We’ve got a difference of opinion going on around here. Which, frankly, isn’t all that unusual. But it seems significant today. Maybe because of the little encounter that Jesus has in our text for this weekend. The difference of opinion is around the subject of clean up. When my daughter Maddie asks if she can fix herself a snack or a meal we usually say “yes, as long as you clean up.” “Sure,” she says. And later I’ll ask her if she cleaned up and she’ll say “yes.” And I’ll go in the kitchen and it isn’t cleaned up, and I’ll grumble while I do her dishes. (I know I should make her come and do it) When I ask her again, she’ll reply that she did indeed do the clean up. I will say, “no you didn’t, I did. I had to wash the dishes or put them in the dishwasher so that they can be cleaned.” “Oh, that,” she’ll respond, “well, I put them in the sink and ran water in them.”
How clean is clean? What constitutes clean? Who decides? The Pharisees were pretty sure they knew clean when they saw it and they were equally sure that Jesus and his gang didn’t know it. They not only knew it, they were experts in it. They were specialists. It was their area of ultimate competence. So, when the disciples didn’t measure up to their standards they decided they had to, no it was their duty, their reason for being, to mention it. And here’s what happened.
Mark 7:1-8 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 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.) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" 6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.' 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
Wow, did Jesus pick a fight here or what? Seems like those Pharisees asked a legitimate question and Jesus came back with both barrels. Or what?
Well, first of all, this isn’t about hygiene. Let’s just get this out of the way at the beginning. The Pharisees aren’t germ-o-phobes who are complaining about the ickiness of the disciples sitting down at table with grime under their fingernails. Jesus isn’t siding with kids everywhere who slump their shoulders when mom sends them back to wash their hands before they can eat, even though they are starving and are convinced their hands are clean enough. Sorry kids - go wash your hands.
No, this is a battle about ritual, an argument about liturgy, a war about worship. Not the “should we use an organ or guitars” battle that occupies our thinking these days. This is about life long worship. This is about whether you acknowledge God when you are off the pew as much as when you are in it. The Pharisees weren’t asking about table habits, but about life choices. “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition..?” That’s what they are asking Jesus, about living without God. They didn’t make the proper acknowledgment of God in this dining moment (and remember that eating was one of the most holy and most ritualized activities of the people of God), so they probably didn’t do it anywhere. They were living defiled.
And that word sounds worse in our translations than it might. The word is in Greek is koine, which usually translates as common. They were eating with common hands, instead of the holy hands that God wanted. They were eating with hands fit for normal stuff instead of the divine stuff of God’s Presence. No wonder they were offended, no wonder they were trying to get Jesus - who was becoming something of a celebrity and therefore potentially influencing people everywhere (Jesus didn’t wash his hands, why do I have to wash my hands?) - to get his disciples back on the right track. Give them a break, they were just trying to help. Jesus resorts to name calling.
Actually, it was descriptive teaching. Jesus called them actors. They were worried about the power of his celebrity, he was worried about their acting abilities. He says, you are just going through the motions. You are performing these elaborate rituals, using buckets of water and showy gestures and genuflections and contortions and it doesn’t mean a thing to you except as a performance to get through. You’ve turned what could be a simple ordering of the heart, a simple grace before a meal, into a Las Vegas routine complete with big band and sparkly outfits.
The commandment of God is to bring your heart, your being, your essential self as an offering, setting aside all that would distract you from that moment, from that gifting. The human tradition consists of all the ways we can think of to help us do that. The churches we build and the spaces we create, the words that we say and the rituals we perform, the disciplines we take up to help shape our hearts after the patterns that Christ gave us. Those human traditions are good things. But sometimes they get in the way, sometimes they become more important than the relationship they are designed to help foster. And we argue about which ones are best, or necessary, or helpful, or universal, twisting ourselves up in knots about the traditions, the behaviors that don’t matter all that much - except that they have fed people at various times.
What works for you? That is part of the question of this passage. What brings you, heart and soul, body and mind, into the presence of God? What is clean enough for you? Or for us as a church, for us as twenty-first century Christians in this culture, what are the rituals, the behaviors, the practices that will shape us into the disciples were are called to be? That we want to be?
What is clean enough? Maybe we need more water, like the Pharisees, maybe we need to practically bathe ourselves before we seek audience with God. Or maybe it is just a touch, or even a sight of the water in our Baptism duck (long story) at the entrance of our sanctuary that brings us into that presence.
Jesus never complained about the practice of handwashing. He never said you are wasting your time, silly Pharisees. He was pointing out that they weren’t invested in the practice they had devised. They weren’t present in the very discipline designed to make them present. An apt warning for them, and for us. Are we here? When we bow our heads before a meal, or alongside our beds, or in our pews on a bright and sunny Sunday morning, are we present? Are we making ourselves clean enough to be present? Or just going through the motions one more time?
