Upside down and outside-in

“Listen to me, all of you, and understand”. (Mark 7:14)

Mark 7:1-23 (Year B: Trinity+13)

Controversies are never far from us..

More controversy. Why is that religion, like politics, generates controversy? In this week’s passage from Mark (following last Sunday’s dispute over hard teachings of Jesus in John 6) Jesus does not mince his words where the traditions of the elders of his time were concerned.  Even today, some folk attach a lot of importance to appearance, ritual and customs as the doorposts on which religion hangs.  These things offer comfort and come from the wells of ‘tradition’. (In Jesus’ time some of these traditions were oral but authoritative and not necessarily practiced at the time by all Jews).  More than that, adherence to particular customs helps distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. If the others drive on the right hand side of the road and use metric measures, well, we do it differently around here. Anyway, it is up to them to change. The habits of a lifetime and the traditions of the ancestors shape deep ravines in our minds and memories. ‘It was always like that here’ and ‘that’s the way it is done here’.

Today, we underestimate the extent of ‘unwritten rules’ in many organisations, families and situations. Let’s call it culture. And culture is important. But, we do not need to be slaves to culture because culture evolves in and out of the experience of human communities.

With sex on the brain..

Notions of what is right and what is pure continue to influence religious debate in our day. Purity may concern notions of what are appropriate and what is not appropriate expressions of sexuality, for example. It may also concern various practices and ways of behaviour beyond sex which continues to preoccupy religious people. In Old Testament times, the notion of purity was very often tied up with not worshiping idols or not partaking in the sacrifices or rituals of others as well as abstaining from various foods as well as keeping away from impure things like persons afflicted with leprosy or dead bodies, etc. (sorry to disappoint but the ancient Hebrews had more than sex on their minds!).

Sometimes, a martian arriving on earth might be forgiven for thinking that the main concern of religious persons – many Christians certainly being no exception – is sex.  In the recent decades more controversies, splits, expulsions, silencings, dissenting publications, resolutions, instructions have been generated by sex and things to do with sex.  At least, nowadays, Christians no longer kill each other over faith and good works. Rather, they squabble over sex, instead. Now, the areas of sexuality, intimacy, commitment, marriage and family are vital parts of human living and it would be altogether astonishing if the bible had nothing to say about these matters and how lives can be formed to bring glory to God and well-being to his people (the two being entirely mutually reinforcing). However, there is more to living and right living than these important areas.  

If one thing is astonishing it is how comparatively little is said or done in the churches nowadays – compared to the tantalising preoccupation with sex – about the great social injustices of our day – environmental destruction, poverty, racism, wars, oppression, denial of fundamental rights (the most recent Encyclical by Pope Francis entitled Laudato Si which discusses the environment goes some of the way to rebalance matters). Of course, churches and Christians are often to the fore in speaking about these wider social and ecological matters and seeking change as well as being to the fore in directly tackling these problems. However, I suggest that there is still an imbalance when it comes to public discourse.

In the gospels we hear about the Pharisees, the scribes and the doctors of the law snooping around and watching to observe and catch out the disciples of Jesus in some infringement of their religious codes. Their focus was on purity, exclusion and censor.  Religion, for them, was about staying on the right side of God by adhering to the traditions, regulations and understandings of the elders. Jesus, in one salvo, dispels their claims and criticisms of the disciples (and himself) by invoking the solid tradition of the prophets and Isaiah in particular who abhorred a religion of formalism and external compliance but lacked the core of compassion, decency and honesty.

It is worth recalling what the passage of Isaiah quoted by Jesus says:

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote.

Isaiah 29:13

Pretty damning then; pretty damning now? What do you think?

In the upside-down and outside-in world of false religion God is placed at the service of human ideology and notions. This ideology becomes god in a way that mocks the very idea of the living God-who-is-love.  Outer compliance becomes the test of faith and fidelity while the inner heart is ‘full of dead men’s bones’. Later in the gospel of Matthew Jesus tells us (Matt 23:27):

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.

