Sunday, August 25, 2024, Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Clean Hearts and Clean Hands”
Psalm 14; Isaiah 29:11-19; Ephesians 5:21-33; Mark 7:1-13
Order of Holy Matins
Hymns: #906 “O Day of Rest and Gladness”; #692 “Praise to You and Adoration”; #654 “Your Kingdom, O God, Is My Glorious Treasure”; #707 “Oh, That the Lord Would Guide My Ways”; #686 “Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
The Pharisees in our Gospel thought being clean before God was a matter of properly washing your hands, and of doing a thousand other things “just the right way.” And Jesus told them they could wash all they cared to on the outside, scrub their skin until it was red if they wanted to - but that would never make them clean on the inside, where the real washing needed to be done. What does it really mean to be clean before God?
If you’ve seen any of those “forensic detective” shows on TV, sometimes when the police are investigating a murder, the murderer will have taken great pains to hide the evidence of their crime; scrub everything down with bleach, deep-clean the carpets, try to leave no traces of blood. But the detectives have a chemical they use called Luminol for detecting blood. Turn off the lights, spray it around the room, and anywhere a trace of blood has been left behind will glow a bright bluish-green.
Our sin leaves behind an indelible stain. It leaves us with blood-stained hands, blood-stained hearts, and blood-stained lives that can’t be made clean, no matter how hard we try to wash or clean or scrub. Oh, people do try. We try to hide our sin behind a mask of righteousness. We try to explain our sin away. We try to down-play our sin by comparing ourselves to others; “I’m not so bad compared to that guy!” But our Father in Heaven has the Luminol of truth. We can’t hide our sins from Him. We’ll all “glow like sin” when He shines the light of truth on us.
The Pharisees and law teachers in our Gospel reading had their own ideas – and very wrong ideas - about how to be clean before God. What Jesus tried to tell them, and what He wants us to know, is that there is only one precious and holy substance on earth that can wash away the stain of sin. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
In our Gospel, the Pharisees and law teachers from Jerusalem came to gather around Jesus, looking, as always, for something to accuse Him of. The Pharisees were the rule-keepers of Israel, the finger-pointers, the “letter of the law” people. The law teachers were the scribes, the grammatai, the grammar police, the fine print readers, the church lawyers, the ones the Pharisees would turn around and whisper with before answering a question.
And the first thing they found to complain about was that some of Jesus’ disciples were eating bread with unwashed and unclean hands. Their complaint wasn’t that they weren’t washing up before sitting down to dinner; it was that they weren’t carrying out the very specific step-by-step ritual of handwashing that was required of all the Jews before partaking of bread.
Specifically, the hand-washing ritual goes like this: First be sure your hands are clean and free of anything that will obstruct the waters from reaching the entire surface of your hands. Remove your rings, unless you never remove them, in which case they are considered “part of your hand.” Fill a cup with water and pour three times on your right hand. Repeat on the left. (Lefties: reverse the order). Make sure the water covers your entire hand up to the wrist bone with each pour. Separate your fingers slightly to allow the water in between them. After washing, lift your hands chest-high and say the following blessing: Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the washing of the hands. (Say this blessing only if you intend to eat more than two ounces of bread.) Rub your hands together and then dry them. Be careful not to speak or do anything else until you’ve recited the blessing on your bread and swallowed some of it.
Mark’s Gospel adds the parenthetical note: “The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles.” The Pharisee’s great argument about all their rules and rituals was to turn to their “WADITW’s” - “We’ve always done it this way.” But that wasn’t necessarily true. The original requirements God gave them had been added and added and added to over the years, until they had rules about the rules, and rules about the rules about the rules, and they’d gone far beyond what God had asked for, and having clean hands became more important to them than having a clean heart.
Now, for the Jews, it wasn’t just your hands that had to be properly washed, but anything human hands had touched. Dishes, cups, spoons, forks, beds, chairs… all had to be baptidzomai - baptized, washed, or sprinkled with water. And the point had become not just that you wash, but how you wash. And that’s the level of rule-keeping the Pharisees and scribes were on the lookout for from others. And for the Pharisees, it was “rules for thee but not for me,” as Jesus many times pointed out to them. The more rules we can give people to follow, the more opportunity we’ll have to chastise and criticize and “aha!” them. Rules become a very useful means to control people, if we use them in that way. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?"
