King’s
Acre and Mostyn Road
31 August 2003
Sheep’s Eyeballs, anyone?
I wonder exactly what we
make, today, of Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading. It’s not just so easy to understand what he was getting at, since
we don’t actually have this thing of being unclean, not the way the Jews did in
his day. They had all sorts of rituals
which hedged them round, and if they failed to keep them accurately, they were
considered “unclean”.
Yet I’m sure we can learn
something from the story today.
Let’s go back to the roots
of what Jesus was talking about. Why
would he get into trouble for not washing his hands properly?
Well, it all started back
in the days when Israel was a collection of nomadic tribes in the desert. They needed all sorts of rules to keep
themselves healthy, and prevent disease – and, of course, to help them keep on
being God’s people. Some of the rules
were purely for hygiene – latrines should be dug well outside the camp, and you
should take a trowel with you to cover up after yourself. It makes sense not to eat pork or shellfish
in that sort of climate, when refrigerators haven’t yet been invented! In an age before antibiotics and
disinfectant, skin diseases, mould and mildew need to be treated swiftly and ruthlessly if they are not to
spread uncontrollably. Even the rules
about sex make sense if you look at them in the context of a small group of
tribes that needed to increase their numbers – as given, the rules maximise
potential fertility and minimise the chance of disease spreading.
You can read most of the
rules in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy; the latter seems to have been
planned for a later time, when the people of Israel were settled in their
land. But they do make a great deal of
sense when you read them in the context of their time and place, and, quite
honestly, whether you consider them to have been directly dictated by God, or
whether you believe they were more the work of inspired men and women, I think
the only response I find it possible to make is, “Isn’t God clever!”
The rules also help people
live together in an orderly society – no stealing, no murder, no lying, and so
on. And rules to help you worship
God. Once the Israelites were settled
down, it was horrendously tempting to worship the local gods, especially as
they were learning how to be farmers from their Canaanite neighbours, and
worshipping Baal, the local god, was all part and parcel of a Canaanite
farmer’s life. So all sorts of
festivals were set up, from Passover, through Pentecost, and so on. They were gradually modified and added to as
years went by, but, by and large, the pattern of how you behaved, how you
worshipped, and how you lived your life if you were Jewish became fixed.
Of course, the God the
Jews worshipped was very different from Baal and the other local gods, in that
Baal and them didn’t care much what you did outside of worship, as long as the
proper rituals were observed within it.
But being God’s person demanded, as indeed it still does, the whole of
your life; not just what went on in the worship service, but what goes on outside
of it, too. There is still no such
thing as a person who is only a Christian on Sundays!
And, of course, this is
where the trouble started. Because it’s
all too easy, as I’m sure you know, to allow the rituals and rules to become a
substitute for the real thing. And then
you get things just exactly backwards: you think that if you eat this diet,
observe that festival, wash your hands on these occasions, you will be right
with God. Whereas, of course, it should
be the other way round: you eat this diet, observe that festival, whatever, because
you are right with God.
So when the
Pharisees and the teachers of the Law spoke to Jesus about this, they were
getting confused. They saw Jesus and
his disciples not washing their hands in the ritual manner and thought this
meant they were disrespecting the Jewish Law.
But Jesus said it’s not the outward things that matter, nor what you put
into your body – after all, much of that goes straight through without becoming
part of you – but the inward things.
It’s what comes out of a person that can be defiling, and Jesus gives us
a great list: “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.”
So What’s the Problem?
Well, we know all about most of those nasty things, of
course, but in some ways, the rest of the reading seems almost irrelevant to
us. After all, we don’t observe the
Jewish Law; we don’t make the mistake of thinking that our relationship with
God depends on whether we observe the rituals correctly. Do we?
Sometimes, of course, we do. We think that because we go to Church, or read our Bibles every
day, or read some kind of daily office, or whatever, then we are in a right
relationship with God. The trouble is,
we get confused – we know in our heads that it’s the other way round,
but sometimes what we think we believe and what we really do believe are two
very different things!
Then, of course, there is all the cultural baggage we
bring with us. The missionaries who
took the Good News to Africa and similar places, the Pacific islands, for
instance, bought an awful lot of their own prejudices with them, particularly in regards to dress codes, for
instance. They thought that how they
dressed was the norm, and how some of
the people they met in parts of Africa dressed was shocking and horrible! So they insisted that Christian people dress
like respectable middle-class people in Victorian England. And the only way they could envisage
worshipping God was in the way they were used to at home, so they imposed
British patterns of worship and traditional hymns. They couldn’t distinguish between what was important for a person
who genuinely wanted to follow Jesus, and what was a cultural tradition that
could have legitimately been discarded.