The things that defile us come from within and Jesus gives a non-exhaustive list of examples (v21-22):

…..fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly…..

In short, what typically fills the Sunday tabloids and popular media! An advertisement for a coffee shop in this part of the world has a sign written from top to bottom of a front window: SEX. There is a much smaller sentence below the word saying ‘now that we have caught your attention come in and have a coffee’. It is sometimes curious to note that many read the scriptures looking for ‘sex’ and when they find it they make it into the one issue on which doctrinal orthodoxy and personal integrity count. Yes, indeed, how we behave in all our facets of our lives and our relationship to others is a vital part of what it means to be a human and a Christian.  But, what about the evils of ‘slander’, ‘murder’ and ‘theft’?  Take slander.  How often are people slandered in conversations – even ordinary every-day conversations. How often we join in especially when it comes to public figures whom we don’t even know or have never met face to face. To refer to someone as a ‘traitor’ or having betrayed a cause or a relationship carries a huge burden of responsibility on our part because we put ourselves in the seat of God. Thankfully God is not anywhere near the merciless judges that we can sometime be – confident in our own correctness and convinced about others on the basis of the most partial of evidence and oblivious to what it might be like to ‘walk in the shoes of another’.

And the criticism by Jesus is for us today...

Down through the ages the very mindset criticised by Jesus has been widespread in the various Christian churches. Under guise of correctness and doctrinal purity, some were hounded, persecuted, excluded, ridiculed, judged and put outside the camp of the saved. Much cruelty was, and is, practiced in the name of religion and, sadly, in the name of Christ.

Costly discipleship..

In a pithy saying attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was martyred for standing up against Nazism:

Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.

The difference between an outside-in mentality and an inside-out is that in the former we are governed by the externals while neglecting those sources of love and unity that lie dormant within the human heart – that place deep within us where reason, feeling and will meet. Like the disciples, we can misunderstand the message initially. The kingdom is not a rule by man-made decrees; nor is it a physical place or time. Rather, it is the continuing in-breaking of the holy spirit of God’s love and truth in our hearts and in our midst.  This has the power to change the way we see and evaluate things so that what we thought was sound religion is, at best, dubious, and what we thought was ‘selling out’ may very well be the thing God is calling his church to do now because the world needs to hear a new song that is fully in harmony with the goodness of creation at the beginning.

It would be all too easy to read this passage of Mark and, indeed, the entire gospels as a confrontation between Jesus, the Messiah, and the old Jewish religion complete with legalism and particularism.  The actual situation is more complex as Christianity emerged from within the Jewish faith. The problem today, as when these gospels were written, is not in the detail of the laws as much as in the order of importance beginning with the simple but overwhelming truth that God is love and on this very same love which requires us to love our neighbour hangs ‘all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22:40).

It is significant that Jesus picks the example of family obligation and duty towards parents to illustrate the way in which we can turn God’s compassion upside down. To deny what is necessary to help others especially those in need such as parents who, in Jesus’ time, would have relied particularly heavily on their children and immediate family for support in their declining years was a great injustice. Such attitudes of confused morals persisted in different ways and at different times in the course of Christian history.

For too many people, fear is the guiding force of their religious observance. It is a question of fear of punishment, fear of disgrace, fear of the road not taken and the risk not embraced.

And today we are challenged..

Many are those who imagine that they are safe because they participate more or less frequently in the sacramental life of the church and avoid serious misdemeanours. Still many are others who believe that they are entirely and irrevocably ‘saved’ since they surrendered their all at, say, 2am on Sunday 5^th August 1979.  Behind such situations lies a niggling case of unease. People feel the need to ‘do the right thing’ and remain on the right side of Great Unknown after death.  Mark 7 is for such well-meaning souls. The reality that confronts us in Mark 7 as in Matthew 15 is that it is the heart that counts. What is in the heart is what guides our thoughts and actions and their impact on others.  If our hearts are full of bad things as well as good things we are conflicted and our actions will reflect this. In this case, we are less than credible witnesses to the great light that Jesus shone on all of humanity and still does.

We would do well to listen again and understand (verse 14).