Jesus responds by calling them out as hypocrites, and pointing out that prophet Isaiah was talking about them when he said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.” The word hypocrite comes originally from ancient Greek stage plays. A hypocritos was an actor, a pretender, a performer hiding underneath a mask. We put on our masks before one another and before the world, to hide who and what we really are. But God alone is the One who knows our hearts.
Obedience to rules we make up for ourselves means nothing in the end. We could make a rule about “no blue jeans in Church” (the church I grew up in had one); but then we’d have to have someone standing at the door to enforce the rule, and we’d need rules about what the punishment should be if the rule should be broken, and rules about exceptions to the rule. Do black jeans or brown jeans count as blue jeans? Can women wear denim skirts? Can I wear a denim jacket? And on and on it would go.
The point being, obedience to God and His Commandments has to come from the heart. A clean heart produces clean hands. A heart that is clean on the inside, will lead to “doing the right thing” on the outside. An active Christian conscience is a blessed thing! “Out of the heart the mouth speaks,” Jesus says, and “By their fruit you will recognize them.” Genuine faith, “real” faith, will always produce a change in behavior. Being good at rule-keeping will make you self-righteous, but it will never make you righteous before God. Only trust and faith in the blood of Jesus can do that for you.
Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men." What is the commandment of God, anyway? What is the greatest, most important commandment? Remember how Jesus answered that question? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.” St. Paul says, “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Jesus says, “Love covers over a multitude of sins.” And apostle John says, “If you see a brother or sister in need and do nothing for them, how can the love of God be in you?”
So Jesus says to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” “For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll,” says Isaiah. “Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord , who do their work in darkness and think, ‘Who sees us? Who will know?’” It’s the pot arguing with the Potter, God’s creatures turning from the way of their Creator, and choosing the way of rules, laws, condemnation, and judgment instead - when all God wants if for us to love Him and for us to love one another.
Jesus, as an example for them, points them to the Ten Commandments, and specifically to the Fourth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” God’s intent in that Commandment is that we honor and obey our parents, and that we do it happily and joyfully, because we love them, and because our hearts tell us it’s the right thing to do. The Pharisees, in their pharisiacal way, had regulated the loving intent right out of that good Commandment, by declaring that you could declare your wealth to be “corban,” a gift intended for God, even if your parents or family were in need. Sorry, mom and dad, I can’t help you; I’m leaving it all to the Church instead! That sounds righteous, pious, and holy on the surface; but as St. Paul wrote, “Whoever won’t look after his own family is worse than an unbeliever.”
Do you remember the story of the Widow’s Mite, where the rich men were making a show of parading to the offering box, and not even seeing that there were people like the widow there in need of help? Jesus accused the Pharisees of “robbing orphans and widows,” and that was true. That widow was down to her last mite very likely because one of those Pharisees or scribes or rich men had cheated her out of what little she had. All done ‘legally’, of course, but still oh so wrong. “Thus you nullify the word of God,” Jesus tells them, “by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that." Truth is the holy Luminol that exposes our sins, and shows the blood on our hands that we can’t wash away.
What does it mean to be “clean before God?” How can such a thing ever be, sinners that we are, and given the un-washable, un-hidable depth of our sin? “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,” St. Paul says; that’s the beginning of the answer. Submission in the biblical sense isn’t ever a have-to, but always a want-to. Submission is something we do out of love. Husbands and wives submit and give themselves to one another out of love for one another. The Church submits to the will of Christ, because we love Him. We submit to one another because we knows that leads to peace. Not because there’s a rule somewhere about these things, but because by the Holy Spirit that’s in us, we know them to be right, and because we know in our hearts that loving God and one another is a good thing, and will lead to good things.
We are blessed to be clean before God on this day – free of our sin and dishonesty and hypocricy and all the rest, because “Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” We’re clean because of the cross, and because Jesus loved us enough to come and die for sinners like us. We’re clean because we’ve been washed in the holy water of Baptism - into the water to die with Jesus, and up from the water to live a new life for Him. Our hearts are clean because we’ve confessed our sins, and our Father in Heaven in mercy has heard us. And our hands are clean because the past is now past, and today is a new day to use these hands of ours to serve our God.
What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
O precious is the flow, that made me white as snow!
No other fount I know; Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
In Jesus’ name; Amen.