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Eating with Dirty Hands
A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
August 30, 2009
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
As much as I appreciate the Letter to the
Ephesians, and as much as I enjoyed the seven weeks we spent “Reading Other
People’s Mail,” I must confess that it’s good to be back in the Gospel of Mark
this week, and back on the familiar ground of ancient Palestine, near the Sea of
Galilee, where Jesus has been preaching and teaching and healing. At the end of
chapter six Mark tells us that “Jesus and his disciples crossed the sea and
moored their boat at Gennesaret, but when they got out of the boat people at
once recognized Jesus and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the
sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages
or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the market places, and begged him that
they might touch even the fringe of his cloak, and all who touched it were
healed” (Mark 6:53-56, NRSV).
All that activity was bound to attract some
attention, and Mark tells us that it attracted the attention of some scribes and
Pharisees who came from Jerusalem to see what Jesus was up to. It is telling
that in a situation where the lame were leaping up off their mats, where lepers
were being cleansed, where the eyes of the blind were opened, and the ears of
the deaf unstopped, where people were being healed simply by touching the fringe
of a man’s cloak what the scribes and Pharisees notice is that Jesus’ disciples
do not always wash their hands thoroughly before they eat. And so they come to
Jesus saying, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the
elders, but eat with defiled hands?” This a serious matter for them, Mark tells
us, “for the
Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands,
thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from
the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that
they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles” (vss. 3-4). You
can picture them, can’t you? Washing their hands up to the elbows like surgeons
getting ready to operate, scrubbing the fruits and vegetables they bring home
from the market (because, really, who knows where they’ve been?), and pouring
boiling water over their cups, pots, and bronze kettles just to make sure they
are completely sanitized. It’s easy to make fun of the fussy rituals of the
scribes and Pharisees, isn’t it?
A little too easy.
We’ve been taught
what to think about the scribes and Pharisees by Jesus himself, and what he has
taught us is that these people are hypocrites. Read Matthew 23 sometime if you
want to know what he really thinks. In verse 13 of that chapter he says, “Woe
to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the
kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going
in, you stop them.” In verse 16 he says, “Woe to you, blind guides, who say,
‘Whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the
gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath.’” In verse 23 he says, “Woe to you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and
have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.”
In verse 27 he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you
are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they
are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” And then, in
verse 33, to sum things up, he says to the scribes and Pharisees, “You snakes,
you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”
Jesus has taught us
what to think of the scribes and Pharisees, and so, when some of them come to
him asking why his disciples don’t wash their hands before they eat we are
already suspicious. We doubt the sincerity of their question, and Jesus
confirms our suspicious. He says, “Isaiah was right about you hypocrites when
he prophesied, ‘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.’
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” And that was
the problem: through the years all these rituals and traditions had sprung up in
the Jewish religion until the people were more diligent about observing those
than they were about observing the Ten Commandments. It’s not in our reading
for today, but in verses 9-13 Jesus gives an example, noting that some of the
scribes and Pharisees, rather than caring for their elderly parents, would take
whatever might have been used for them and dedicate it to God instead. They
would create a kind of a trust fund, or a tax shelter, that worked to their
advantage while their poor parents scraped by on next to nothing. It was
perfectly legal, apparently, but it wasn’t very loving. Jesus says, “You see?
You’re happy to do what human law allows but you won’t even do what God’s law
commands: honor your father and mother.” And that’s just one example. Jesus
says, “You do many things like this.”
Here they are, making
a big fuss over hand washing while in their hearts they are wondering how they
can cash their dear old dad’s Social Security checks. It’s like Jesus says in
Matthew 23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the
outside of the cup, but inside it is full of greed and self-indulgence. You
blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may
become clean” (vss. 25-26). It’s the inside of the cup that’s the problem for
these people, but they keep thinking that if they can get the outside clean
enough nobody will notice. So they wash their hands like surgeons, and scrub
the fruits and vegetables they bring home from the market, and rinse their cups,
pots, and bronze kettles in boiling water. Everybody sees all that cleanliness
and assumes that it’s the same thing as godliness, everybody but Jesus that is.
He sees it and calls it what it is: hypocrisy. And we stand on the sidelines,
cheering. “Good for you, Jesus! You tell them.” And we pat ourselves on the
back, thankful that we’re not like those people, those Pharisees, those
hypocrites.
At least we don’t
think we are.
I’ve been reading a
book called Unchristian in which David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons report on
the interviews they have conducted with thousands of young people outside the
faith, asking them what they really think of Christians. The results are
unsettling. Most outsiders think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had
in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be. One
outsider from Mississippi said, “Christianity has become bloated with blind
followers who would rather repeat slogans than actually feel true compassion and
care” (p. 15). Not everyone was so blunt, but a vast majority of young people
outside the faith said that Christianity has become judgmental, antihomosexual,
too political, too focused on making converts, too sheltered, and right up near
the top of the list they said they thought Christians were hypocritical, that
they said one thing while doing another. And I wonder: do those young people
outside the church think of us the way we think of the Pharisees?
