A different sort of heart test
Ordinary Sunday 22: 31st August, 2003
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
It is what comes out of a person that defiles. (Mk 7:20)
The lessons today revolve around some sharp criticisms and questioning of the Lord's approach to tradition. In particular, the customs and practices around what it was allowable to eat and what preparation was required. What is clean? What is unclean, in a ritual sense? How important are these distinctions to be?
These are not difficulties we ourselves urgently face. For almost all who would call themselves Christian, questions about these observances of the old Law were settled almost 2,000 years ago. Those codes of practice reached into every aspect of life. But they have been put aside. Some of them, very selectively indeed, are resurrected even today though, by Christians in debates of current interest. A gentle read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy is most instructive on this matter. There is a whole package there, a whole approach to living. And it is certainly very free with the death penalty. We are dealing there with a legal code and a code of religious and social practice from some 3,000 years ago.
We are aware that for observant people of the Jewish faith, food and cleanliness customs continue to remain extremely and definingly important. Therefore the design details of kitchens and food storage areas are complex. We are aware too that somewhat similar food and cleanliness codes are also observed in Islam. Special butchers and restaurants widely cater for these needs in this city. A mosque has large areas set aside for ritual washing by worshippers before they go in to pray. These customs are for such people of faith, ways of continuing to honour God.
Yet Christians do not follow these observances, even though so many of the earliest Christians would have themselves been very familiar with them. The reason that this is so stems from incidents included in the gospels such as today and similar passages, or such as the vision of Peter in Acts, relating to all foods being declared clean and more importantly, all people being declared able to receive the gifts of God's grace – no matter what ethnic background or religious or cultural tradition they came from. From the earliest generations of the Christian Church then, Christians have not been under the obligation to hold to these practices.
In today's gospel the Lord is saying, look to the core teachings and see what they say. Keep things in balance and do not confuse commandment of God with a developed human regulation, no matter how worthy its intention. Elsewhere in the gospels he made it explicitly clear what he on on about.
The Lord's summary of the Law we know well. He looks at the Ten Commandments, recognising that they are in two groups – the first that deal with relationship to God, and the second which addresses the way we are to interact with each other. And so we get this restatement of a central understanding from the First Covenant, from the Old Testament, powerfully presented again in the New Testament, simple and clear. This, in contrast to the specifics of practice and custom that have been put aside, has been retained and affirmed.
'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' Jesus said, 'this is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself.'
How might we understand this and apply this in our own context? We might understand that there is a clear difference between the place of this 'love God and love neighbour' fundamental teaching, and for instance, our own much loved customs of say genuflecting in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament or making the sign of the cross. It is not that these outward signs are unimportant or that they do not have significance in helping us understand who we are, or helping others understand who we are, by noticing what we do or do not do and when. They are indeed important. They are second nature to us. They are a matter of reverence and honour and respect. They are signs that we are close to the things of God. They remind us and others of that. But they are not at the level of the Two Great Commandments of the Lord. They in themselves do not necessarily speak of what is inside, in the heart of things. They may or they may not. Obviously, the same sort of consideration could be given to the specific customs of washing or eating that the Lord and his disciples were being quizzed about in today's lesson. But they are on a different level and we know it.
This gospel today is a difficult one. It is hard because as on many occasions in the gospel, we can find ourselves sympathising with those who are on the receiving end of the Lord's criticism. Scribes and Pharisees can sometimes be vicious opponents of the Lord taking him all the way to the cross, and other times they might seem to us to be just apparently good people, trying their best to do things the way they have always understood them to be done.
This gospel is hard, the gospel as a whole is hard, because it always presupposes the possibility of a new understanding – and fresh hope coming out of it. The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ: offering new life, new hope. It is the story of some of what he said and did – and why. It urges those who hear to follow in the way that he taught, to shape their lives in that particular way. It is an invitation to relationship with God. None of those things are easy to take on board.
Now today, there is no way of avoiding the fact that in this lesson, the Lord says that those who would cling just to human traditions (rather than to God's), are hypocrites. That is a strongly critical word that comes straight from the Greek word for actor – it means a pretender, in this case a spiritual pretender.
In today's gospel we have put before us the ever-present possibility that external observances may be just that – external. The Lord quotes from Isaiah about people honouring God with 'lip service' only – with their hearts not being in any way involved. And in response to those who would want to stress the food codes, he makes a strong point. It is not what goes in that matters. It is what comes out. Food comes and goes in a readily understandable manner. Matters of the heart are more complex.
An unclean person, a defiled person (to use the language and understanding of the lesson today), is one who cannot approach God, or who cannot approach another person, without doing them spiritual harm. So this is serious.
The teaching of the Lord here is that you are not going to be able to be sure about who is in that category, by just watching whether they have appropriately washed or have eaten the right sort of food. Instead, you will see it by what they do and how they interact with others. Our second lesson this morning from James made that point very strongly indeed. Similarly, if we ourselves are most diligent indeed about whatever are the equivalent careful external observances that we most hold dear, that does not in itself tell us (or our God, or anyone watching us) everything there is to know about the state of our own heart. There are deeper issues at stake here.
So the Lord called together the whole crowd and gave them this teaching. It is all about a rather different sort of heart test. So to the question who is going to be acceptable to God, who is behaving appropriately, and whether it is or should be a matter of offence to God and all others that certain customs are observed or not, the Lord has a much broader answer. It is 'evil intentions' that defile, he says, not the breaching of traditional customs that have expanded in detail through the generations. 'Evil things' are defined and listed: 'fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.' This is a mixture of attitude and action, but I think we get the drift.
That heart test is recommended for us all.
It is what comes out of a person that defiles. (Mk 7:20)
The Lord be with you.
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