The priest offers the following blessing.)
May God, who has led us in the paths of justice and truth, lead us still, and keep us in his ways. Amen.
May God, whose Son has loved us and given himself for us, love us still, and establish us in peace. Amen.
May God whose Spirit unites us and fill our hearts with joy, illumine us still, and strengthen us for the years to come. Amen.
And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you forever. Amen.
(The Recessional Hymn follows.)