Amy Howe, a parish associate at a
Memphis church, tells a story a lot of pastors can relate to. She came into her
office one Sunday morning to find a note on her desk: “It seems that our youth
don’t know how to spell any better than they know the Bible.” When she looked
out her door, she could see the offending specimen: a bulletin board created to
welcome church members back to Christian Education. It was a happy-looking
thing, brightly colored and flamboyant, and it invited everyone to attend
“Sunday Skool,” spelled S-k-o-o-l. Reverend Howe said the misspelling was
obviously done to attract attention, and admits to being irritated about the
note because she knew for a fact
that the youth had sacrificed part of their Saturday to make a welcoming
banner. And most of us pastors can relate to this because most of us have had
it happen to us, some petty complaint that completely ignores the big picture.
And I think Jesus feels a bit irritated
at the Pharisees’ and scribes’ complaint. They come upon him and the disciples
having dinner, in a moment of relaxation, and some of them haven’t washed their
hands! And rather than saying “what’s for supper?” or “excuse us for disturbing
you,” they ask “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of
the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” They completely miss the forest for
the trees, they miss the deeper message: Jesus’ followers had sacrificed a lot to follow him. Some have
given up families, some careers, and others worldly status. It would only be
understandable if Jesus were a little ticked off on their behalf.
Beyond that, he probably knows what most
pastors do, that when a complaint is that petty, it’s rarely about what the
complaint is about.
In the case of Pastor Amy, it may have been jealousy about too much money or
pastoral attention on the youth, or the youth director, or even the pastor, and
in Jesus’ case, well, the Pharisees were never
his biggest fans.
Anyway, Jesus knows a teachable moment
when he sees one. Quoting Isaiah, he says “This people”—Ouch! This people!—honors me with their
lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching
human precepts as doctrines.’” And Jesus isn’t dissing the Torah here, he isn’t
downplaying the received Law of God . . . it’s not commanded by scriptures that everybody wash
their hands (and dishes and pots and pans) before they eat, just the priests.
But the Pharisees had generalized it to include everybody, and that’s how Jesus
can say they’re “teaching human precepts as doctrine.”
And you can hear Jesus’ irritation in
his reply: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites,” and that’s not any
nicer an accusation in those days than it is today. It comes from the Greek
words for “acting out a theatrical role” and “pretending,” and refers to the
disconnect between the moral values and standards that we espouse and those that we
actually practice
in our behavior.
But how’s that hypocrisy? How is
extrapolating from scripture to additional rules—something every denomination
has done since time immemorial—how is that
not practicing what you preach? He goes on, in an unmistakably sarcastic vein:
“You have a fine
way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” And
as example he uses an apparently common practice of denying support to your
parents because you’ve declared resources Corban,
or dedicated to God.
And that’s clearly hypocrisy in Jesus’
book, because of the commandments in the Law to honor your father and
mother—those are clearly
from God, they’re in the Scripture,
for Pete’s sake! They profess to follow the commandments of God, yet do not
honor their father and mother. I guess it’s hypocrisy in my book as well.
And Jesus doesn’t like hypocrisy one
tiny, little bit. Don’t be like the hypocrites, he says, who sound a trumpet
before themselves, who pray loudly in public, who spread ashes on themselves
when they fast so they can get that fashionable starving-waif look. He calls
them "whitewashed tombs:” pure on the outside, dead on the inside. Oy vey!
Jesus knows that few things can derail
the mission of God faster than hypocrisy. If people see that you don’t practice
what you preach, then . . . well. When I talk to ex-church-goers, or
never-been-churchgoers, the number one thing they cite is the hypocrisy of
church folks. They see them profess concern for the poor, yet hoard their
finances like misers. They see them support war when Jesus was clearly a pacifist . . .
they don’t call him the Prince of Peace
for nothing. And they see them piously quote Jesus about adultery and then
support politicians who cut a mile-wide swath through half the women in the
country. I myself have been guilty of that, supporting a president who abused
his power because his political views corresponded with mine. (That was in the
nineteen-nineties, in case you’re wondering.)
