Mass readings for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Deuteronomy 4.1-2, 6-8 Psalm 15.2-5 James 1.17-18, 21-22, 27 Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
The scribes and pharisees criticize Jesus through noting his disciples don’t wash their hands! It’s a jab at our Lord more so than at his followers, although they are condemning the whole lot of them – but I would note that when it comes time to discuss this incident, quite often a preacher will delve into the world of purity rituals, their place in authentic spirituality, and of course, what Jesus’ attitude is toward these little niceties of religious practice such as the washing of hands. Are these essential? Do they contribute to our salvation or distract us from our internal spiritual state?
I’ve sat through such homilies, and enjoyed them. And indeed, we can take from this incident that while it is salutary to observe little religious rituals, to say grace at meals, if they’re done absent any real relationship with God, any active conforming to Christ in how we relate to others, then it is all for nothing.
You know, it wasn’t just Jews of the first century who had such rituals at meal time. Every culture had these. The Romans offered a token sacrifice at meals: usually a bit of cake was sacrificed to the gods. There were little preparatory rituals as well seen as necessary for a proper meal with friends or family. But what is often missed in a discussion of how these are ultimately not going to save us from the fires of hell, is how they can be used for downright evil purposes.
Now, these practices, in the case of today’s gospel are about purifying oneself spiritually before offering prayer at a meal. They did function on one level as religious observance intended to ground people in thanksgiving for their food, and more importantly in recognizing the source of it, and of all good things, God. But on another level, these are used to signal social class and divide people accordingly. There were those who did them understanding this is just what a proper, cultured individual was expected to do; it wasn’t really about an ardent faith. To fail to do them showed oneself to be lacking culture, a deplorable member of the lower orders; if not a slave, little better than a slave.
Most of Jesus’ followers were working people, farmers and fishermen. When their midday meal came, for example, they’d be either in their fields or coming in on their boats with a catch of fish. The meal would be simple, bread and onions or olives, perhaps some cheese curd, carried in a sack; and there would be no means to practice the ritual washing. With dirty hands one would offer thanks, and then start eating, with work still to be done. Urban elites, men like the scribes and the Pharisees, men of property and status, they usually knocked off work at two o’clock, had a long lunch, a nap, and then prepared for evening social occasions.
So, what we see in the Pharisees and scribes criticizing Jesus’ disciples, likely doesn’t come of any religious concern – it’s them being snobs, but also them indicating that common people had no business discussing, let alone criticizing, the state of religion at that time because, “look, they don’t even know how to say grace properly!”
Much the same happens today – not so much with regard to religion, although yes with respect to that, but more with regard to the important matters of our civilization generally. There are little tests that if we fail them, exclude us from the public conversation. But they also direct that conversation, focussing it away from real issues and toward the superficial. The Pharisees don’t want to talk about the root causes of spiritual crisis and the demoralizing of the people – no, they want to talk about the pressing matter of people not washing their dishes properly!
Today, the same thing is going on. So, for example, we’re told what really counts are things like race, like gender, that these are the critical indicators by which we gauge social justice in our community (it’s not that these are unimportant, but they aren’t solely determinant of society’s ills). More importantly, to participate in the discussion of our community’s life, to participate in politics, we must first, in a way that is truly ritualistic, signal that we agree as a premise that it is gender and race that are key. We must state our pronouns and apologize for our privilege; and only then do we get to speak. In doing so, we are actively dissuaded from thinking of the social problems that beset us in the other larger dimension of economics. Yet poverty, joblessness, lack of affordable housing, rising crime, the decline of the middle class and so, the hope of better times for those working in pursuit of something more than mere survival are no respecters of race and gender – it’s happening to everybody but a favoured few. These things cut across the categories that our elites want us to think in, and these are the realities that really unite us.
I can recall from my time in ministry in the upper Ottawa Valley having parishioners who would be quickly condemned because they would fail such little tests. I mean, I’d have folks refer to the people on the Golden Lake reserve as “Indians.” Well, we know that’s not the proper term, that we now say “First Nations” people, or “indigenous”. But I would not describe any of my former parishioners as racists because quite often they would be talking to me about the reserve because many of those “Indians” were their cousins! Because they were doing business with somebody at Golden Lake, because they would be going to a wedding or an anniversary party there! But their out-of-date language in reference to the Cree community would have them excluded from any meaningful conversation despite having more in common with the Cree socially, economically, and culturally than any of the urban elites of Toronto and Ottawa have with First Nations peoples.
One thing that I often forget in thinking about Jesus and his disciples as Jews of the first century is that the scribes and Pharisees wouldn’t have – that is, in the eyes of the religious elite, of those in authority in Jerusalem, they weren’t so much Jews and they were Galileans. Yes, Galileans shared in the same religious cult as Judeans, as the people of Jerusalem, but they were considered to be mongrels. And it didn’t matter that Galileans actually had a reputation for piety, for a great love of the faith centred on the Jerusalem temple such that they came down by the thousands every Passover to celebrate the great festival. No, they were dismissed in the minds of many as being somehow on the margins of the covenant people, of Israel, just barely belonging. And why? Because they spoke with the wrong accent, their vocabulary was corrupted with too many Syrian and Greek words, that they were unsophisticated, and even as they could recite scripture better than the average Judean, that was more evidence of their backwardness: I mean, don’t you people read anything else other than the Torah?!
It’s kind of like the way, as a product of American pop culture, that the instant you hear a character on a t.v. program or in a movie speak with a southern U.S. accent, you know that whoever that is they’ve been encoded as an ignorant, gun-loving, bible-thumping, racist redneck until given some proof to the contrary in the course of the story.
We as Christians are called to look past the superficial, and to look for the truth, but also detect evil. And indeed, within our culture, and I would say this is a result of our Christian heritage, there is a healthy suspicion of the sophisticated, of the cultured, that is, whenever it is used to make distinctions and so set some above others, to exclude the many, and empower the few. But, of course, the point today is that it’s not always so obvious, and quite often these attempts to divide, to exclude and to silence are couched in terms that give the appearance of a discussion of virtue, of goodness, of propriety, of the defense of the right and the upholding of justice.
Christ, in many of the gospel accounts, looked within, past appearances. We have stories of his service to those clearly outside the bound of the Israelite community: the Roman centurion, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Samaritan leper, and so on. He was looking, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, at the content of their character, and to that he responded.
So, by all means, wash your hands before dinner, and say grace, but also practice the faith meaningfully, and when listening to others, take care to hear what they are actually saying rather than waiting on triggering words that stop us from engaging with others across superficial divides, illusory categories, so that we can find the common ground, recognize our shared need, and open ourselves up to the saviour of all, Christ our Lord.
Amen.