“It Takes More Than Clean Hands to Follow Jesus”

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Acts 10:15: The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Mark 7:21-23: For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within a person.

[prayer]

Whenever I need to be reminded just what the basic core of Jesus’ teaching is, I look back to the Sermon on the Mount. As Jesus deals with two particular sins, adultery and murder, he makes it clear that they originate in the human heart. Lust can very well lead to adultery if it is not prayerfully excised from the heart. Unresolved anger can erupt in sometimes-murderous ways. As an old commercial used to say, “It’s what’s inside that counts.” God, by the way, had already addressed this issue with the Tenth Commandment: “You shall not covet…”

In today’s text Jesus is involved in another dispute with the Scribes and Pharisees. They were criticizing him for allowing his disciples to eat with ritually unclean hands. The rigid orthodoxy of the Pharisees contained a multitude of rules about what you could eat, how you should prepare it, how you should serve it, and how you should prepare yourself for the meal.

It’s not that eating clean food with clean hands out of clean dishes was a bad thing. It was, and is, an important health issue. The issue was the great lengths these Scribes and Pharisees went to ritually wash this, that, and the other – rituals that were legalistic to an extent that went far beyond what the Hebrew Scriptures called for. God’s holy, healthy Word had been superseded by nit-picky rabbinical traditions. Jesus addressed a related issue on another day when he reminded the Scribes and Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for humanity not humanity for the Sabbath. They had taken Law, a good gift from God, and twisted it into a host of sometimes-absurd rules.

Then Jesus got to the heart of the matter by quoting from Isaiah: “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.” The key phrase here is: “their hearts are far from me.” Over and over again the prophets Amos, Micah, and Isaiah had warned the children of Israel about the judgment coming their way if they insisted on using outwardly pious rituals to cover up the corruption in their hearts, a corruption that manifested itself in unjust and unrighteous behaviors. Even as they were putting on a grand show of empty religiosity they were committing every one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In verses 9-13 that were not read this morning Jesus made a point of reminding the Scribes and Pharisees how they paid lip service to God’s command to honor their parents while getting by with the least support of them the rabbinical tradition allowed. They were keeping rituals. They were outwardly professing God’s Law. All the while they were using every loophole they could find to avoid their God-given responsibilities. For all their clean food, clean hands, and clean dishes theirs were hearts of corruption. For all their sanctimony they were at heart very sinful people.

Way back when I was a Boy Scout we had an unofficial motto that went something like this: “We don’t smoke, and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls that do.” Those were appropriate rules for eleven and twelve years old boys. There are some things, including the use of tobacco, that we ought not to be doing at any age. That’s not a legalism; that’s common sense.

Another phrase I heard over and over growing up was “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Being clean was important to my mother. She had grown up poor, but even in the poverty of her childhood her mother had always kept a clean house, most especially a clean kitchen. Early on I got the message that I should never eat food that might have come from a dirty kitchen. In fact, I badly embarrassed my father when I refused to eat at the home of some distant in-laws because I was afraid that they might not be clean. My good manners were trumped by my concerns about hygiene.

It’s my firm belief that all too often the piety of American Protestantism has been more a reflection of our culture’s definition of socially acceptable behavior than it has a deep down sense of Christian ethics. Good citizenship has often been confused with Christian living. I suspect that there are a whole lot of Christians out there who sincerely believe that as long as they dress up nice, stay clean, use good manners, say a blessing over dinner, pay their taxes, and try to obey the speed limit they are living a Christian life. Their ethical system is an adult version of “We don’t smoke, and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls that do.” We call that civic religion.

And then there are those extremely pietistic Christians who are there every time the church door opens, faithfully tithe, and rigidly avoid any and all sins of the flesh yet who over the years have turned a blind eye to slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and what not. Or don’t cut their hair, refuse to wear jewelry, would die of thirst before they would take a drink of wine, or never, ever use certain four letter words, yet have no qualms about telling horribly racist jokes, taking ethical shortcuts in their businesses, and looking down on anybody who doesn’t look, dress, talk, and pray just like they do. We call that judgmental hypocrisy.

These are the modern Pharisees. Highly moral when it comes to the sins of the flesh. Rigidly orthodox in whatever way their theological heritage defines orthodoxy. Outwardly pietistic. Clean as a whistle. Neat as a pin. Exemplary models of sanctimonious rectitude. But somehow not quite getting it at a heartfelt level. Like that seven year old I once was they are long on judgmentalism – “It might not be clean!” – and short on concern for the feelings and struggles of their fellow human beings.

I realize that I’ve been painting with a rather broad brush here. My honest hope is that I have not come off as condemnatory. The truth is that not every Pharisee of Jesus’ day was a horrible human being – some of them ended up following Jesus. There are many good people who have become tangled up in legalisms. To a greater or lesser extent we all have our “Pharisee moments.” We all get caught up at times in the trap of self-righteousness. The issues differ from person to person but we all have some pet sin about which we like to pontificate.

In the tenth chapter of Acts, Peter, a very devout Jew, is challenged by God in a dream to eat foods considered unclean. In the dream Peter gives the traditional Hebraic arguments against eating such things. Finally God makes it clear that nothing he calls clean should ever be considered profane.

Ultimately it is this dream that moves Peter to share the Gospel with a Roman Centurion – not only a Gentile but also a member of the military that enforced the iron hand of Roman rule in Judea. Peter shouldn’t have even gone into this man’s house, but he did. Why? Because God had made it clear to him that people who were considered unclean by the Pharisees could still be clean in the eyes of God.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Clean is as clean does.” True cleanliness is a matter of the heart. “Create in me a clean heart,” cried David. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus. The purity of any person’s heart cannot be discerned just by looking. Such purity transcends race, nationality, cultural expectations, prejudices, and every variety of supposed orthodoxy. Such purity cannot be achieved by washing your hands, taking a shower, keeping a kosher kitchen, or living in a spotless house. It goes far deeper than generic politeness, good citizenship, abstinence from certain beverages and whatnot, or the avoidance of naughty language.

Good manners, solid citizenship, sobriety, and not having a potty mouth are very good things, things for which each of us should strive. But more than one evil doer has been polite, law abiding, and sober. People who would never utter a curse word have done some pretty awful things. Even a mass murderer can have a spotless kitchen. Lest we forget, the folks who wanted Jesus dead had the Romans do the dirty work while they remained ritually clean and avoided breaking the Sabbath.

We also know what Jesus had to say in a certain parable about the supposed bad guy who ends up being the good guy – you know, that Good Samaritan thing. He who was considered unclean by those who cared about such things was the one, who in the end, was pure in heart. The supposedly righteous guys just kept walking rather than deal with someone in pain. They might have gotten their hands dirty!

Let us close with these words of Jesus in verses 21 and 23: “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” It takes more than clean hands to follow Jesus. Amen.