Jesus summoned the crowd again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile. From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” (Mark 7.14-15)
Nobody’s fool, Saint Benedict wrote a short rule for his monks in the fifth century, offering common sense guidance and sensible regulations for the spiritual advancement of his fellow monastics, urging them to have good zeal all their days in the monastery. However, in Chapter 1, when discussing the kinds of monks, he spares no sharp rebuke for the sarabaites, “the most detestable kind of monks,” as he calls them, who have “character as soft as lead.” He sums up their attitude in a pithy and profound sentence, writing, “That which they like they call holy; that which they don’t like, they call unholy.”
Were we to offer a short summary of the start of Chapter Seven in Mark’s gospel, we could easily borrow Saint Benedict’s dismissal of the sarabaites and apply his adage to the Pharisees whom Jesus confronts in the greater part of these verses. While Jesus says a lot of things about them, his overarching criticism boils down to the same truth, “That which they like they call holy; that which they don’t like, they call unholy.”
Acknowledged custodians of the Mosaic Law and self-acclaimed guardians of righteous living, the Pharisees bring it on themselves, their privileged role in the Jewish religion resulting not so much in moral rectitude, as we might expect, but in massive rigidity. We’ve met them in earlier chapters, their judgmental attitude always on the lookout for some breach of right behavior on the part of the Galilean teacher called Jesus.
Here at the start of Chapter Seven, Mark tells us that these Pharisees and some of the scribes have made a special trip from Jerusalem to watch Jesus’ behavior, eager to catch him red-handed in either a major or a minor non-compliance with the Mosaic Law. Their motives are not to assist Jesus in making adjustments, but to write up a rap sheet long enough to result in his execution. Anytime Mark uses the word Jerusalem, we can expect trouble, the name of the city serving as a stand-in for the back-stabbing and high-handedness of these religious leaders.
They don’t have to wait long to find something with which to fault Jesus, or, in this instance, his disciples, the wrongdoing considered a reflection on his own poor leadership and questionable example. The problem centers on the fact that the disciples have failed to wash their hands before eating their meal, a major no-no in the eyes of the Pharisees who put hand washing on a pedestal like the golden calf that rested on the altar that Aaron built for the Hebrew slaves in the desert.
Self-assured as always, the Pharisees confront Jesus, asking him to explain, “Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?” By this point, Jesus has had his fill of their sanctimonious slurs. First, he calls them hypocrites, defining the word by way of a quote from Isaiah the prophet who said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” Then he offers his own definition, telling them that they disregard God’s commandments while clinging to human tradition. Wanting no misunderstanding of what he is saying, he provides a long list of ways that they replace the God-given commandments with their own cockamamie rules.
This exchange then becomes the context for the few verses that we heard a short while ago, hearing Jesus turn away from the Pharisees and now speaking to the crowd that has gathered, telling them, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person, but the things that come out from within are what defile.”
As he so expertly does whenever challenged by the Pharisees, he exposes the superficiality of these supposedly super-religious folks, stripping away the veneer of sanctity that they proudly put on display, showing the shallowness of their self-aggrandizement. He wants the crowds to understand something that the Pharisees will never understand. “All these evils,” as he says, “comes from within a person,” not from outside a person. In other words, a little dirt under the fingernails doesn’t hold a candle to the sludge in a man’s soul.
In these few verses, Rabbi Jesus is giving us two important truths. The first is that there is a world of difference between human traditions and divine mandates. This was the first mistake of the Pharisees. They knew the commandments, but they didn’t stop there. Rather, they spun a slew of do’s and don’ts from these commandments that constrained people’s behavior from morning to midnight.
For example, the hand washing ritual as dictated in the Book of Exodus referred to Aaron and his sons and only when they went into the tent where the altar rested. In other words, they were to wash their hands when they approached the sacred space, a symbolic gesture of their unworthiness, much like Moses taking off his sandals before the burning bush. Later, the Pharisees took the rule for priests and made it obligatory for Ordinary Joe and Unassuming Anna.
Before long, the ritual hand washing was ordered to be done before every meal and between each course of the meal. And if that were not tedious enough, there was a clear-cut procedure for doing it. First, the hands were held with the fingertips pointing upward as pure water was poured over them, the water required to run as far up as the wrists.
