“Why do your disciples not
live according to the tradition of the elders?” the Pharisees ask Jesus. Tradition:
it’s a strange thing, but very powerful.
A few years ago I was taking
a wedding rehearsal. It was one of those weddings where there were a lot of
bridesmaids, and I’ve tended to find that the more bridesmaids people have, the
less use they are collectively – they all stand around comparing their nail
varnish, rather than looking after the bride. So I took special care at the
rehearsal to remind these bridesmaids of the essentials of their job, which is
to look after the bride. In particular I told them that it was really, really
important that when the bride got out of the car at the lych gate they made
sure that her dress didn’t touch the ground until she got into the church. They
looked at me wide eyed, “Why? Is that
supposed to be bad luck?” “ No,” I said, “it’s just that it will get dirty if
you don’t.” I thought I was stating the obvious, but I can understand why those
bridesmaids assumed this must be a tradition they had missed out on somewhere,
because weddings are festooned with traditions, many of which have no apparent
sense to them. I’m glad I managed to prevent another one being added
inadvertently, because, my experience is that it is easy for traditions to
become superstitions, and for people to feel that they have blighted the
marriage somehow if they don’t keep them.
The word “tradition”
literally means something that has been “handed down”. It’s from the Latin “tradere”
– it gives us trade and trader too. Traditions can be very good and useful,
ways of conveying important knowledge and skills. Our ancestors passed down
traditions about which plants were poisonous and which good to eat –things
they’d discovered by trial and very painful error. They handed down skills,
like how to make a wheel, so that we didn’t have to reinvent it in every
generation. But the trouble with things that
are handed down, like all those wedding traditions, is that it is very easy to
forget why they were important in the first place. Out of context they become
hindrances rather than helps. That’s what had happened to the Pharisees who
accused Jesus and his followers of disregarding the traditions of their
ancestors.
Jesus’ disciples, they say,
aren’t washing their hands before eating. Now it’s important to stress that
this isn’t about hygiene. We know that handwashing is very important in order
to kill the bacteria and viruses that would otherwise make us ill. But the
Pharisees didn’t know anything about germs, and that’s not what this is about. This
is about spiritual impurity, which you got by coming into contact with a whole host of
things; dead bodies, skin diseases, discharges of any sort, or by breaking the ritual
laws in other ways – or associating with those who did. If you weren’t ritually
clean you were excluded from God’s presence. Ritual washing would make you clean again,
though, and the Pharisees seem to have taken to washing before every meal, just
in case. You never knew, after all, what might have been going on in the lives
of people you had bumped into in the marketplace. You could have been
inadvertently contaminated without even knowing it. Better safe than sorry. But
just imagine how that felt to the people they were trying to avoid? They felt
judged, stigmatised and excluded.
No wonder the Pharisees
disapproved of Jesus and his followers. They knew perfectly well what kind of
people they associated with - lepers, foreigners, tax collectors, prostitutes –
people who they thought were walking bundles of uncleanness. If ever there were
people who ought to be washing, it was surely them. But they didn’t, and Jesus
didn’t seem to be at all bothered. It was as if he was saying that these sinful
people were loved by God just as they were. Which, of course, he was.
Strictly speaking, then, according
to the law of Moses and the traditions of Judaism, the Pharisees were right to
be concerned. And it wouldn’t be the only time Jesus had broken the law, or at
least seemed to sit very lightly to it – working on the Sabbath was another
recurrent gripe they had with him.
It’s not that Jesus didn’t
care how people lived – in fact the standards of love and service he called
people too were often more demanding than the law of Moses. As he says in this
passage, never mind what you put in your mouth – that’s an easy thing to
control – it’s what’s in your heart that matters, and we all know that that is
far more complicated to sort out. What
distinguishes Jesus from the Pharisees, though, is that instead of telling
people that they have to change before they can draw near to God, he
starts by telling people they are already loved and welcome. The change in
their lives will come as a response to God’s love.
