Here is tomorrow’s sermon.
Introduction
If you want to know the cause of the water shortage, I have the answer. It’s not July’s heat wave of not-so-blessèd memory. It’s not global warming.
It’s our daughter. No, at three and a half she isn’t old enough yet to be booking the bathroom for endless baths, showers and personal pampering. But ever since she learned to take herself to the toilet she has developed a fascination with washing her hands. Debbie says she has her first Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! If we’re not careful, the tap would drain our water tank and she likes to use enough soap to bathe an elephant.
And we have a Gospel story today about washing hands. But we would be very much mistaken if we thought this was a story about personal hygiene. It’s about ritual washing. It’s about Jesus having no regard for an oral tradition that had developed in Judaism to fill in the missing gaps where the laws given to Moses didn’t cover every eventuality:
‘In areas where the Law was silent the tradition was vocal, drawing the conclusions felt to be implicit in the mandates of the written code. The result was a vast legal complex … [that] was regarded as binding upon all Israel.’
[William Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p245]
For disregarding this tradition, Jesus was in trouble. For undermining it, he was regarded as a threat. For rejecting the tradition – well, he was spiritually seditious.
So our story is one of conflict. But how might a dispute between Jesus and the God Police have anything to say to us? Let’s follow the story and see.
1. Charge
In mid-June Debbie and I were elated when our next door neighbours put up their house for sale. We have been progressively less elated every time we come back up the drive and still see the sign saying ‘For sale’ rather than ‘Sold’.
We were even less happy four weeks ago when the husband came knocking on our door. He had noticed oil marks on his precious drive when he came home from work that afternoon. They weren’t there when he left in the morning, he said. It must be our fault. How could he sell his house when we were making the place look like a council estate?
We knew it wasn’t us, but last week he complained to the circuit about us. He also told the circuit (not us) that he didn’t like the fact that we take our black wheelie bin out on Sunday night, not early on Monday morning. He has taken to moving it off the edge of the drive onto the pavement – in clear contravention of council instructions and in our opinion causing a dangerous obstruction for the elderly people who walk along our road to and from their residential home.
Perhaps he thought that a bunch of Christians would roll over meekly. If he thought that, he was wrong. We have rejected his allegations and our superintendent minister has supported our stance.
Well, Jesus didn’t roll over easily at the accusations thrown at him. He is challenged for his disciples’ failure to follow an oral tradition that was essential to the convictions of the Pharisees [ibid, p 247]. And as far as Jesus is concerned, they are hypocrites. You don’t roll over for hypocrites. If your obsession is with keeping up appearances by outwardly following tradition but don’t match that with a heart that is close to God [verse 6] then don’t expect Jesus to be quiet.
And the parallels are there in church life. How easy is it for us to major on minors and neglect what is of prime importance, namely our relationship with God (from which everything of worth flows)? Think about some of the contentious issues Christians sometimes argue about and you being to wonder whether Jesus might not have a few words for us. I think back with pain to my first appointment and remember some of the things that made me unpopular in certain circles:
I was told that only the minister was ever allowed to stand behind the communion rail (although this rule used to be miraculously suspended for the flower arrangers). There was a militant insistence that you didn’t kneel at the communion rail until everybody else was there – despite the fact that the church building was cramped and it took not so much communion stewards, more like traffic police to manage the flow of people returning to their pews and those going forward. You weren’t allowed to put nails in a wooden cross on Good Friday. You couldn’t pick hymns from anything other than Hymns And Psalms. And you certainly couldn’t suggest ripping out the pews and making a worship area more flexible.
None of these objections, in my opinion, had anything to do with Gospel imperatives. But they had everything to do with promoting style over substance. Never once did any of those who raised their loud protests against me want to know more about prayer or about sharing their faith.
It’s altogether too easy to put on an impressive outward show. We can fool not just those around us, but we tell the lies so often that we end up deceiving even ourselves. But we cannot fool God. One day sooner or later we discover that the Jesus whom we assume endorses our religious activities in fact our most fervent opponent.
So let us ask searching questions about our priorities. Are they about nurturing the heart towards God and sharing God’s heart for a broken world? Or are they about maintaining structures and putting on a good show? Only one of these approaches will give pleasure to God.
2. Counter-Charge
Jesus goes on the offensive: ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,’ he says (verse 8). Not only that, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (verse 9). In the battle between human tradition and God’s commandments, God loses, says Jesus. And yet you claim you are his most faithful followers and representatives!
To prove his point, Jesus goes on to adduce a shocking case. The Ten Commandments say we should honour our parents. A particular expression of that is when they are elderly and infirm. Yet some in Jesus’ day diverted some money that would have helped their parents by dishonestly dedicating it to religious work.
