THE THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Deuteronomy 4:1-9
Ephesians 6:10-20
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Year B/ Proper 17
The late Urban T. (Terry)
Holmes, beloved professor of Anglicanism, used to delight in telling how an
elderly woman walked up to him one day with a look that could kill and said, “If our Lord were around today and heard all
these new fangled abominations in our Prayer Book, he would roll over in his
grave!”
Dean Holmes used that story
to remind people that while tradition serves as a living breathing heritage
guarding the church from impulsiveness, the danger of tradition was that it
could make people so rigid their hearts would turn to stone. He said that while
tradition is essential, it should be guarded lightly, cupped in the hands like
a young bird fallen from its nest. Because holding on to it with a death grip
chokes off its power to function as a channel through which the mystery of
God’s presence flows freely. It becomes a
That seems to be what Jesus
is saying in today’s Gospel.
Prior to today’s gospel
reading Jesus had not had a confrontation with the authorities since he had
gone home to
As one preacher says, “It’s nice to have a scapegoat – someone you
can blame for all the things you do not want to blame yourself for, someone who
will carry your dark side for you so that you do not have to carry it
yourself….The target stays out there, where you can keep shooting at it, which
keeps your mind off the target inside you, buried way back among all those other
things stored in the garage of your heart.”*
Today Jesus was condemned
because his disciples ate with unwashed hands, another fault they added to
their growing list of things he did wrong, such as healing on the Sabbath,
touching lepers and dead children. He did not fast
according to schedule, yet ate with tax collectors and other notorious sinners
regularly. He responded to his accusers by saying, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about
you hypocrites (saying) ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their
hearts are far from me’”.
In the early days the
Hebrew’s relationship with God was less legalistic and more experiential. Jesus
says the religious purists have allowed the Law to obscure their relationship
with God.
Without a doubt the Pharisees
kept to a very high standard, which would have been fine, had it fostered their
relationship with God and others, but Jesus said it had done exactly the
opposite. Two thirds of the oral Torah was about eating – what you could and
could not eat, with whom, on what kind of dishes and what kind of pots. These
rules were not about hygienic dangers. They were about spiritual dangers. Touch
a corpse or a leper, get down and dirty with a pig, and you would be banished
from the community of the faithful.
When Jesus told his accusers
that what was inside their hearts was the test of purity, not only did he
threaten the entire Kosher industry, he threatened the
very fabric of their faith. Perhaps that is part of the reason why this is
regarded as one of the most revolutionary passages in the New Testament. By
saying that evil comes from within the heart and not the grocery store, he was
saying that the law had become hostage to the traditions that interpreted it.
He was saying that rather than being a vehicle for finding the will of God, the
Law had become a way of avoiding it!
We can empathize with the
confusion that must have existed for the ordinary Jew standing around Jesus
that day. We too are confronted and surrounded by all kinds of things that are
lifted up as THE proof
test of whether one is actually a Christian or not. To that Jesus warns us that
we must not confuse our own ideas and agendas with the mind of God. Our
discernment of the divine will should be humble, patient, and open to the
unexpected.
Well respected theologian
Walter Bruggemann writes:
“The gospel is a truth widely held, but a truth
greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and
rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither
valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking
reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, revises
quality into quantity, and takes the categories of biblical faith and
represents them in manageable shapes….There is then no danger, no energy, no
possibility, no opening for newness!”
Through the centuries we have
defined God as omnipotent, omniscient, and transcendent. Our definitions make
God seem distant and detached. We’re down here on earth while God is somewhere
‘up there’ in heaven; not really all that involved with us. And Jesus says,
despite all evidence to the contrary, God IS involved with us, here in the muck
with us, just as God was down in the mud with the people held in bondage in
Shortly after the tsunami
disaster, a newspaper reporter called Methodist Bishop William Willomon and
said: “How do you reconcile
this event with your belief in an all-powerful God who is in control of
everything, who has set up natural laws?”
Willomon replied: “Who told you that we believe in that kind
of God? We believe God is love, that God’s love is vulnerable to us. We believe
in the kind of God who came to us in Jesus. You talk as if we think God is a
lawyer! Our God is a lover! Faith is not a cool, calm, or rational
matter of belief. It is a thing of love, of being loved by God and loving in
return.”
Theologian Hans Kung said, “The more precepts and prohibitions are set
up, the more the decisive issue is concealed.” And the decisive issue in
the Gospel was indisputably our intimate union with Abba the Father – through
Jesus – and all that flows out of that love relationship.
Never having sought
confrontation or turmoil, never bucking the system, Pope John XXIII, at the age
of seventy-seven, was elected to be a “transitional pope”. He did become a transitional pope, but not
as the church had expected. He sought to radically reform the Church. He said
his goal was to bring “fresh air” into it. It needed, he said, opening to the
world. It needed simplification, humanization and co-operation. With the Second
Vatican Council, dialogue was opened with other world religions, even atheists.
The position of the laity changed dramatically from what it had been
previously. One wonders what else might have happened, had he been younger when
it all began.
He came to be called the
“good pope”; one through whom you could catch the scent of Jesus close by. Of
himself he would say, “Angelo, don’t take
yourself so seriously!” A humble man, a good man, a holy
man. A man who said, “Apart from the will of God there is nothing
interesting to me”.
The question that drove the
Pharisees; the question that can confuse and hound us today is, in a
religiously diverse culture, how does one maintain Christian identity and
integrity? And then we are reminded that when Jesus was asked which was the
great commandment he said this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first
and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor
as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets”.
Jesus did not tear down the
law. Rather, he points out the true purpose of it; to liberate people so that
they are capable of living an authentic life in communion with God and others.
That authentic life is a battle as Paul sees it. To gird our loins with truth
means to be willing to own, not only who Christ is but what he says is
ultimately important; what is essential in our relationship with God.
Anglican priest Robert Farrar
Capon reminds us: “Christianity is not a
religion: it is the announcement of the end of religion. Religion consists of
all the things the human race has ever thought it had to do to get right with
God. (The Church) is not here to bring to the world the bad news that God will
think kindly about us only after we have gone through certain creedal,
liturgical and ethical wickets; it is here to bring the world the Good News
that ‘while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly’”.
That is why we are called to
proclaim the mystery of the gospel with boldness - remembering that the only
cure for the heart disease of which Jesus speaks is the grace of a loving God,
and the willingness to have our hearts broken open, so that we might become new
- from the inside out.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
*