Which Side are you on?
Proper 17: Deuteronomy
4.1-2, 6-9; James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
It is the job of the Gospels to disturb, but it’s
almost tedious to indicate how political and theological presuppositions are
continually turned upside-down in the topsy-turvy world of Christ’s Kingdom.
Today in the reading from Mark’s Gospel, we are
thrown into a scene where Jesus is meeting his most persistent and regular
antagonists, the Scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem. If they were actors, they would be complaining that they
were always setting up the jokes for Jesus to deliver the killer replies.
Jesus, also has the advantage here in the shape of
Mark, who is an expert at setting the scene for his most famous verbal
victories. The reader even gets
the cues about how they should respond too.
The antagonists appear and notice that some of the
disciples are eating with ‘defiled hands’. They speak their lines, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to
the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? And Jesus makes
his response, all served up with a good helping of Markan gloss, which explains
in a thoroughly stereotyped way, that the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not
eat unless they wash their hands.
Jesus then goes onto suggest that they are all Obsessive compulsive with
their cleanliness in the kitchen.
An unfortunate by-product of this is that devout
Jewish practices are seen as quaint as best or pointless as worst. Mark seems to completely ignore the
fact that these practices were important for the Jewish people in the face of
repeated invasion and subjugation.
He sometimes turns the words of Jesus into a cheap
put-down, disconnecting Jesus from the issues. In this, the twenty first century, we can forget that Jesus
was himself a Jewish teacher, subject to the law, and closely associated to the
1st century Jewish reform movements. The early church eventually became disassociated from
Judaism, Jesus never did.
And Jesus said ‘there
is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that
come out are what defile’.
The question is though, who is doing the
defiling? On a day like today, as
many clergy will be preaching on how we shouldn’t love tradition too much, and
should embrace proper biblical teaching, whatever that may be, we seem to have
lost direction somehow. Today,
people will use the readings to preach about how we shouldn’t have what are
seen as ‘traditional’ practices, and order within the church because it is what
the Pharisees would do. Many
others will preach about how the church needs to change to become more
relevant, but relevant to whom?
That’s nice but it’s not even close.
I’ve been following the fortunes of the Russian Punk
Band, ‘Pussy Riot’. You may remember from the news that they
performed a song a month ago. They
said it was a prayer, for Vladimir Putin’s downfall. The only difficulty was that the performance took place in
Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow.
They were duly arrested and eventually sentenced to two years
imprisonment each for hooliganism.
Their
concern was that there is an over-identification between the religious and the
powers that be.
You might also remember that when the Occupy protests were taking, and a
protesters camp was set up outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, Canon Giles Fraser
made them welcome, but the church in general did not. The Occupy
movement was concerned with fairness and they have made their concerns known.
Their
concern was that there is an over-identification between the religious and the
powers that be.
And back to the Gospel reading, we have the Son of
God, creating havoc and in a rather dramatic account from Mark, he is making
his point to the assembled Pharisees and Scribes.
His
concern was that there is an over-identification between the religious and the
powers that be.
Moreover, he believed that the religious authorities
had lost their direction, their prayers were empty and their tradition stale
because it wasn’t giving them the strength they required to fire the people up.
Perhaps the words of Psalm 84 were called to mind?
For
a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the
house of my God than live in the tents of wickedness.
The incarnation of Jesus, was not to make us all
anti-Semites, it was not to allow evangelical preachers the luxury of telling
us that liturgy, order and tradition is wrong, although many will.
The incarnation of Jesus, and his subsequent ministry
on earth was to help us face the choices we and to do our best in the face of
conflicting choices. We may not like
it, but Jesus is reminding us of a painfully simple truth, that it is from
within, from the human heart, that all evil intentions come.
If the church is failing to clearly distinguish
between right and wrong and call for justice, to distance itself from powers of
oppression and intolerance, then it too is more concerned with rules, order,
and kitchen hygiene, than doing the work left for it to accomplish by Christ.
In that sense, it doesn’t matter what we think we
are; low church, high church, broad church, reformed church, catholic church,
traditional church or modern church, because if we aren’t continually looking
for opportunities to engage with real injustice then we aren’t church at all.
It’s not the shape of the tree that is important,
it’s all about the fruit it bears.
The idea of the Incarnation is essential. In Jesus Christ, God takes on human
life and comes to us. Jesus lives
with all the ups and downs of everyday life. His accusers said that he liked drinking and partying amongst
the ordinary people, and why not?
Jesus wasn’t born to make us think the Jews are mad
with their traditions, he wasn’t born to make us suspicious of tradition, he
wasn’t even born to help us attain the sort of personal individualistic
transformation much loved by conservative evangelicals. The incarnation tells us that we need
to understand that the human heart is corruptible, no matter what rituals and
traditions we create for ourselves.
We have only one hope, and that to see ourselves in
the right light. When Jesus says, You abandon the commandment of God and hold
onto human tradition, it’s easy to forget to apply that to ourselves, but
apply it we must.
We must focus on God, who loves us faithfully, and
try to make all we do mean something to those Jesus cared for.
Outward shows of religion are useless if our hearts
are not in the right place. Even
though Martin Luther called the Epistle of James, and epistle of straw, because
he felt that he had failed in the battle to understand that we are saved by
grace and not by works, I think James is not as simplistic as Luther made out.
James emphasizes our actions in the theological
context that every generous act of giving comes from God. We behave in a godly way because we
have been given such good gifts by God.
Our actions are a response to God’s grace and an expression of it, and
not an attempt to win something from him.
St. Benedict agrees with James, and tells us that God
waits every day to see if we will respond to his guidance by doing good.
The Pharisees weren’t doing things wrong, it was just
that the fruit of the tree had gone bad because they had forgotten what the
harvest was all about.
We are all called to be a reflective people, to see
whether our actions are producing the right fruit, and stop looking at the
shape of the tree, and judging others’ trees.
God is watching every day, to see if we have learned
this lesson. Let’s pray that we
all will.
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