Sermon for Time after Pentecost – Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

The pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus, “why do your disciples eat with defiled hands?” What does “defiled mean”? Dirty. Unclean. So let’s do a little poll. Who washes their hands before they eat? How about every time? I guess we wouldn’t make good Pharisees, would we? But don’t we get a lot of reminders to wash hands? Seems like these days every restaurant bathroom has a sign above the sink – “EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.” I sure hope they do! Let’s say we’re good and we wash our hands. How do you know they’re really clean? How long do you have to wash them? I know some people sing Happy Birthday. But what if you’re a fast singer? ok, now who thinks this is just overcomplicating things? It’s always something, right? If dirty hands don’t get us, won’t something else?

But I kept thinking about all this while reading our gospel text this week. Rules and washing hands and what it means to be clean. So, Jesus is with his disciples and they’re eating (they’re eating bread BTW). Nothing special there – disciples gotta eat. But then, on cue, Pharisees and scribes show up from Jerusalem and start something. Hey Jesus, how come your disciples eat with defiled hands? Now, if we’re honest, we don’t like the Pharisees. They’ve got a reputation. BUT – here the gospel tells us something VERY interesting. They don’t eat unless they wash their hands. They wash their food before they eat it. They wash their cups and pots and kettles. This makes good sense. Try going to cooking school and getting away WITHOUT doing all that. It’s important to them, it’s important to us. So aren’t the Pharisees asking Jesus a perfectly reasonable question? What do disciples do all day? They baptize in muddy rivers, they brush dust off their feet, they touch lepers. They’ve got some grimy mitts. If the disciples came to YOUR house for dinner, wouldn’t you ask the same question? Your mom sure would.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. Jesus gets riled up. Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘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.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” Well if those aren’t fighting words! Because Jesus hates Pharisees? No. Some of Jesus’ best friends are Pharisees. Remember Nicodemus? So why would Jesus blow up? Well, listen to the whole question that the Pharisees ask. “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” See, here’s the thing. What it means to be Jewish is to be a member of the chosen people of God. That’s huge. The stories of Abraham and Isaac and Moses are your family history passed down froom your elders. But being Jewish also means being the people of the Torah, the people of God’s law. But that doesn’t just mean following 613 laws because God said so. No, it means God gives your people these laws as a way of living in the midst of a broken world so that everyone else will see you and know there’s another way beyond hostility and strife. It means God uses these laws to choose your people to be peace and community FOR the SAKE of the world. The city on a hill that draws everyone to it.

But we know people are people. It’s too easy to get stuck on that chosen by God thing. We do the math. If everyone’s chosen, then how could chosen mean anything? It’s like a trophy for participation. So we figure we can’t be chosen unless we’re doing something pretty good. And if I’m such a good Christian, then I’m not like all those hypocritical Christians out there. Have we never had that thought? But we don’t stop there, we want to prove to God just how good we are. How do we do it? Use God’s laws. We get out the spiritual hand sanitizer and we go to work. But here’s the thing, you can’t prove to God how good you are unless you show how much better you are then everyone else, because you have to give God a measuring stick. It’s the only way that works. So all these laws that should be a model of community that attracts, we turn them into a gatekeeper. Who’s in and who’s out. The opposite of community. The opposite of what God stands for.

See, why Jesus gets upset with the Pharisees – and with us – all hangs on that word “defiled” (KOINOS). It can mean “dirty”, but most of the time it just means “common”. “Ordinary”. The Pharisees want to know why Jesus lets his disciples be so ordinary, so much like everyone else. Not holy. Not chosen. Like they’re not following God’s commandments and what kind of example is that? Don’t we make a lot of assumptions about other people’s faith by what we see on the outside? Who’s in and who’s out? But Jesus knows us. So he says hold on, there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” None of this external stuff can make us holy, no amount of piety or faith practices or hand washing, because they can’t erase the truth of what’s going on in our hearts, and that stuff always comes out one way or another. Jesus even gives us a laundry list of ways. Fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. This stuff happens every day. It’s ordinary. Who’s not guilty? It’s not a question of who’s in or who’s out, because we’re all out. Jesus is telling us the ways of death that hold us captive. He’s telling us our powerlessness. But we don’t hear that. We only hear Jesus giving us another list of commandments to get right, because we’re literally dying to prove to God that we’re not ordinary.

But Jesus won’t let that be the last word for us. He’s done waiting for us to sort ourselves out. He doesn’t wait for us to come to him with clean hands. Jesus comes to us, he grabs us by our dirty, ordinary hands, and won’t let go. He sees our ordinary and he raises it by being raised on an ordinary cross like an ordinary criminal. He dies our ordinary death just so that he might rise and raise us with him to extraordinary life. Extraordinary because we never asked for it. So undeserved, so impossible, so defiant. This extraordinary life says that God will have God’s way in spite of the ordinary death and injustice that we see every day, when bodies are killed under the pretense of justice and order. When basic needs are deprived under the pretense of legal or illegal. When relationships and identities are suppressed under the pretense of human doctrines. We know this is nothing more than a deadly game of who’s in and who’s out, and we don’t have to play it anymore. We know the God who raises the dead and makes a way where there is no way, so that there will be a beloved community in pure defiance of the world. God has to pull everyone in so that everyone will know God.

See, the Spirit shoves faith into our hearts so that we recognize why rules and discipline and order all fail. They mask. They hide all kinds of motivations. You don’t need any faith to look like a good citizen. It just doesn’t testify to the truth of who God made you and me to be. We know we mess up. We don’t need the Bible to tell us that. But what we need is a Lord who clings to us in spite of that, especially when we lose our grip. A Lord who gives us his own body and blood to eat and drink, so that we would have the heavenly food that cleans us from the inside out and makes us whole. A Lord who loves us specifically because we’re so ordinary, dirty hands and all, just so that we would know what love actually feels like. This is all the revelation of faith. And that’s exactly why faith makes us suspicious. Suspicious that we aren’t hearing the whole story when tragedy strikes other people. Suspicious that we don’t know the whole of these ordinary, God-given lives and what God is bearing through them for our sake. Because we might be seeing Jesus crucified like an ordinary criminal. But by the power of the Spirit we will recognize our assumptions and prejudices for what they are and finally be free. We will know the joy of seeing others the way Jesus sees us, and THEN they will believe us when we tell them they belong to the Lord. By God that will be satisfying.