Anyway. Up till this point, Jesus has
been talking to insiders: his disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees. But now
he gathers a crowd, indicating the general importance he attaches to what he’s
about to say. “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing
outside a person that by going in
can defile, but the things that come out
are what defile.” And while Mark interprets this as Jesus declaring all foods
clean, and he might have been right, I rather think Jesus has bigger fish in
mind. Right at the outset, he castigates the religious authorities for being
concerned with outer conditions—whether they washed their hands or not—then
goes on to complain about their lip-service to God while their hearts—the seat
of the soul to the ancients—are far away. And now he’s saying what goes in from
the outside can’t defile—like dirt and food—but it’s what’s inside that matters.
And by extension, the outer trappings of
religion —ritual, hymn-sing, public praying and the like—isn’t an indication of
what goes on in our hearts, either. We already know what Jesus thinks about
ostentatious public prayer . . . and what does he tells us to do instead? Go
into our rooms, close the door and pray to God in secret . . . and the God who sees in secret will reward
us. And it’s useful to ask: reward us how? Could it be that we’ll hear God
speaking to us as well? It’s hard to hear the Lord when we’re in public, when
we’re doing all the talking, struggling not to embarrass ourselves and say
something stupid.
Well. Any of Jesus’ disdain for empty
ceremony, for meaningless religious observance, for not seeing the forest for
the trees is
nothing new, it’s squarely in the prophetic stream in which he waded. In
another part of Isaiah, God—through the prophet—chides the religious
authorities of his
day: “Is such the
worship that I choose,” God asks, “a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down
the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?” And you can
imagine the elders bowing their heads at the proper time like nodding reeds,
oh-so-chicly humble in designer sackcloth and ashes, sort of like all the
tailored black we saw yesterday at John McCain’ funeral.
In that Isaiah passage God goes on to
say what worship he does
choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke . . . to
share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our house . . .
and take care of our own kin. And that gives us an insight into Jesus’ own words . . . he’s not
just talking literally, narrowly, about only what comes and goes into and out
our out of our mouths—I.e.,
food and drink and words—but in larger terms as well. He’s not talking just
about wagging tongues or kosher meats, but about external observance, observing
the traditions of the elders—washing this or that item, singing this or that
hymn—versus what you actually do,
how you obey the commandments of God.
And like Isaiah, for Jesus it’s all
about actions . .
. not just the literal words that tumble out of our maws. Of course, he
mentions slander and deceit, which are often couched as words, but his list of
evil intentions mostly result in actions:
licentiousness, adultery, murder . . . all actions
that arise in the heart. This list is very like one of Paul’s lists of fruits
of the flesh, like the one in Galatians, and like that one, it concentrates on
things that harm community. In fact, the example he uses to support his claims
of hypocrisy—using man-made rules to get around supporting one’s
parents—undercuts the family unit, the foundation of first-century community.
Our passage records a teaching of Jesus
that moves from the relatively trivial—Pharisitical complaints about dirty
hands—to hypocrisy to community discord and disruption, and does this mimic a
progression that happens to organizations? I think it might, and you can see it
in all kinds of denominations. Rules are set up to provide structure and order,
which can provide obvious benefits—hand-washing, for example, has obvious
health consequences of which even pre-scientific cultures were aware. Structure
leads to hierarchy—somebody’s
got to decide on the rules and then enforce them—which leads to calcification,
rigidity and protection of positions of power. All these things are inimical to
true community.
They crop up in local congregations, too
. . . the leadership gets arrogant and too used to having its own way. Groups
within silo themselves up, protecting resources and turf . . . especially when
they are in short supply. There’s nothing more vicious than a choir protecting
its own (that’s a joke). Jesus says that it is from within us that all these things
come, all these evil intentions, as he puts it.
When you look inside of us, you might
see these things, latent—forming what the Buddhists call seeds, that require the
proper watering, the proper conditions to flower. But you know what? If you
look there—really look—you
also find Christ
himself, you find the Holy Spirit, who Paul says holds everything together.
Christ holds rocks together, trees, birds of the air, and he holds us together
as well, or he can, if we’ll only let him. That’s why they call it “good news.”
Amen.
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