I spent
a week up in Vermont with my newborn grandson recently. I will state with utter
and complete conviction that he is the most adorable baby ever… just as I said
the same thing about each of my children when they were newborn and just as I
said the same thing about each of my other four grandchildren when they were
newborn. Grandmothers, you know?
Like
most newborns, Wiley had that little umbilical cord stump, about an inch and a
half long, slowly drying up. Sort of yucky to look at, and it was getting - how shall I put this? - ripe before it finally fell off. And when it did, Wiley’s mother said,
“well, now we can give him a bath. The doctor told me no baths before that was
all healed up.”
Now I
had spent a good bit of time with him doing things like changing diapers, but
when she said that, a little voice in my head said, “I’m amazed that he doesn’t
smell stinky with no bath for two weeks, particularly with those diapers he’s
been soiling.” But the only scent that he exuded was that beautiful milky soft
smell of newborn baby. Is there any smell like that in the world? It’s better
than new car smell, that’s for sure! Yes, we wiped off the dirty bits when
necessary, but despite no bath, Wiley smelled clean and sweet.
Would
that we could stay that way! We people who are no longer newborn have to follow
a different pattern. We need our daily wash-ups, otherwise our aroma will not
be sweet. We sweat, we get dirt on us, we eat something that disagrees with
us…I go no further down that road – you know what I mean. We have to work a
little harder to get clean.
Clean…what
is clean? That’s the question that’s posed in today’s Gospel. The Pharisees
were offended by what they saw as unclean behavior on the part of Jesus and his
disciples, who didn’t wash up before their meal. Now this was a big no-no for
the Pharisees, because, as the evangelist Mark suggests, this was part of
Torah, the LAW. You were supposed to wash up.
A little
sidebar here: this is not about the Pharisees only being about rule-following
and being the designated enforcers of the rules. It’s more subtle
than that. The biblical scholar Elisabeth Johnson writes:
“[The Pharisees] understood that God’s choosing and calling of Israel was a gift. They also
understood that God gave them the law as a gift, to order their lives as God’s
people. Their observance of the law was meant to be a witness to the nations
around them, to give glory to God.
In the book of Exodus,
before the giving of the law, God tells the people of Israel that they are to
be “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” in the midst of the nations around
them (Exodus 19:6). The Pharisees took this calling to be a priestly kingdom
and holy nation very seriously. They interpreted the laws concerning priests
serving in the temple to apply to all God’s people and all aspects of life. As
priests serving in the temple were required to wash their hands before entering
the holy place or offering a sacrifice, the Pharisees believed that all Jews
should wash their hands before meals as a way of making mealtime sacred,
bringing every aspect of life under the canopy of God’s law.
These “traditions of the
elders” were seen as a way to “build a fence around the law,” to preserve the
Jewish faith and way of life, especially in the midst of Roman occupation. The
concern of the Pharisees and scribes when they saw Jesus’ disciples eating with
unwashed hands was about something much more serious than proper hygiene. They
suspected that the carelessness of Jesus and his disciples with regard to the
traditions of the elders threatened to undermine respect for God’s law.”
So they really had a legitimate concern: were
the followers of this new rabbi Jesus flouting the law in this, and would this
mean that they would flout the law in other ways? For the people of Israel,
oppressed by Rome, always under siege, Torah was not only a sign of God’s
favor, it was a daily reminder of the fact that they were a particular and
particularly blessed nation belonging to God in the midst of this crazy world
they lived in. It was a survival tool in difficult times, because it reminded
them that they WERE different, and they shouldn’t do things like the rest of
the world.
And yet…was this the only way that they could
signify their identity with and following of God?
This is the point that Jesus raises in his
response to them. The LAW doesn’t stand alone. The LAW is one part of what it
means to follow God, to be God’s people. But if it becomes an end unto itself,
it’s just not good.
Jesus points out the sad truth: the LAW doesn’t
address the state of the heart. God gave the LAW to govern the heart, not just
set random rules out there. If you follow the LAW and your heart isn’t it, what
good is the LAW? If you’re merely checking boxes, your heart can smell to high heaven even
if your hands are washed.
And here’s the thing: the Pharisees have allowed
the LAW to become something that isolates them from others, to make them extra
special. “We’re clean and they’re not,” we can imagine them thinking.
But are we really clean? And are others
really not?
We like to think, because we showed up here this
morning, that we’re the clean crew…and maybe we passed by someone walking to
brunch over at the restaurant around the corner instead of coming here and we think “we’re good and
they’re not.” We may be following the letter of the LAW but is our heart in it?
And Jesus keeps saying, “it’s the state of your
heart that matters, not merely adherence to the LAW. There are all sorts of
ugly things that might be in your heart other than God, and you might be
following Torah in a thousand ways but it’s for naught, because the defiling
thing, the ugly thing, is sitting there in your heart making it all smell just
like a dirty diaper.”
Well, maybe Jesus didn’t say that bit about the
diaper, but you get my point.
So does this mean we don’t have to follow the
rules of basic hygiene? Does it mean that we don’t need to show up at church on
a Sunday morning? No, that’s not what Jesus says. It’s about the way we take
what God has given us – God’s wisdom conveyed through his word, the spiritual
joy that we feel in God’s presence, the food and drink for our souls that we
share at this table – and how we respond to it. It’s about knowing that, given
these gifts, we cannot desire NOT to share what we’ve learned, to offer these
gifts to others, to serve…in other words, as our reading from the Letter of
James says, to be “doers of the word.” And when we do that, it’s not about mere
obedience to a law. It’s also not about measuring whether or not those whom we
serve are clean enough to deserve it. It’s not about whether or not they’ve
followed the LAW well enough. It’s about the gift of Jesus, given to us despite
our own often unclean hearts. If we measured our own worthiness, we might not
look and smell as clean as we’d like, but the best way to address that aroma is
not a baby wipe, it’s Gospel love. Love without measure of worth, love without
judgment, love without shame. Jesus gave it to us, this law of love. Now it’s our turn. And won’t
that smell sweet indeed?
Amen.
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| Ain't he sweet? |
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