When the Pharisees with some scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals with unclean, that is, unwashed hands. For the Pharisees and, in fact, all Jews, do not eat without carefully washing their hands, keeping the tradition of the elders. . . So the Pharisees and scribes questioned him, “Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?” (Mark 7.1-3, 5)
In her 2006 book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, the popular spiritual writer and Episcopal priest Barbara Taylor Brown chronicles her own spiritual journey, especially that time in her life when she chose to leave behind organized religion in search of something she felt was truer to God. She explains her move in this way:
“I had become an Episcopalian in the first place because the Anglican way cared more for common prayers than for right belief, but under stress even Episcopalians began vetting one another on the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and his physical resurrection from the dead.” She continued, “Both in Clarkesville and elsewhere, the poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.”
She described the pressure she felt, writing, “I began to feel like a defense attorney for those who could not square their love of God and neighbor with the terms of the NIcene Creed, while my flagging attempt to be all things to all people was turning into a bad case of amnesia about my own Christian identity.” She said, “My role and my soul were eating each other alive. I wanted out of the belief business and back into the beholding business.”
Not surprisingly, what she was experiencing was nothing new, but more of the same, as we see in the scriptures for today, as the belief people–the Pharisees–battle with Rabbi Jesus and his followers–the beholding people. Challenging the Galilean Rabbi because his disciples did not follow the tradition of washing their hands before eating, the Pharisees are quick to judge, equating failure to follow beliefs with failure to live rightly.
One of many such unpleasant encounters between Rabbi Jesus and the Pharisees, each generally more of the same, one is left with the same conclusion that Barbara Brown Taylor makes in her book when she writes, “As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly towards one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”
Therein, of course, is the crux of the problem, the Pharisees believing themselves holier than others because of their beliefs, criticizing others for their failure to believe in the same way, proving something a man who ministered to people with AIDS once told the the spiritual writer Philip Yancey, “I’ve noticed,” the man said, “that Christians tend to get very angry towards others who sin differently than they do.”
As we might expect, Rabbi Jesus took to task the Pharisees , putting before them the difference between unclean hands and unclean hearts, telling them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy 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 as doctrines human precepts.’”
Offering a concise course on the origins of evil, he tells the Pharisees, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come from within are what defile,” explaining, “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts”, in this way forever after making the heart the seat of all things good and all things evil.
Apparently, the 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthrone understood well the lesson that Rabbi Jesus was teaching, making the same point in his exquisite short story, “Earth’s Holocaust.” Set in “one of the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would be endangered by the flames,” Hawthrone tells the story of the earth’s inhabitants who have “determined to rid themselves of their accumulation of worn-out trumpery,” tossing everything on a giant bonfire.
At the urging of the reformers, the people began to toss their jewels into the fire, then their barrels of liquor, as well as the entire tobacco harvest. Not stopping there, the zealous participants threw guns and ammunition into the fire and, at the urging of the reformers, also put to flame every book and sacred vessel ever conceived.
The bonfire reaching into the night sky, the zealots decided to cast into the flames clothing, toys, certificates, and letters, believing this grand purging was the way to rid the world of everything that “overburdened” it, the flames greedily eating everything put within its grasp, until little remained for the people to give.
As the flames died out, a bystander who had been watching the whole procession, offered these words, “There is one thing that you have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all.” Hearing his words, the crowd asked him, “And what might that be?” He answered them, “What, but the human heart itself.”
Then he explained, “Unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery–the same old shapes, or worse ones–which have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume in ashes.” He ended with this dark prophecy, “Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world again.”
That oversight, of course, was the folly of the Pharisees, who chose to believe every wicked thing could be righted by external observances, such as keeping their hands clean of dirt, failing to see that dirty hands can’t hold a candle to dirty hearts. Just because a person has clean and sanitized hands, no cracked nails and no dirt beneath them, does not mean they are living good and righteous lives.
Here, as always, Rabbi Jesus, pulls the curtain on the hypocrisy of Pharisee-minded people, exposing the ugly truth that corruption is within the heart, not outside it, and that dirty hands tell no more about a man’s character than the color of their skin. What is visible is no guarantee of what is true, reminding us again of the wisdom of the fox in Saint-Exupery’s book, The Little Prince, who confided to his newfound friend, “And here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Unfortunately, we live in a world of externals, where worth is evaluated by things that are visible, be it the clothes on a person’s back, or the size of a person’s paycheck, or the zip code in which a person lives. Like the Pharisees, we look at external indices, convincing ourselves that we know a person by the things that we see, overlooking those invisible things that reside in a person’s heart, not on a person’s hands.
A pastor tells of a woman in his church in Tennessee who had everyone saying what a religious person she was. As the pastor got to know her, he did see that everytime she came to church she brought her BIble with her. If he asked someone to say a prayer, she was the first to stand. She spoke of almost nothing else but religion, bringing it into every conversation she had.
Pointing out he had no problem with these externals, he admitted his problem was with the fact that anytime it came to people who were poor, unemployed, divorced, or with addictions, the same woman was relentless in her criticism, not a drop of mercy or compassion staining her pristine appearance. She was all judgment and condemnation.
Knowing everyone in the church called the woman a religious person, the pastor was left to wonder just what made a person religious, questioning how somebody whose heart was so full of rancor towards the down and out could be deemed as religious. “This people honors me with their lips,” Rabbi Jesus said, repeating the words of the prophet, “but their hearts are far from me.”
Even Huck Finn, young for his years, understood better than the adults around him that the externals didn’t tell the true story of a man. With a sharp eye, Huck watched in stupefaction as his dad, a diehard drunk, was taken in by the new judge who swore he was “agoing to make a man of him.” Giving him a room in his own house, the judge “dressed him up clean and nice and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family.”
After supper, the judge spoke to Huck’s dad about temperance and, hearing the words, “the old man cried and said he’d been a fool, but now he was agoing to turn over a new leaf.” The judge cried and his wife cried and Huck’s dad, right before bedtime, stood up and held out his hand and spoke these words to everyone in the parlor.
“Look at it gentlemen and ladies all: take ahold of it, shake it. There’s a hand that was the hand of a hog. But it ain’t so no more. It’s the hand of a man that’s started in on a new life, and ‘ll die before he’ll go back. You mark them words–don’t forget I said to them. It’s a clean hand now; shake it–dont’ be afeard.”
So everyone in the room shook the old man’s hand, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge’s wife went so far as to kiss it. Huck, taking it all in, watched as his father signed a pledge and listened as the judge announced “it was the holiest time on record.” After putting the old man in the spare bedroom, everyone went to bed.
But sometime during the night the old man, as Huck tells it, “got powerful thirsty and climbed out onto the porch roof and slid down and traded his new coat for a jug and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler.” Seeing the man back to his old ways, the judge said “he reckoned a body could reform the ole man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.”
A lesson learned–clean hands don’t make a clean heart, a lesson the Pharisees failed to learn, satisfied that their clean and cuticle-perfect hands were all that was needed to win the esteem of God, a colossal blindness that Rabbi Jesus tried to correct, reminding them that “all these evils come from within and they defile,” not the layer of dirt on a person’s hands. But the Pharisees, jurists to the end, just didn’t see it that way.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 