Some time after our conversation about what constitutes cleaning up after yourself, Maddie stopped me as I came out of the bathroom. She looked me in the eye and said “Did you wash your hands, daddy?”
Are you clean enough, prepared enough, present enough for worship? Or should you head back in to the water once more?
Shalom,
Derek
How clean is clean? What constitutes clean? Who decides? The Pharisees were pretty sure they knew clean when they saw it and they were equally sure that Jesus and his gang didn’t know it. They not only knew it, they were experts in it. They were specialists. It was their area of ultimate competence. So, when the disciples didn’t measure up to their standards they decided they had to, no it was their duty, their reason for being, to mention it. And here’s what happened.
Mark 7:1-8 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 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.) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" 6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.' 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
Wow, did Jesus pick a fight here or what? Seems like those Pharisees asked a legitimate question and Jesus came back with both barrels. Or what?
Well, first of all, this isn’t about hygiene. Let’s just get this out of the way at the beginning. The Pharisees aren’t germ-o-phobes who are complaining about the ickiness of the disciples sitting down at table with grime under their fingernails. Jesus isn’t siding with kids everywhere who slump their shoulders when mom sends them back to wash their hands before they can eat, even though they are starving and are convinced their hands are clean enough. Sorry kids - go wash your hands.
No, this is a battle about ritual, an argument about liturgy, a war about worship. Not the “should we use an organ or guitars” battle that occupies our thinking these days. This is about life long worship. This is about whether you acknowledge God when you are off the pew as much as when you are in it. The Pharisees weren’t asking about table habits, but about life choices. “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition..?” That’s what they are asking Jesus, about living without God. They didn’t make the proper acknowledgment of God in this dining moment (and remember that eating was one of the most holy and most ritualized activities of the people of God), so they probably didn’t do it anywhere. They were living defiled.
And that word sounds worse in our translations than it might. The word is in Greek is koine, which usually translates as common. They were eating with common hands, instead of the holy hands that God wanted. They were eating with hands fit for normal stuff instead of the divine stuff of God’s Presence. No wonder they were offended, no wonder they were trying to get Jesus - who was becoming something of a celebrity and therefore potentially influencing people everywhere (Jesus didn’t wash his hands, why do I have to wash my hands?) - to get his disciples back on the right track. Give them a break, they were just trying to help. Jesus resorts to name calling.
Actually, it was descriptive teaching. Jesus called them actors. They were worried about the power of his celebrity, he was worried about their acting abilities. He says, you are just going through the motions. You are performing these elaborate rituals, using buckets of water and showy gestures and genuflections and contortions and it doesn’t mean a thing to you except as a performance to get through. You’ve turned what could be a simple ordering of the heart, a simple grace before a meal, into a Las Vegas routine complete with big band and sparkly outfits.
The commandment of God is to bring your heart, your being, your essential self as an offering, setting aside all that would distract you from that moment, from that gifting. The human tradition consists of all the ways we can think of to help us do that. The churches we build and the spaces we create, the words that we say and the rituals we perform, the disciplines we take up to help shape our hearts after the patterns that Christ gave us. Those human traditions are good things. But sometimes they get in the way, sometimes they become more important than the relationship they are designed to help foster. And we argue about which ones are best, or necessary, or helpful, or universal, twisting ourselves up in knots about the traditions, the behaviors that don’t matter all that much - except that they have fed people at various times.
What works for you? That is part of the question of this passage. What brings you, heart and soul, body and mind, into the presence of God? What is clean enough for you? Or for us as a church, for us as twenty-first century Christians in this culture, what are the rituals, the behaviors, the practices that will shape us into the disciples were are called to be? That we want to be?
What is clean enough? Maybe we need more water, like the Pharisees, maybe we need to practically bathe ourselves before we seek audience with God. Or maybe it is just a touch, or even a sight of the water in our Baptism duck (long story) at the entrance of our sanctuary that brings us into that presence.
Jesus never complained about the practice of handwashing. He never said you are wasting your time, silly Pharisees. He was pointing out that they weren’t invested in the practice they had devised. They weren’t present in the very discipline designed to make them present. An apt warning for them, and for us. Are we here? When we bow our heads before a meal, or alongside our beds, or in our pews on a bright and sunny Sunday morning, are we present? Are we making ourselves clean enough to be present? Or just going through the motions one more time?
Some time after our conversation about what constitutes cleaning up after yourself, Maddie stopped me as I came out of the bathroom. She looked me in the eye and said “Did you wash your hands, daddy?”
Are you clean enough, prepared enough, present enough for worship? Or should you head back in to the water once more?
Shalom,
Derek
No comments:
Post a Comment