‘This people
honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” St. Mark 7:6
When I noticed that today’s Gospel
lesson was about burdensome laws, I had to smile. Because for the last month, my life has been
dominated by one particular burdensome law—Virginia Civil Code 46.2-1177. That’s the law that requires that all Fairfax
County vehicles pass an emissions test prior to registration. Now, in principle, I think it’s a very good
law. I think we have a responsibility to
limit carbon emissions, and I want my kids to breathe clean air, and I’m sure
that auto mechanics do work that contributes to the common good. But in practice—well let’s just say I’ve made
eight trips to Sunset Hills Automotive, and we haven’t passed yet. I’m on a first name basis with everyone in
the shop.
I drive a big old car, which I
inherited from my grandfather. He always
liked a pretty car and this one was his last one and his favorite. Sometimes, when I climb into it, I can still
smell my grandmother’s perfume. I love
the leather seats and the leg room, but the car has reached a certain age, and
apparently its valves, sensors and gas cap appear to be hurtling down the “way
of all flesh.” Over at Sunset Hills,
they test it, and when it fails, they find something wrong and fix that. Then I have to drive it for fifty miles at
varying speeds to reset the monitor and first thing in the morning, they will
test it again. And the process repeats,
and the repair bills rise, and I’m left a rather less enthusiastic environmentalist
than I was when I first moved to Virginia.
All those trips back and forth to the mechanic’s, all that steam being
released from my ears—when you stack up those emissions against the ones
escaping from the minuscule gaps around the sides of my gas cap, I just wonder
how that computes.
Virginia Civil Code 46.2-1177 graciously has a mercy clause. If you spend over $750 on emissions repairs,
they call it a day and pass you anyway.
There was no such way out of the Old Testament’s dietary rules, at least
as interpreted by the Pharisees. Today’s
Gospel focuses on a confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees over an even
more burdensome law.
The Pharisees criticize Jesus’
disciples for eating with unwashed hands.
This isn’t a commentary on hygiene.
It’s about ritual purity. The Old
Testament law had quite a few regulations about eating. Everyone remembers the prohibition on pork,
but other foods were also forbidden, as was the mixing of certain foods. There were also additional rules surrounding
foods which had been offered in sacrifice to God. In Numbers chapter 18, God commands the
priests who work in the tabernacle that they should wash their hands before
consuming the food consecrated at the Altar.
The washing of hands here at our Altar before the offering of the
Eucharist is a kind of remote survival of that old rule. It’s meant to express the teaching that holy
things are to be handled with reverence, and that we must approach God cleansed
from sin.[1]
But the Pharisees had extended that
law—it was called “building a fence around the law.” What was originally a regulation for only a
small number of people—the priests, and for a particular place and
situation—the temple, when sacrifice was offered—was extended by the Pharisees
to cover all people and all kinds of meals.
Truly righteous people, they believed, must wash hands before consuming
any food—with a certain amount of water, up to certain joints of the fingers,
using certain prayers—and so on, and so
on. And if they did not or could not (as
most working people, in a country where water is scarce could not), well then,
for the Pharisees, they were probably unclean, and most certainly irreverent,
and ignorant, and so on, and so on.
The Pharisees weren’t just trying to
be obnoxious. Their movement had arisen
in a time of desperation, when the Jews had no power, and were dispersed across
a mighty empire with a sophisticated dominant culture. They were afraid it was all going to spin out
of control, any minute, that all their brightest and best would sign up for the
Roman army, head off for a philosophical career in pagan Athens or marry the
daughter of the richest camel dealer in central Arabia. In a generation, they feared, God’s chosen
people would vanish into thin air. But
if you focused on keeping alive the traditions of the past, and you rewarded
those who were zealous for the law, well maybe, they hoped, God would smile on
his people again. Until then, they would
hold it together for the days of glory just around the corner.
Jesus has very little patience for
this anxious, manipulative strategy. He
really criticizes the Pharisees for missing the point, for confusing a true
zeal for the law, a true desire to live according to God’s will, with a finicky
fixation on burdensome regulations and obscure traditions. Jesus
isn’t saying that God’s law is unimportant, and He’s not freeing people to live
however they like. He shares the
Pharisee’s zeal for the law, stressing in other parts of his teaching that not
a bit of it should be eliminated and that those who teach others to break it
should be condemned. Jesus Himself was
completely faithful to the law, expressing its deepest purpose in a way that
far out-shadowed even the greatest of the Pharisees.
But Jesus says it’s the inner
purpose of the law, what Jeremiah called the law “written on the heart”[2] that’s what really matters to God. He criticizes the Pharisees for giving God
lip-service, while their heart “is far from me.” And then, a bit later in the exchange, He
talks about the sources of true defilement.
He gives a great list of evil deeds fueled by what the Baptismal service
calls “sinful desires that draw you from the love of God." They don’t spring from external things. You can’t avoid jealousy by washing your food
more fastidiously. These deeds and
desires are from the heart. And the
heart, turned away from God, bent on destruction, but also abounding in such
great potential for good—that’s what God really wants to heal and claim for
Himself.
The great Dominican theologian
Herbert McCabe described this distinction when he said that the spiritual life
is like soccer (well, because he’s British, he said it was like football—but
you know what I mean).[3] The rules of the game are important. If you don’t know them and discipline
yourself by them, the game you are playing isn’t really soccer. But if your only goal is not to break the
rules, you miss the point of the game. Soccer’s
about playing with gracefulness and power, using your abilities as well as you
possibly can, developing skills over time that will bring consistent
success. Good playing comes from the
heart of the game, and only when you can set your anxieties about the rules
aside to concentrate on what matters most.
There are rules for the Christian
life: the commandments inherited from the Old Testament, the clear moral
teachings of the New Testament. There
are rubrics about how the liturgy should be celebrated, canon laws about
governance, and civil laws about how we handle money. They are important, and we serve God best
when we know them and are faithful to them.
There have always been some Christians who have a particular zeal for
them, usually especially for the ones especially far from the beaten path; and
that zeal is commendable in its way. But
sometimes, as for the Pharisees, that zeal is caught up in a kind of fear and
anxiety about the future that is not really of God. And sometimes, it can be bundled with anger,
jealousy, pride and all sorts of other inner sins that are plainly contrary to
His will. It has always been fully
possible to keep the law and miss the point.
You know, I’ve noticed that here in
Northern Virginia, there seems to be a great deal of emphasis on procedure,
following the rules, doing everything in exactly the right way. And I get that. I’m part of that great brotherhood of Type A
people. I like my desk in order, the
goal in sight and my to-do list synced across all devices. People in this area are people primarily
responsible for running the world’s most complex bureaucracy—and on the whole
you do that very well.
The
rules have their place in getting things accomplished. But it’s also easy to
carry that kind of focus on externals that is entirely appropriate in your
professional life into other arenas where it is a little less useful. I just wish I heard a little more talk about
love, joy, peace, patience and kindness in the emails and phone calls I receive
at my office, and a little less about regulations, budgets, and
spreadsheets. Really, it’s going to be
okay. We’re in God’s hands. You’re in
God’s hands. This simple fact frees us to tend to things which matter most in
this life. We have been redeemed to serve Him with whole heart, mind and
strength, to play the game beautifully, practicing those virtues that show
God’s work within us. Let us ask of Him
the grace to put first things first and to commend the rest to His care and
keeping.
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