Furthermore, the amount of water that was used had to be enough to fill one-and-a-half eggshells. Then each hand was to be cleansed with the fist of the other. By that point, the water was considered unclean and freshwater had to be poured over the hands, this time the fingertips pointing downward. Then and only then were the hands considered clean.
Similar regulations were imposed on the cleaning of cups, jugs, kettles, and other vessels. And that was just a part of the rule book that concerned keeping things clean, much like the checklist in public bathrooms that employees are supposed to follow when cleaning the place for customers. There were regulations for just about everything.
Looney as it may sound to us, the purpose of these meticulous rules was to ensure that a person was leading a holy life. Failure to comply with the letter of the law meant a person was unholy, meaning second-class citizens or scum of the earth, depending on how far one deviated from the traditions. It is easy to see how such an approach to spiritual well-being easily resulted in the elevation of minutiae, rigidness, and judgmentalism.
Before we cast stones, always our first reaction to the Pharisees and their nonsensical behavior, we have to ask ourselves if we don’t do the same thing, defining personal holiness by adherence to a slew of second-tier or third-tier rules that have as their support long-standing practice or tradition, but do not enjoy the status of divine ordinance. We have to closely inspect the many things that we do because we believe they make us holy and then double-check if they are truly from God or if they come from human invention.
The simple truth is we have a way of concocting a recipe for holiness like we would a thick stew, throwing in odds and ends from the refrigerator, all suited for our personal taste, but not necessarily much of anything included from God’s pantry, things he actually has stipulated like judge not, or welcome the foreigner, or do away with false idols such as wealth, public acclaim, or important status. I suspect our roadmap to holiness is not always aligned with God’s pathway. Lesson learned–beware of man-made definitions of holiness.
A second truth that Jesus is making here is that there is a world of difference between the outside and the inside of a person, a fact that Jesus was quick to point out to the Pharisees who were squeaky clean on the outside but who apparently had more than a few dark spots on their souls. Parading in front of people, their moral rectitude on full display like a peacock’s feathers, the Pharisees found it easy to fool others into believing that they were a notch above the common folk, holiness seeping from their souls like the sweetest smelling sweat.
So, Jesus rightly points out that external observance of various regulations was no sure indicator of internal cleanliness, stressing that right living comes from a clean heart, not from clean hands. He was smart enough to know that it was much easier to wash one’s hands than it was to clean the human heart of all the dirt that takes up residence in it.
As he was quick to point out, when there is a discrepancy between what is in one’s heart and what is on display to the public, then there is fertile soil for hypocrisy, or, as he said, “honoring God with our lips but not with our hearts.” In other words, just because a person is cleanly dressed, well-groomed, and with shoes polished does not mean he has a good heart, understood as a heart beating in sync with the heart of God.
Contrary to popular opinion, the simple fact is clothes do not make the man, at least not in terms of goodness, genuineness, or graciousness. Those things come from inside a person, deep-down in the grain of his or her heart. In other words, the beggar clad in rags on the street may be holier than the businessman dressed in a suit and wearing a silk tie from Macy’s.
We may want to hear again what Rabbi Jesus says of those who look good but who don’t do good. “In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” In vain. Two tiny words but how they cut to the quick. All our make-up and make-overs and remakes don’t count for anything if our hearts are home base to a menagerie of feral beasts that belong behind bars, not enshrined in the human heart.
We can learn a lot from the Pharisees. Or learn from their mistakes. The exchange between them and Jesus offers us much to think about, especially our ideas about holiness, generally rooted in a few quick and easy steps to completion that we have cooked up on our own or borrowed from others, as well as our misguided belief that a penny shiny on the outside is somehow worth more than a tarnished quarter that has lost its silver gleam.
The medieval mystic named Meister Eckhart once wrote, “People should not worry about what they do, but rather what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, because it is not our works that sanctify us, but we who sanctify our works.”
It’s the same thing that Rabbi Jesus was trying to tell the Pharisees who were hand-wringing about his disciples’ hand-washing habits. He told them and he tells us today that “nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person, but the things that come out from within are what defile.” A nice reminder, overall, that holiness, when it is real, has depth.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 