Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, from Proper 17 (22).
I refer to myself as a “recovering Pharisee” on the About me page. This might be a good week to explain why.
Mark 7 opens with a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Such conflicts appear often in the Gospels. One might have expected Jesus to go around yelling at sinners, especially considering that there were so very many of them on hand in the mash-up of Jewish, Greek and Roman culture that pervaded Galilee during the time of Jesus. There were pagan temples and idols and spas everywhere. The Galilean capital, Tiberias, managed to be unclean in its entirety, having been built atop an old graveyard. But Jesus embraced the region and its many Jewish sell-outs, most notably the tax collector Matthew. What seems to have made Jesus angriest, Frederick Buechner notes, “was hypocrisy and irrelevance, and thus it is the Pharisees who come in for his strongest attacks, the good people who should have known better. ‘You brood of vipers,’ he called them. ‘How can you speak good when you are evil?'”
On this particular occasion, the Pharisees had noticed that some of Jesus’ disciples were eating with unwashed hands, a violation of Jewish law. Mark – who, tradition holds, wrote his Gospel mainly to Christians in Rome who were unfamiliar with Jewish ways – pauses to explain that, “The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.”
Whether Mark intended them to or not, I can’t say, but his words invite us to sneer at the Pharisees’ feverish devotion to such customs. For for the sake of your digestive tract, I do hope you wash your hands before meals and eat off of clean plates. But the Pharisees, Mark’s text implies, thought doing so made them better than everyone else, and they had no reservations about saying so.
I resemble the Pharisees a lot more than I like to admit, though. You might, too. They were, after all, the fine religious people of their time. They went to worship services every week. Every line of scripture was at least familiar to them. Surrounded by a corrupt and violent society, they saw devotion to their beliefs and traditions as vital to preserving faith in, and fidelity to, the one, true God. Many Christians in many churches would assert the same about themselves today.
So what was Jesus’ problem with them? If they were, as Buechner says, “good people who should have known better,” what, exactly, should they have known better than than they did?
Pharisees like me tend to see rightness with God as a condition we have to maintain. We love verses like John 3:16 and hymns like “Amazing Grace,” but it never really sinks into our heads that God simply made us right with him through a maneuver that had everything to do with Jesus and nothing to do with our behavior. As St. Paul wrote, in words that moved Martin Luther and touched off the Protestant Reformation:
“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
We Pharisees don’t get that. Instead, we keep working and working and working to keep God pleased with us. And since we’re so afraid of his displeasure, we figure you ought to be afraid of it, too, and we have not reservations about telling you so. If you refuse to be as afraid as we are, well, we consider you part of the problem, and we’ll treat you as such. In doing that, we’ll forget all about treating you like the brother or sister you are. Perhaps most closely to the point Jesus makes in this painfully pointy passage, we consider ourselves bastions of righteousness under siege by a corrupt world, and we’re not about to take in the likes of you and all the sinfulness we think you would bring with you.
Jesus bluntly tells us Pharisees in this passage that we can stop worrying about letting defilement in, because it got in a long time ago and has been spewing out of us ever since, adding to our guilt each time. Meanwhile, what should be coming out of us isn’t. Jesus doesn’t get into that aspect of the problem here, but he does elsewhere. “A new command I give you: Love one another,” Jesus tells his disciples in John 13:34-35, only hours before his arrest. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And in Matt. 25: 31-46, the sheep on Jesus’ right had showed love and compassion, while the goats on his left had withheld both, and neither group seems to have been all that aware of what it was doing.
So, what comes out of us – or doesn’t – reveals what’s going on inside of us, and before we yuck it up over the stupid rituals of these wicked Pharisees, perhaps we should consider whether we’re truly any different from them.
While jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, in April of 1963 for leading a march without a permit, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. penned a response to a statement eight moderate white clergy had published in The Birmingham News criticizing the march and other demonstrations. If his words to Birmingham’s white religious leaders – good people who should have known better – don’t sting at least a little, we would be wise to wonder why. A sampling:
“I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.
“I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.’ In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’ And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.
“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'”
I am a recovering Pharisee because I grew up as a good kid. I memorized my Bible verses and listened quietly to the lesson instead of fidgeting or talking and gave the right answers when asked. You would have loved having me in your class, and you would have urged all the other kids to be more like me. But somewhere along the way, I started to get the idea that I really was better than the others, and I began to protect the goodness I thought I had in me by shutting out, and even attacking, those whom I judged less committed to right living than I was. My church offered everything I needed to live apart from the messiness of the world. Sinners were welcome to come to us and become like us, but we weren’t about to go to them. We put up barriers, like a dress code that forbade long hair on males, pants on females and blue jeans on anyone, that were ostensibly about protecting decency but were at least as much about discouraging the poor and otherwise different from joining us. Minorities were few, and there were subtle, unchallenged rules about mixing with them.
The Pharisees of Jesus’ time would have welcomed me, and I, them.
It’s none of your business exactly how God finally managed to confront me with my moral inadequacy. What matters is that he did, and I finally saw that my only hope lay in the the type of righteousness St. Paul described, a righteousness apart from the law, a righteousness through faith, and faith alone. But I doubt I’ll ever get fully rid of that old Pharisee on this side of heaven. I still default to judgment and self-righteousness, to fear of God’s wrath instead of faith in God’s love. Recovery is an ongoing thing, and thank God for grace.
Next week: Proper 18 (23)