So do we use our traditions to negate the commands of God, as Jesus charged the Pharisees? I know my father thought that, and once got in trouble with a superintendent minister for suggesting that Methodism placed more emphasis on ‘CPD’ [the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church – our nearest equivalent to Anglican canon law]. Dad thought we had little moral superiority over the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned! Certainly at college we faced an exam in CPD but not in biblical or doctrinal matters. And Methodism can certainly get hung up on matters that are natural consequences of the Gospel at times. It was popular to say at college, ‘You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism’.
But more seriously, do we invent traditions and practices in order to avoid the Gospel and commands of God? I don’t know that we’re always so blatantly devious as to invent a tradition like ‘Corban’ (verse 11), which sounds like a religious tax dodge. But I think we put other things in place so that we miss the imperative of the Gospel.
What do I mean? Well sometimes it’s about the expectations, atmosphere and culture of a congregation. The old criticism that churches can be little more than religious clubs is a serious allegation and it has a lot of truth behind it. We make for a lopsided church that is all about care for one another but has little active focus upon the world – except for the enthusiasts. I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t concentrate on people outside the faith if it offends the faithful. Yet we have spent decades concentrating on the faithful and where has it got us?
We so fill our time with social activities that the ‘club’ epithet is altogether too well-deserved. We hide in perpetual business meetings. Or we duplicate within the church things that are done perfectly well outside but we prefer to go for the church version and stay in our little castle, behind the moat and with the drawbridge up. In all these ways and more we create a culture – our traditions – that helps us negate the commands of God.
All these reasons and more are why I called a year ago for a simpler structure for church. What we basically need in church life for the sake of the Gospel is fairly simple stuff. We gather on Sundays for worship and inspiration. We meet in small groups for worship, pastoral care, learning about the faith and mission. We hold such other meetings as are necessary for business and oversight. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we need. Most stuff beyond these bare necessities is extraneous and serves either deliberately or unwittingly to keep us away from the mission of God.
I believe Jesus calls us to a tough choice between the unhealthy traditional culture that strangles the spiritual life like a weed and a simpler, more radically prioritised vision of church that is set free to share in God’s mission and be faithful to the Gospel. Which way will we go?
3. True Defilement
Sometimes you can’t allow yourself just to be caught up in a perpetual argument. Not long ago I was being regularly attacked on the Internet by a militant atheist. For a while I answered his points, but eventually it became clear that an ongoing debate was going to be fruitless, because his attitude was arrogant and he had little desire to listen.
And it strikes me it’s a bit like that with Jesus in this story. He has his spat with the scribes and Pharisees, but after having answered their charge and countered with his own allegations, he turns away. In verse 14 he stops talking to them and starts addressing the crowd. Rather than being bogged down in a tedious argument, he uses the disagreement to make a teaching point to those who are listening and watching. In a way, he’s giving an answer to the scribes and Pharisees if only they would listen, too.
And his point is basic and stark: true spiritual defilement isn’t about failing to wash your hands in the same way that a priest would, nor is it about clean and unclean food. At best those are but outward signs of the inner state. And it’s the heart that matters. For there is the evidence of whether we follow the commandments of God.
‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 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 things come from within, and they defile a person.’
[verses 20-23]
Material purity isn’t the issue: moral purity is. It’s right through the Scriptures, yet it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to any of Jesus’ hearers – religious professionals, general crowd or his own disciples. You can keep all the religious rules you like and look good in the eyes of those who find such things impressive. But none of those rituals on their own will cleanse the pollution of the heart. And straightening out inner corruption is a much higher priority than how we wash our hands or what food we eat.
Or in our terms, you might say that living a winsome, holy life is the priority, rather than worrying about the rules of our denomination or putting on a good religious show that impresses only the shallow.
And it isn’t just about the big issues. Yes, we are to abstain from violence. We are to keep the marriage bed pure – Jesus’ prohibitions against both fornication and adultery mean he upholds a sexual ethic that maintains fidelity within the marriage covenant and celibacy outside.
But he also includes the everyday matters like ‘envy, slander, pride [and] folly’. And maybe these are the ones where our witness is most regularly compromised. In envy we look altogether too much like our consumerist world. In slander, we speak with sly digs, character assassinations and tawdry gossip that make us like small-scale versions of the gutter press. In pride and folly we forget our need of grace and that our boasting should only ever be of Christ.
The snag for me in the reading is that Jesus doesn’t propose an answer. That comes elsewhere in his teaching and in the writings of Paul, John and others. And it’s the usual basic Christian stuff about confession, repentance and co-operating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
But maybe Mark ends the story here deliberately to challenge us. The radical message of Jesus is that the ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ approach that makes us look like real-life Hyacinth Buckets is neither funny nor sad. It’s an outrage against the Gospel. He is challenging us to prioritise on the call to holiness and the mission of God.
Too much of our society today is all about surface and little about substance. What hope is there if we go down that road? Our world needs a radical, courageous and deep challenge from those of us who claim to be the disciples of Jesus to go below the surface and address the heart.
We need spiritual heart surgery, and so does our world.
Big Circumstance 
What Do You Think?