I have to issue a disclaimer here. I am occasionally hard on Pharisees, and often
they deserve it.
But if we examine their actions, often we find them no
worse than ours. They observed distinctive practices, such as kosher
food and circumcision, that helped the nation of Israel to maintain its identity as
God's people in a world that tempted them to worship their neighbors' gods. These traditions, which come into question in this
text, grew out of a need to maintain their religious identity.
The Jewish law, called the Torah, while quite
detailed, leaves room for interpretation in many situations. The Pharisees, out of a desire to obey God,
established rules to clarify the law in those situations. As time passed, these rules hardened into a surrogate
law that Jewish leaders regarded as equal
to scripture.
They lost sight of the line between God's law and
their opinions.
Both before and after this particular lesson, Jesus
has been about the countryside doing good works and miracles. But the Pharisees instead focus on nitpicking about the
ways of the law.
Ritual cleanliness has nothing to do with hygiene. Pharisaic handwashing involved the use of only a small
amount of water poured over the hands to wash away ritual defilement, such as
that caused by touching an unclean object or person (i.e., a bodily discharge
such as blood, a dead body, a leper, or a Gentile). While most of us
would want to wash our hands for hygienic purposes in many of these
circumstances, for example, if we came in contact with blood, the manner in
which ritual handwashing was done offers no hygienic benefit.
Have you ever heard the story of the cat in the
temple?
Somewhere long ago, in the East, a wise man sat in the
front of the village temple, teaching his apprentices and the local villagers
the tenets of their religion. But prowling around the grounds of the temple was a
yowling tomcat, repeatedly drowning out his words. Finally, the holy teacher asked his disciples to tie
up the cat to one of the pillars at the back of the temple. They did so, and while the cat was still noisy, the
disruption was in the background and he was able to go on teaching.
And three hundred years later, in an honored tradition
in the same village temple, students of that religion and followers of that
teacher still tied cats to the temple pillars. And no one knew why.
"The tendency that Jesus criticizes in the
Pharisees and scribes appears in most religious groups. People come
to hold on to merely human traditions as if they were divinely revealed." [1]
The Pharisees knew why they did what they did – they had rules that said they did these things to honor
God and to keep their religion pure
– but they had
lost the sense of what God had called the people to do. Instead they substituted their own rules and
opinions.
That’s where Corban comes from. Under the law as interpreted in Jesus’ time, the
religious scholars had made a determination that in the interests of charity, a
person could dedicate a portion of all their possessions to God. And what you gave “to God” could be what you would otherwise
use for supporting your parents in old age.
“Gee, Mom and Dad, you know the commandment about
honoring you? Well, I have! I have given all your support to God! Isn’t that wonderful!?
Huh? How am I
going to support you in your old age?
Well, I don’t know. It’s not my
problem anymore.”
Corban was a legal dodge, a legal commandment dodge,
you might say. A legal way to avoid the obligation laid on you by the
Commandments.
It was not only legal, but encouraged by the religious
authorities,because of course, they were the ones who benefited
from this legal commandment dodge. Anything dedicated to God ended up in their hands.
The problem is that both concepts – honoring God and honoring parents – have been honored in the breach, you might say.
The Pharisees had so corrupted valid laws from God as
to make them unrecognizable. Corban was a scandal in Jesus’ time because elderly
people were left destitute by their children.
Jesus tells us the story of the Good Samaritan to make
a similar point. The priest and the Levite passed by the injured man
because he was bleeding and therefore unclean. And they would not have enough time to ritually purify
themselves before worship. So, instead of offering comfort to someone injured,
they walked right on by.
And the law that God had given them,to honor and respect other human beings as fellow
creatures of God,fell victim to ritual purity requirements.
That was what concerned Jesus. And it should concern us.
Ritual actions or their lack, do not make one pure and
they don’t make one impure. Eating with Gentiles did not and does not affect your
status with God, nor did whether or not you had handled a dead body
recently. And certainly, whether or not you washed before you
ate was not as critical as the Pharisees would have you believe.
In an interesting turn, Jesus is doing exactly what he
accuses the Pharisees of doing: changing
the rules. But Jesus has changed the rules to refocus them: your religious actions, what we call piety,
are not what is important. What is
important is your behavior in light of God’s commandments. Your uncleanness comes from your own heart, not from
any external source.
The Pharisees, rather than look for some teaching that
will guide them to live a better life,
focus on a pious action of human origin.
Instead of looking to the words of hope and
encouragement that Jesus has been offering to those who hear him,
they are looking for ways to tie cats to temple
pillars.
I opened with a disclaimer because this is where the
Pharisees start to seem quite a bit like us.
If you asked one of them why they washed their hands
that way, I bet they’d reply, “Because we have always done it that way.”
Okay, Episcopalians, are those some words that sound
familiar?
Because we have always done it that way?
Because we have done it that way without thinking
about it?
We need to be very careful that we know that what we
are doing serves to honor God’s commandments – and not our own preferences.
That’s not always easy to know. And sometimes the questions need to be asked over and
over again.
When your elderly mother is hooked up to machines that
keep her alive and you know that she would not want that, the relationship between commandment to honor human
life and the commandment to honor one’s parents can seem pretty hard to figure
out sometimes.
When a child of eleven is raped by a family friend and
ends up pregnant, where does the command to not kill stand between her
baby and her own body that is not physically mature enough to bear a child?
And with apologies to Augustine of Hippo and St.
Thomas Aquinas,in a religion with a commandment to not kill, and a
savior who tells us to turn the other cheek, is there really such a thing as a ‘just war?’
This Gospel is not intended to render us helpless, but to make us see a true problem, the challenge before us as people of faith.
Because it is
not always easy to know the way that God would have us live out the
commandments.
Despite what some would have you believe,following Christ is not always slam-dunk easy.
What we do require, at the center of our being, is for
God to create a new heart in us. And this needs to happen, not one time only, but
continually.
Over and over again the transforming grace of Christ must find a home in us, help us understand those difficult places where
justice and mercy and commandments all seem to collide.
Along with the Pharisees, we have to be set free from our own opinions and
speculations, and become susceptible to the transforming work of God
at work around and within us.
I think there are two basic requirements to knowing
what it is that God is asking of us, each and every day.
The second (yes, the second!) is to discernment in
community.
Together, we can look at the tough questions of where
justice and mercy lie, and struggle with them. And the struggle to find where the lines of justice
and mercy lie is much easier when we do it as a community of faith. We will each bring our various gifts to the table and
together seek God’s will for us, both as a community and individually.
But the first and most important requirement is
something that we may not think about often enough. We must be emptied of ourselves.
We must let go of human-made rules to be enabled to
hear God’s word to us.
We must let go of everything except Jesus Christ.
Sometimes our insight into Scripture can be enhanced
by hearing a story from another source. Or another story.
There once was a teacher of Zen Buddhism in Japan, named
Nan-in. It seems that one day, Nan-in received a university
professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full,
and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no
longer restrain himself. "It is overflowing! No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are
full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you
first empty your cup?" [2]
How can
Jesus Christ show us the Way, the Truth and the Life unless we first empty our
own cup?
When our
hearts and minds are free of rules about handwashing AND emptied of ourselves,
then we will
be able to hear and know the words of justice and mercy which Christ speaks to
us.
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