Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9Ps. 15
James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Lectionary Link
It seems as though Jesus treated some religious behaviors like the farmer who entered his pig in the wrong contest at the County Fair. He put some lipstick on the pig and tried entered his porker in the Miss County Fair contest. But of course, the lipstick could not cover the true identity.
Jesus exposed that some religious activity was a game played before God and within community. Religious leaders were stressing the religious purification rituals like liturgical police to prove to God and everyone what good people they were. It gave them permission to excommunicate those "dirty" people who don't know how and when to wash their hands correctly.
Washing hands is very important and not just for religious show; Joseph Lister ushered in the notion of a sterile field to keep at bay the spreading of those dirty germs which can harm us.
In our spiritual lives we have a much bigger problem than dirty germs; we have to deal with our inward lives which for a good portion of the time are not worthy of publishing to the world at large.
Outward filth is an external problem and certainly germs can become an internal health problem in our bodies.
Jesus was telling the religious people not to mistake physical dirt for the inward cesspools which our interior lives can become. If we really want to clean up our act, we have to deal with the inner life.
The inner life is the great problem. St. Paul in his struggles said the things that he did not want to do, he did anyway, and the things he wanted to do, he did not find the power to do. This is the wretched experience of dealing with uncontrollable and the Pandora's box of our interior lives.
The Psalmist in desperation cried out for a clean heart and a renewed spirit. Jeremiah said that above all, the heart is exceedingly deceitful, and who can know the depth of such deceit? Martin Luther expounded upon the perpetuity of human depravity, which co-exists with the needed experience of grace. Sigmund Freud wrote that the unconscious mind is polymorphously perverse.
Early in life each person has the problem of coherent agreement on all levels of being: in how one feels inside, in how one comports one's body language, and in the words that one uses.
A problem is life is that we only allow babies and young children full honesty. A young toddler wants something, a baby screams for what is wanted, a baby reaches out to take whatever is wanted. But such behaviors we only allow for but a short time. What happens when babies have to learn the adult world?
Human adult laws interdict and restrain the child. Harmful outcomes slowly teach us. Putting one hand in the fire burns, so one stops doing it. We also learn adult suppression, like "the customer is always right." Adult protocols set in which cause internal division, like when a customer is rude, but the clerk has to smile and accept the abuse and suppress feelings disgust.
The law is supposed to teach us to inwardly desire the recommended outcomes of lawful behaviors. And our interior lives become at odds with the law. We desire inwardly what the outward law does not permit. And we either try to be sneaky and not get caught, or out of fear of punishment we do not do what we want to do and as a result we might live in perpetual resentment of being required to do things that are actually good for us.
Jesus had a high standard for the inward life. In the beatitudes, he stated that to hate and be angry and to have lust are the same thing as murder or adultery. And of course, in our jurisprudence and social life, we know this is not practically true, since doing wrong gets us in trouble, not thinking or desiring wrong.
Jesus gave us a vision of perfection which is so high, that we are promised great opportunity to grow in holiness, so that we cannot presume to be those adequate to write other people off and judge them because they are at their own place of spiritual growth.
If we are are honest, we know that our inward life and the objects which we desire wrongly, means that we are always in need of the graceful interdiction of God's words to rearrange our inward lives so that we can see and desire differently and be gradually made more Christian so that our desire is trained to work for us rather than against us. But this is indeed a lifetime of training.
The writer of James encourages us to be in recovery from our hypocrisy of living "do what I say, don't do as I do," lifestyles. The entire purpose of the grace of spiritual practice and transformation is to be delivered from the divided lives of hypocrisy and come to inner union and peace so that desire, words and deeds can agree in the unified practice of the love of God and our neighbor.
Even when we think we're making progress, a life incident can trigger the uncontrolled misbehaviors of our inward life. If you don't think so, just think about the thoughts that you have had about someone who has said or done something you think is really stupid. And suddenly, one's interior life is all aroused.
Jesus Christ reminds us about how bad we can be but also about how good we can become to show us that we are in this lifetime process of transformation in being made more Christian, more Christ-like. And we come here today not because we think our church behavior is a lipstick on our horrendous inner lives. We come here today because, we want to say, "Lord Jesus Christ, I am with you and for you, as you and your words continue to do do an inside job on me as I seek to be made a better Christian. We come here today, because we are renewed in the grace of Christ which makes up for our lack of yet being finished and perfect beings. Amen.
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