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Tuesday, September 05, 2006
The Heart of the Matter
Mark 7:14-23
Washed hands are healthy; clean hearts are essential. When religious ceremonies mix up the two, you run the danger of losing out on everything God is up to in the world. Check out what Jesus had to say about the problem.
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I recently went to the Monet exhibit at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor. Absolutely fabulous! And utterly priceless in value!!
The museum had to be loaded with all kinds of security gadgets to prevent anyone stealing the masterpieces.
Each gallery was probably crisscrossed with laser beams and hidden cameras. Were there fire doors to seal off the rooms after hours? How many locks did each entryway have?
The only thing missing, probably, was an electrified fence on the perimeter topped with triple-thick concertina wire. Well, maybe armed guards. Attack dogs. Garlic cloves. You get the picture.
It's a metaphor for the ironic situation Jesus jumped all over in today's Gospel text.
Some scrupulous religious types complained that he didn't make his disciples wash their hands before, during, and after a meal. What kind of spiritual teacher could he be?
The issue wasn't really hygiene. All that washing was simply ceremonial, signifying a person's purity of soul. Kosher laws strictly segregated "clean" and "unclean" foods, dishes, and people.
If you touched a dish that had touched unclean food, then you became unclean. Even if you didn't eat the food.
If you touched a person who was unclean, you also became unclean. Even if you touched that person by accident, let alone held her hand to say grace at the dinner table.
So, in this case, you used very specific ways to wash your hands at very specific points of a meal. Fingers up, fingers down, water poured just so, hands rubbed just right.
It's a case study in how far good intentions can go bad in their effects.
The fundamental law of all biblical laws is this: Love God with everything you've got. Its flip side: Love your neighbor the way you love yourself. (Jesus says so in Matthew 22:37-40, quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.)
The contours of that divine kind of love are summarized in the ten commandments (see Exodus 20:1-17). How those top ten ways of loving God and people work out in real life are spelled out in detail in the first five books of the Bible (Torah).
By Jesus' day there were 1001 ways to make sure you didn't violate God's laws, down to how many times and ways to wash your hands at the dinner table.
And so my monkey mind jumps to the image of a fortified gallery whose paintings are so supremely valuable you could find yourself cut off a dozen different ways from ever gettting to see one of them.
So many rules and regulations, all formulated to protect you from breaking the truly big laws -- love God and love people. Instead, we end up so busy doing the right thing the right way that we forget all about loving anybody at all.
"Don't bother me now, son, I'm busy praying for you."
"I'm really running late to that Bible study. Sure hope somebody'll stop soon to help that guy stranded on the shoulder."
"The body and blood of our Lord. Amen.... Is that her? Argh. I still can't forgive her for what she did to me."
"We had to bomb that village in order to save it."
You get my drift.
Jesus said, "It's not what goes into your body that defiles it... food, dirt, germs. It's what comes out of your heart!" Then he delivered a horrible laundry list of vices, all too familiar to our thought life if not our actual behavior.
The antidote to all that spiritual dirt is love. Love for God, love for people. With everything you've got. Just the way God already loves you and all people.
It's not about rules and rituals. It's all about a way of life.
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:49 PM
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