Sermon — September 1, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Well, it’s Labor Day tomorrow and only the real hard core has showed up to church today, so we’re going to have fun. I’m going to see if, in the next thirteen minutes or so, I can convince you to become full-on Bible-thumpers. In a way. My crazy proposition for today is this: Sometimes the only way to defend yourself against the moralistic criticism of the holier-than-thou is to know the Bible well. To put it another way: If someone’s trying to condemn you or control you in the name of God, sometimes the Bible is part of the problem; but often, it’s part of the solution, too.
And Jesus knew this well. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus confronts a group of people who try to use their own religious beliefs to condemn his disciples, and he doesn’t do it by backing off from Scripture. He does it by embracing what’s actually in the Bible; by insisting that if Scripture doesn’t require him to do something, neither can you, and thereby setting his disciples free from their demands.
This confrontation isn’t about any of the culture-war issues of our day. The Pharisees aren’t arguing with him about sexual orientation or gender identity, the ordination of women or access to abortion or any of the many other things on which churches today disagree. They’re attacking him because they see thatsome of his disciples are eating with unwashed hands.
This is not advice for your Labor Day barbecue. They’re not talking about washing your hands with soap and water before you cook or eat, to wash bacteria and dirt away. They’re talking about a ritual purification. In some later Jewish traditions, it takes the form of pouring water from a cup over each hand three times before a meal. It’s not about hygiene, but about purity.
The very fact that this practice existed, and was widespread enough that Jesus could be criticized for some of his disciples not doing it, reflects a trend in ancient Judaism of expanding the scope of purity laws from the Temple to daily life, from the holiest days to the everyday.
In the system of Biblical law in the Old Testament, “purity” is not a moral or an ethical status; it’s a ritual one. It’s not “wrong” to be impure. Sometimes it’s right, or even required. Impurity results from a wide enough variety of things that an ordinary person living an ordinary life should expect to be in a state of “impurity” with some regularity. And that wasn’t a problem. Purity was only required in the presence of holy things in the Temple, a place where most ordinary people only went for major holidays a few times a year. If you were just living in a village somewhere in Galilee, the whole system of purity laws meant you needed to immerse yourself in a ritual bath every once in a while, before the highest holy days. As far as religious rituals go, these purity regulations were not really a big deal.
Now, this is deeply dissatisfying to the pious religious mind. Surely, we devoted people tend to think, religion must be harder than that. If it’s good to be pure in the Temple, then it’s good to be pure all the time. And there’s clear archeological evidence that over time, these practices of purification took on a life of their own. We find ritual baths spread throughout the ancient Jewish world, even far from Jerusalem, and descriptions of purification that are detached from the Temple, as people who technically didn’t need to be “pure” began to practice ritual purification as part of daily life.
Handwashing is just a small example of this trend. It originates in a single commandment in Exodus that instructs the priests, the sons of Aaron, to wash their hands and feet before they go to the altar, to ensure that the hands that touch the holy food offered to God are not impure. (Ex. 30:17-20) But like many pious practices, it expanded over time. If it’s good for the priests to wash their hands before they touch the food that will be sacrificed on the altar, isn’t it even better for us all to wash our hands before we touch food of any kind? It certainly can’t hurt.
And the context is important, too. Remember that Mark is writing down Jesus’ words a few decades after Jesus spoke them, most likely a few years after the Temple had been destroyed. When the rituals in the Temple could no longer take place, the rituals that had happened around the worship in the Temple began to take their place: and so as early Christianity began to emerge and separate from the rest of the Jewish society around it, these practices like handwashing became even more widespread, even though the reason for ritual purity to exist was no longer there.
Jesus didn’t mind, either way. Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples not to wash their hands before meals because in the Bible, that was only required of the priests. And you can tell this because the Pharisees’ concern is that some of Jesus’ disciples weren’t washing their hands, which means that some of them were. But the Pharisees come to Jesus and confront him. They ask, “Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5)
And that’s when Jesus gets a little mad.
“Now just you wait,” he seems to say. “Now I know who Isaiah was talking about when he talked about people who worship God in vain, ‘teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” (Mark 7:7) It was you! There’s nothing wrong with adopting some extra pious practice for yourself, but don’t you dare insist on it for everyone else. You can hear the echo of our first reading from Deuteronomy in Jesus’ mind: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything away.” (Deut. 4:2) But the Pharisees have elevated their own traditions, which are fine in and of themselves, to the status of God’s own law.
And then Jesus goes on, turning things around with an accusation of hypocrisy. You, who are not priests descended from the sons of Aaron, follow commandments you don’t need to, in line with human traditions that say you should; but you abandon the commandments of charity and love. You lose sight of what it is that really defiles, he says: not impure hands touching food before it goes into our mouths, but impure hearts from which evil intentions come. I don’t know whether Jesus’ accusation is fair. Perhaps the Pharisees in front of him weren’t quite so bad as that. But he’s making a real point, recalling people’s attention to the commandments at the heart of what it is to follow God.
In this story, Jesus defends his disciples against a pious complaint by adopting a kind of strict Biblical interpretation. And he can only do this because he’s deeply familiar with the text. He knows where the commandment in Exodus ends, and where human traditions begin. He’s confident in quoting Isaiah off the bat. He doesn’t use this knowledge to condemn those of his own followers who want to adopt this special pious act. But he does use it to defend those who are under attack.
Jesus would make a darn good Episcopalian, I think. Or rather—we Episcopalians have a chance here, to become even better followers of Christ: to embrace and act upon our values of inclusion and love, not by shying away from the text of the Bible but by diving further in, by finding and learning
To take just one small example: Over the summer, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. For centuries, women’s ministry had been restricted to the ministry of laypeople; for more than a thousand years, women were told there was no place for them at the altar. Sometimes the Bible was quoted. Sometimes it was human tradition, whether religious sexism or misogynistic philosophy. But in fact, the Bible is relatively clear. Women played a leading role in the leadership of the early Church. Not only the women who followed Jesus to the tomb, and were the apostles to the apostles, the first ones to proclaim Easter’s good news. Not only the women like Lydia who led early gatherings of the disciples. But women who are given the titles of what would become ordained ministries, like “Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae,” (Romans 16:1), and Junia, who is “prominent among the apostles.” (16:7) It’s no surprise that it was the most Protestant churches, least bound to human tradition and most drawn to the Bible, who began ordaining women first, then Episcopalians later with our murky in-between, and who knows whether our more siblings in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where tradition is elevated to the same level as Scripture, will ever allow the same.
So, okay: Maybe you’re not ready to Bible-thump quite yet. But I want to encourage you to read the Bible, at least; to mark, as one of our prayers says, and learn, and inwardly digest it; because it can be not only the source of inspiration, comfort, and strength; it can be the source of liberation too, as Jesus knew so well.