15^th Sunday after Pentecost: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23p

When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

In Germany there is a Sunday ritual which is observed religiously by 8 to 13 million people. I am not talking about church attendance. I am talking about Tatort, a television series which features murders and detectives. Since 1970 Tatort has been appearing Sunday evenings at 8:15 PM. For many people, Tatort is part of a Sunday liturgy. Martin Thau, who is a television screen writer, wrote the following:

People do not go to church anymore; instead they look at Tatort. Tatort has replaced the Catholic mass as an instrument which gives meaning to life. Tatort gives us the reassurance that the world is still meaningful, despite all of the difficulties…Chief inspectors perform a priestly function

This assertion that Tatort conveys a sense of reassurance is not completely true, because at some point in the 1980s or 1990s, Tatort became brutally realistic in its depiction of violent crime. For me, Tatort is often unwatchable, because the display of mutilated murder victims is sometimes too explicit. Watching Tatort sometimes gave me the feeling that my soul had been defiled by what I had seen.

The television series Tatort conveys a general truth, which is also witnessed to in the Bible: namely, that no one can avoid defilement. The violence in our world can make us feel contaminated. Watching news reports can have the same effect as watching a crime movie: it gives one the feeling of being polluted. Seeing images of what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza makes us aware that we share a common humanity with all people, and that when human life is violated in any part of the world, we feel violated ourselves, so that we all need some form of cleansing.

One way to seek cleansing is to join a community which sets itself apart from an unclean world. For example, during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, many people in the US felt degraded by the atrocities of this war. The hippy movement was an attempt to create a community which was isolated from the contaminations of the so-called Establishment, the established order which was regarded as responsible for warfare.  “Make love, not war” was the slogan of the flower power people, who wanted to separate themselves from the pollutions of society.

In Christianity we have the monastic movement. Many people who entered monasteries sought a life of purity. They renounced possessions, individual freedom and normal family life in order to live a life of holiness in the presence of God. Monastery life was an attempt to separate oneself from the contaminations of everyday life.

Along this line, the Pharisees at the time of Jesus were also people of faith who attempted to live a life of holiness by separating themselves from the unclean world. The word “Pharisee” is derived from Hebrew/Aramaic words which mean “set apart, separated”. Our gospel reading from Mark begins with an indication of how the Pharisees set themselves apart:

When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)

This washing of hands, of food and of eating utensils had nothing to do with hygiene; it had to do with ritual cleanliness. Whoever approached the temple in Jerusalem had to be ritually clean, because the holy presence of God resided in the temple. The priests who served in the temple had to maintain a high level of cleanliness, which involved the washing of hands and utensils.    

Normal people did not have to wash their hands before eating. It was not a sin to be ritually unclean, and it was impossible to remain ritually clean in the course of everyday life. In Nazareth, which was 85 miles away from Jerusalem and which was the setting for our gospel reading, ritual purity was not even relevant.

The Pharisees, however, wanted to expand the holiness of the temple so that it would encompass the entire land of Israel. The Pharisees apparently thought that every Jew should be as uncontaminated as a temple priest, that every eating table should be like a sacred alter and that every home should be like a temple.

The Pharisees remind me of my oldest brother, who was a cleanliness fanatic. He would wash a can of soup before opening it with a can opener. He would wash a banana before pealing it. However, the Pharisees were not worried about germs. They wanted to bring the holy presence of God into every detail of daily life.

What the Pharisees advocated is referred to in our reading from Mark as “the tradition of the elders”. This was an oral tradition of Biblical interpretation which the Pharisees had developed and which they regarded as authoritative, comparable to the authority of Holy Scripture. You could also call it self-made religion. When they criticized the disciples of Jesus because they did not wash their hands before eating, they were accusing the disciples of violating rules of holiness which they themselves had created. Jesus responded that the Pharisees were violating Holy Scripture by presenting their oral tradition as though it were the word of God.

As Jesus pointed out, defilement does not enter the heart by eating or drinking. Jesus mentions those things which pollute the heart of a person, the things you can see every Sunday evening on Tatort. Jesus mentioned “evil intentions, carnal depravity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, shameless lusts, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.” These pollutions mentioned by Jesus contaminate us, even if we strive to be pure in heart, because we share a common humanity with all people, even with those who degrade themselves.

In this context, the Bible reveals a shocking truth: namely, that God Himself shared a common humanity with people who degrade themselves. In Jesus of Nazareth God took upon himself our humanness. But, unlike the Pharisees, he did not try to isolate Himself from the contaminations of society. He did the opposite: He embraced the pollutions which defile us, by letting Himself be unjustly arrested, convicted, tormented and crucified, like a depraved criminal. Dying on a cross was the ultimate contamination, because a crucifixion victim in the Biblical world was regarded as an abomination, as cursed by God.

But a strange thing happens when we look upon this victim of crime hanging on the cross: Instead of being defiled, we are cleansed. Instead of being polluted, we are purified. As the NT proclaims: the blood of Jesus has a cleansing effect: “the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin” (1. John 1:7). We experience this cleansing when we celebrate the Eucharist, in which we confess our sins, which is a form of cleansing, and when we eat and drink that which purifies us. What the Pharisees strived for by their washing rituals, namely to bring God*s holy presence into daily life, is given to us in bread and wine.

This cleansing which we experience in worship does not isolate us from an unclean world. People who think like the Pharisees feel that it is their calling to separate themselves from a polluted society. But with us Christians the dynamic goes in the opposite direction. We are called to identify with people who commit wickedness. No one expressed it better than Martin Luther, who wrote:

Everyone should “put on” his neighbor and so conduct himself toward him as if he himself were in the other’s place…I take upon myself the sins of my neighbour and so labor and serve in them as if they were my very own. That is what Christ did for us. This is true love and the genuine rule of Christian life.

The ultimate act of love is to look at a person who is degraded morally and to identify with this person, praying for him or her as though praying for oneself.

In this context we can learn something from Gloria Swanson, a Hollywood actress, who was already a glamorous movie star at the time of silent films. When she was 8 or 9 years old, she was walking with her mother hand in hand. They saw a woman who was extremely over-weight. Gloria thought that this fat woman walked like a duck and began to laugh hysterically. Gloria wrote down her mother’s reaction:

She stood still, as though she were struck by lightning. She let go of my hand. She bent down to me, so that our faces were almost touching, and said: “For God’s sake, that is who I am!” Can you say that, my child? I repeated her words, but didn’t understand what they meant. My mother said: “Let’s make a game out of this. Whenever you see someone who is too fat or too skinny, who has crooked eyes or is bow-legged, who is grumpy, twisted or ugly, who is a slow learner or is not good at sports, then imagine that you are in his skin and he is in yours.” I liked this idea, and I have played this game ever since, practicing it year for year by saying: “For God’s sake, that is who I am.”

These comments of Gloria Swanson reflect Christian faith. Christians are not people who isolate themselves from the contaminations of society in order to maintain a high level of holiness. Instead, it is our calling to embrace all sorts of people, projecting ourselves into their situations and identifying with their weaknesses, seeing the shortcomings of others as our own shortcomings, interceding for others as though we were interceding for ourselves, because this is what Christ did for us. This is the ultimate form of divine love, because this is what Christ did for us when he embraced all of humanity on the cross.