Trinity 12
03/09/06
Readings: Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-9; James 1: 17-27; Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23
When I was a child my parents always told me to wash my hands before a meal. I
didn’t understand it at the time and didn’t much like it either. But when I
worked in a restaurant for a while washing my hands before working with food was
a very important habit to practice. And when I later worked in hospital wards
hygiene was important then too. Good hygiene can save lives in those sorts of
environments.
My parents also taught me about washing fresh fruit and veg. Store bought items
often still have traces of insecticide on the skin, and home grown items might
come straight from the earth and need the mud cleaning off them before you eat
them.
And on the subject of cleaning pots, I once heard a story about a student who
didn’t bother cleaning his saucepan, he just waited until the baked bean juice
dried onto the pan then peeled it off in one lump – I really hope that one was
made up!
On the surface it looks like the Pharisees had the right idea, they were into
hygiene; they washed themselves, their food, and their cooking and eating
utensils. No chance of food poisoning in a Pharisee home. But it wasn’t really
about being clean, following all these traditions; it was about ritual purity,
being clean before God. A good idea, you’d think, and Christians still have
similar traditions. When Pamela, Don or Stephen lead communion they wash their
hands before they serve the bread and wine, but that cleaning isn’t about
personal hygiene – they are making themselves symbolically clean before God.
Some churches have a bowl of blessed water at the door and people can dip their
fingers and cross themselves; again, a symbolic cleansing. And all this is fine,
as long as you know where the symbol ends and the reality begins.
The Pharisees, in our reading from Mark’s Gospel, had forgotten that essential
difference. They had started to see their traditions of ritual purity on the
same level with God’s laws as Moses taught them.
So, when the Pharisees questioned why Jesus’s disciples didn’t wash their hands
before eating (“why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the
elders,” they asked, “but eat with defiled hands?”), they weren’t concerned for
their health, they were trying to catch Jesus out – again.
But Jesus is ready with an answer, a quotation from the prophecies of Isaiah
which you can find in Isaiah chapter 29: “This people honours me with their
lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching
human precepts as doctrines.” They’d done exactly what Moses told them not to
do: they’d added to the laws, added their own interpretations, which gradually
started to be taken as the law.
God gave his people just laws with the intention that by following them they’d
have a better life. People in the surrounding nations would look at Israel as a
“wise and discerning people”; foreigners would look at Israel and be amazed that
this people had a God who cared enough to give them these just laws, a God who
was near them when they called to him; Israel would be set apart from other
nations by having a God who was actively involved in their lives and they were
actively doing his will in the world. Because, after all, those laws can be
summed up as ‘love God and love your neighbour’ – that’s the kind of law that
can make a difference in people’s lives.
But it won’t make a difference to anyone if we just sit here on a Sunday and
listen to the words, nod politely, and then think about something else until the
same time next week. As James tells us, we need to “be doers of the word, and
not merely hearers”; actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes – we
need to act in accordance with what we’ve heard, otherwise we’re not loving God
or our neighbour. We’re not making a difference at all.
Jesus uses his debate with the Pharisees as a lesson for the gathered crowds:
“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: …and they defile a person”.
So, if we want to make a difference we need to start with ourselves. The church
isn’t a model community; the church collects sinners as a hospital collects sick
people, but there are always plenty more outside waiting to be diagnosed. The
church is a community where we can confront our weakness and badness and deal
with it amongst like-minded people.
James says we should “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger”. It’s
not easy though, and there are so many misunderstandings that come from not
hearing what people are trying to tell us, and arguments that come from saying
the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person. James says that being
religious in words only is useless: like looking in a mirror and, as you turn
away, forgetting what you’ve seen; like the Pharisees with clean hands, but
unclean hearts.
We should get rid of immorality and evil and “humbly accept the word planted in
[us], which can save [us]” (NIV); we should study “the law of liberty, and
persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act [and] will be blessed
in [our] doing.” The persevering is very important, because it isn’t always easy
to love our neighbour, or ourselves, or God. But for James, faith and good works
go together. By doing good we can become good. “Every generous act of giving… is
from above, coming down from the Father”. And God wants nothing more or less
than to write his law on our hearts, so that our actions will flow from our love
for him.
James concludes that real religion “that is pure and undefiled before God, the
Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep
oneself from being polluted by the world.” (NIV). Steer clear of temptations and
evils in the world around us and stand along side those who have no one else to
look after their interests – just as Jesus did, and does, for us and through us.
I’ll finish with words from the Message translation of the Bible, “In simple
humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a
salvation-garden of your life.”
And may that garden be a place for our own salvation, but also somewhere our
neighbours and those in need will find Jesus walking with them.
Amen.