I am sure we all have had a similar proper meal training as children: Sit up straight! Elbows off the table! Napkin in your lap! Wait until your mother begins to eat before you start! Do not talk with your mouth full! The Germans in their Teutonic specificity have two different words for eating: one for humans (“essen”) and one for animals (“fressen”) If your eating habits are characterized by the latter, you are in big trouble or the target of a supreme insult!
The rituals associated with eating begin early in a child’s life and grow more complex with our journey toward maturity. In every culture these rituals are one of the ways the “in” group holds itself apart from the “out” group. Those who are like “us” eat the same foods the same way we do. This true for many in mid-America throughout their lives and we who live in a large cosmopolitan area are indeed blessed to experience the diversity of cultures expressed in the variety of cuisines available to us.
Though we can embrace the mystery of our differences when it comes to food, at the time of Our Lord, dietary laws were a very serious matter for most Jews. Many struggled to hold on to their identity after the Temple was destroyed and even after it was rebuilt, identity was important in a world dominated by strong hellenizing and Romanizing pagan influences. In today’s Gospel reading the Pharisees noticed that Jesus’ disciples had not performed the precisely correct ritual cleansing before they eat: they had broken with tradition.
Our Lord encounters their slavish adherence to traditions with a holier-than-thou attitude by quoting the prophet Isaiah: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me…” In other words, Jesus warns the Pharisees to concern themselves with God’s rules rather than the rules of humans. He says that spiritual defilement starts on the inside; it arises from the heart. The word “heart” is a metaphor for the total person, one’s whole being. For those who are ritual specialists the focus is on the external; neglecting a dynamic, creative, life-sustaining relationship with the living God. The more they focus on outward actions, the less attention they give to inner attitudes… they focus on the rules but neglect a relationship with the living God.
Now rules and traditions are not bad in themselves and no one respects rules and traditions more than me! Traditions are fine, well, and good when they arise from a deep faith and point us and others to God – Our Lord does not advocate dropping traditions, per se. However when we allow traditions to prevent us from following God’s will they become idolatrous. When Jesus challenges the Pharisees to follow the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of the law.
A few years ago I was asked by a parishioner at my former parish in Hollywood, who was a member of the Board of Governors of HRC to be a guest on a panel at the University of Redlands speaking in favor of same sex marriage legislation. I began my remarks by clearly stating that I viewed this as a civil rights issue and I did not intend to address the matter from a theological or scriptural perspective within the scope of that forum. Nevertheless, at the close of the evening’s agenda, before I could even dismount the stage, up from the rear of the room came a group of students tightly gripping their Bibles and I knew they were headed right for me!
Sure enough they were Campus Crusade for Christ and I was in their sights as an apostate evil Christian Priest and they had Scripture quotations to defend their stance. But in their brain-washed arguments they did not anticipate that I could counter them with just as many examples and I rebutted them with questions like our Lord often did with the Pharisees until they could not answer.It was a valuable experience for me to make that trek to the inland empire only a couple of hours’ drive from the West Side of LA and see first-hand a mind-set so foreign to what I experienced in my part of town.I realized that I probably did not convince those campus crusaders, although I pray that just maybe I caused at least one of them to recognize that there is another law than the one they had been spoon-fed – a law of equality and love and decency. But I also sadly realized once again that there is a whole lot of anger and hate guised in the name of our compassionate and loving Savior.
Christian devotion is meant to help gain and maintain a new heart, a heart that is alive not dead, a heart that is compassionate not selfish, a heart that is large not small, a heart that is hospitable not judgmental. Christian devotion in all its forms is all about softening the heart, preventing it from becoming hard, keeping it tender. Other controversies than dietary laws today divide Christians and our own Anglican Communion. Each area of contention represents deeply held convictions about how we are to live and when they are challenged we get scared. And it is fear ultimately that fuels a phariseeism of the heart. Pure religion has to do with caring for others in distress, not stressing over pure religious practices. In our Epistle for today St. James admonishes us to be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.
The trouble for the Pharisees was that their scrupulosity about observing the law led them to depend, not upon God’s graciousness, but upon their own ability to channel their lives into certain predictable routines setting themselves apart as better than other people. Now if we’re honest we can admit that no matter how hard we try, we can’t always get it perfectly right every time. In despair we may seek consolation by comparing ourselves to others and end up with a dull and formal religion in which we become like Anthony Trollope’s Miss Thorne, whose “virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.”
So what then makes a person good enough for God? What makes us good enough for God is the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. It is His broken body and shed blood: that bread and that cup we share today that brings us closer to God. And the traditions of humans, even those of good intention, insofar as they become the basis for judging others, are of no account. As much as we honor our scriptures and traditions, they do not serve us well when we make them the basis of judging who it is God loves and who is acceptable to Him. In today’s Gospel lesson and throughout His ministry, Jesus denounces hypocrisy of the self-righteous and clearly reminds us that the outward forms of holiness are meaningless if we do not have the basics in our hearts: the basics that call us to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
Amen.
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