As we continue our contemplation of Morality, Culture Wars, and Consent in our gospel reading this week, another thing that may be difficult for us to wrap our heads around today is that the practice of hand washing in our reading was before the discovery of germ theory. Perhaps people in that culture noticed a link between people who got sick and those who didn’t wash their hands before eating. The sect of Pharisees we are reading about this week had ritualized the practice of washing one’s hands and attached moral value and worth to it. It was not simply a health practice. It was a practice within a set of behaviors that defined whether the person washing their hands was themself was morally pure or unclean.
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(Read this series from its beginning here.)
In our reading this week, Jesus contrasts the inconsistency of being fastidiousness about hand washing while having utter disregard for the moral demand of caring for one’s parents in their old age:
And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)—then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.” (Mark 7:9-13)
Next in our reading, we encounter Jesus discussing the practice with his disciples:
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) (Mark 7:17-19)
Here, Jesus moves the focus from outward washing to what is transpiring on the inside of a person. “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come.”
We’ll take a closer look at this contrast and it’s insight for our justice work today, next.
(Read Part 3)
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