One of his later followers –
the author of the first letter of John – said “We love because God first
loved us” (1 John 4.19). And in the second reading today, James tells us
that a right relationship with God is his gift to us, not something that we
create through our own efforts. Change is a result of God’s love, not a
precondition for it.
That’s the heart of the good
news of the Christian Gospel – God’s gift of grace to us - but it’s not the only good news that we can
find in these readings we have heard today.
The second piece of good news
comes in the very fact that Jesus is clearly prepared here, and elsewhere, to
argue with the traditions and laws of his people, to wrestle, and sometimes
disagree with what was regarded as sacred truth. It is good news because in
doing so, he gives permission for us to do so too.
Moses said to the people of
Israel in our first reading, “You must neither add anything to what I
command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the
Lord your God with which I am charging you.” He’s talking about the lists
of rules which God had given for this fledgling nation, rules which covered
every aspect of daily life. It sounds
very straightforward. Here are the commandments – now keep them. No more, no
less.
If we want to treat the Bible
as a simple instruction manual, a book of rules, here is our justification for
doing so. But it’s clear from today’s Gospel reading that this wasn’t how Jesus
treated it. He respected and paid attention to what had been handed down – the
traditions , written or verbal, which his ancestors had found valuable – but he
was prepared to reinterpret them, or even set them aside if they were getting
in the way of the healing and the growth of the living, breathing, hurting
human beings in front of him. In him God was speaking to us through a Living
Word. Jesus was a flesh and blood reminder that God can’t be pinned to a page
of print, but comes to us anew in every time and place.
If you like your religion simple,
as some of these Pharisees did, that might feel a bit unsettling, but it really
wasn’t all that revolutionary, even at the time of Jesus. In fact, if we look
at what we now call the Old Testament we find it often argues with itself. It
speaks with a variety of voices and gives us many different viewpoints.
The law of Moses, for
example, forbade marriage between Jews and non- Jews (Deut 7.3). Some Jewish
leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah fiercely upheld the law, making those who had
intermarried put aside their wives and children, no matter how good and loving
those marriages were, or the impact on their families. But alongside that example
of strict adherence to the law we also have the book of Ruth, a foreigner from
the land of Moab, who married the Israelite, Boaz. Their love story was
celebrated in the Scriptures, and she became the great-grandmother of King
David. She was highly honoured in Jewish faith.
There was no condemnation for her.
If it surprises or disturbs
us when the Bible doesn’t fit neatly together, that’s probably because we think
of it as one book, which we feel ought to tell one story. But it wasn’t written
like that at all. Instead it’s a library, composed over a long period. The list
of books regarded as sacred which were eventually bound together into what we
call the Bible, wasn’t agreed on for several centuries after Christ, and even then
it wasn’t completely settled. Today’s epistle, the book of James was almost
thrown out by the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who famously called it a
“strawy epistle”. Different branches of the Church still don’t see eye to eye
on the Bible; the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have eighty-one books in theirs to
the sixty-six of Protestant Churches.
So the very make-up of the
Bible, with its baggy, inconsistent, but fascinating assortment of writings, should tell us that we can’t simply pick out individual
verses and apply them unthinkingly to contexts and circumstances far removed
from the ones they were written for, especially if we use them to judge and
condemn others. If we are serious about following the pattern that Jesus left
us then, like him, we need to learn to see under the surface of these ancient
stories, and listen for the voice of God speaking today, in our language and
for our world.
The Bible can be many things
to us. It can provide inspiration and food for thought. It can open the doors
of our imagination. It can bring comfort, and challenge. It can help us to be
more aware of God in our own lives by showing us God at work in the lives of
those who met him long ago. But it can’t be a simple book of rules, and when we
try to make it one, it often becomes dangerous and damaging.
I began by talking about
tradition – the things which are handed down to us. The Bible is part of that
tradition for Christians, a precious gift for us to pass on to others. But
let’s make sure that we are passing on not a collection of dead rules, but
something through which we can discover the Living Word of God afresh.
Amen
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