We tend to believe we
don’t fall into that sort of trap any more, and perhaps we don’t. We know that if we were invited to a banquet
in Saudi Arabia, we might be asked to eat sheep’s eyeballs, and we are really
quite used to the fact that snails and frogs’ legs tend to feature on the menus
of good restaurants across the Channel.
We won’t make the mistakes that the first colonists in north America
made, who starved in the midst of plenty because they did not, or could not,
realise that what the local people were showing them so carefully was not only
food, but the sort of crop that grew and thrived in the local soil, in the way
that the wheat, barley and oats they had imported from England with such
difficulty did not.
Nevertheless, though, we
do all bring cultural baggage with us to our Christianity. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, of
course. Our heritage is part of who we
are, and we need to acknowledge that.
Where we go wrong is when we try to impose it on other people.
It’s not always easy to
distinguish between what is cultural baggage, and what is important to us in
helping us to be God’s person. That’s
where the Pharisees went wrong, of course, but we are apt to do the same thing. Like shopping on Sundays, for instance – in
Paris, the small shops are all open for a few hours for you to buy your bread,
which does not keep, and any necessary groceries, and nobody sees anything
wrong in it. Similarly, some of you may
be planning to call in at Tesco’s on your way home, while others of you
wouldn’t dream of it. That’s okay; what
isn’t, of course, is when you try to impose what you think is right on other
people.
Jonathan Edwards, the
triple jumper who retired at the World Athletic Championships last week, never
used to compete on Sundays in the early part of his career. I don’t know what changed his mind, but it
is notable that his success, and world records, only came after he did discover
that competing on Sundays didn’t necessarily harm his relationship with God.
Then there’s the matter of
what you do or don’t wear to Church. My
father – and Robert’s too, for that matter – would always put on a suit to
go. My mother wouldn’t wear
trousers. Lots of the Black-led
churches still expect women to wear hats.
I always try to look smart when I’m preaching, although I don’t normally
dress up on an ordinary Sunday if I’m not.
I happen to like a little
symbolism in my worship; other people like a very great deal, and others think that
worshipping using any sense other than the intellect is totally
unnecessary. When I grew up, it was
traditional to bow your head in the Creed when you said “I believe in the Lord
Jesus Christ” – I don’t do that any more, but I notice that my father not only
does, he bows whenever he says or sings the name “Jesus” during a worship
service. And I noticed last Sunday,
when I went to church with them, that he knelt all the way through the service,
despite his hip being officially “on its last legs”. I, wimpy, with a sore knee from skating, sat most of the time!
I was brought up to
observe Lent and Advent fairly strictly, but we were not, and are not,
Sabbatarian. I found it very strange
when I first met Christians who kept Sundays very strictly, but almost ignored
Lent and Advent. And while some
Christians feel the need to receive Holy Communion every single day, others
take it only once a quarter, after a great deal of personal preparation.
Just a word here about the
Sacraments: sometimes we might feel that taking the Sacrament is also cultural
baggage, mere outward formality that doesn’t do anything. And, okay, yes, sometimes that is so. But, unlike ceremonial washing, for the
Jews, or Sabbath observance, or whatever, sacraments are said to be “An outward
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. In other words, they’re a picture of something God does for
us. So even if it often feels as though
nothing happens, in fact, we believe, God does do something, come close to us
in a new way, whatever.
But things like how often
we attend the Sacrament don’t really matter.
It’s your relationship with God that matters, and how that relationship
spills over into your relationship with others. And, of course, the Sacraments can help that. Jesus knew that it didn’t matter if the
disciples hadn’t washed their hands exactly as prescribed; what mattered was
what was inside them. St Paul puts it
rather well, I think, in his letter to the Galatians, where he contrasts “those
who live by the Spirit” with those who don’t: “Now the works of the flesh are
obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger,
quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like
these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will
not inherit the kingdom of God.” That’s
more or less what Jesus said, in our first reading. But then St Paul goes on: “By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against
such things.”
So, basically, if we
belong to Jesus, if we have the Holy Spirit, then we will be more likely to
display all those nice qualities than all those nasty qualities. And if we do, then we are truly clean
inside. And that has to be more
important than ceremonial washing, or any other sort of religious observance
which is basically just cultural baggage.
Let’s commit ourselves once again to being God’s person, to allowing the
Holy Spirit to fill us, to allowing ourselves to be made clean inside.