David Kinnaman says
that if that’s what they think about us there may be a good reason: our lives
don’t match our beliefs. His research firm did a study exploring more than one
hundred variables related to values, behaviors, and lifestyles in religious and
non-religious areas of life. They compared born-again believers to people who
did not identify themselves as Christians. They found that while born-again
believers owned more Bibles, went to church more often, and gave more money to
charity than those who did not identify themselves as Christians, their daily
choices, actions, and attitudes were essentially the same. In just one example
they learned that while 35 percent of Americans admitted to inappropriate sexual
behavior in a thirty day period, 30 percent of those who identified themselves
as born-again Christians admitted the same. Kinnaman says that in statistical
and practical terms they are no different from non-believers, that “if these
groups of people were in two separate rooms and you were asked to determine,
based on their lifestyles alone, which room contained the Christians, you would
be hard-pressed to find much difference” (p. 47).
But that’s just half
the problem, he says. It’s not just that our lifestyles don’t look very
“Christian,” it’s that we judge ourselves and others on the basis of lifestyle.
When Christians were asked what they thought was most important to pursue in
terms of their personal faith the number one answer was “lifestyle—doing the
right thing, being good, not sinning” (p. 50). Way down the list were things
like evangelism, worship, and service. So, if we say that what matters most to
us is living holy lives and then we live just like everybody else, well, that’s
the definition of hypocrisy, and those people who call us hypocrites are right.
We have become the very scribes and Pharisees we have ridiculed. So, what do
we do about that? How do we change the perceptions of those people out there
who think Christians say one thing and do another? More importantly, how do we
change Jesus’ perception of us? How do we make sure we have not become like
those Pharisees who wash the outside of the cup to make sure it sparkles and
shines while the inside is full of filth?
We focus on the
inside.
In her comments on
this passage New Testament scholar Pheme Perkins says that all this ritual
washing the Jews used to do was a way of setting themselves apart from others.
When God told them that they should be holy as he, the Lord their God, was holy
(Lev. 19:2) they took it to mean there should be a difference—a holy
difference—between them and their pagan neighbors. So they began to wash
differently, dress differently, wear their hair differently. They began to eat
different foods and take up different practices. They wanted to be sure that if
you put them in two separate rooms anybody would be able to tell the difference
between a Jew and a Jebusite. In the beginning they may have done it to
demonstrate their love for God, but by the time Jesus came along, for most of
them, it was just what was done, and in that way they are exactly like us,
aren’t they?
How many things do we
do in church simply because, “That’s the way it’s always been done”? How many
layers of tradition have built up over the years that have become sacred to us,
and how vigorously would we protest if anyone tried to change them? I’ve been
writing about these things on my blog and one reader commented: “Sometimes
I look around at our rituals, formalities, rules and regulations and I think to
myself…”My God, what have we done?” We’ve taken something so pure and simple and
we’ve muddied it up and made it almost unrecognizable. Impossible to be a part
of…. And then we wonder…why don’t people come to church anymore?” Well, if you
ask them, 85 percent of them will tell you that the church is full of
hypocrites, scribes and Pharisees who polish the outside of the cup but never
really look at what’s inside.
So, what do we do?
We look inside the cup, and when we do we may be shocked by what we see. Jesus
says it’s in there, in the human heart, that you find evil intentions,
fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly (Mk. 7:21-22). All this talk about
washing hands may only be a way of changing the subject, of diverting the
attention of others to what’s on the outside rather than what’s on the inside.
Because it doesn’t matter if you wash your hands. It doesn’t matter if you eat
non-kosher foods. What goes into your stomach will eventually pass on through
your system. But your heart isn’t like that. What goes into your heart can
stay there forever, and so you have to be diligent about keeping it pure.
“Clean the inside of the cup,” Jesus says, “so that the outside also may become
clean” (Matt. 23:26).
And that’s what we
have to do—by God’s grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit we have to wash
the cup of the human heart. We have to tell God how sorry we are that those
things have ended up in there and then, one by one, ask him to forgive our sins,
purge our hearts, make them clean again. By saying we’re sorry to the ones
we’ve wronged, by doing whatever we can to make things right, we can do our part
in scrubbing those dirty cups, and getting rid of any residue that is left
behind. And then, before anything else can take its place, we can hold our cups
under the waterfall of God’s love until they overflow with love for him, for one
another, and for our neighbors. We may even find that our hearts are full of
love for our non-Christians neighbors, the ones who call us hypocrites, and
while I can’t guarantee this I can be reasonably sure that if we love those
neighbors—if we really love them—they will no longer call us hypocrites. And I
think I can promise you this, too: that if the inside of the cup is clean the
outside will be clean, too—just the way Jesus said it would—whether we wash our
hands or not.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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