JESUS AND THE LAW
That Gospel passage should be a very popular one with children. We’ve had small grandchildren staying with us for most the summer, and the constant refrain before meals is: “Have you washed your hands? Are you sure you’ve washed your hands?” As far as children are concerned, washing your hands before meals is a rather tedious and boring formality that parents will insist on; and here is Jesus telling the Pharisees not only that you don’t have to wash your hands before meals but also that making a fuss about it is hypocritical and to be condemned.
Now I’m sorry to disappoint the children, but the point is of course that Jesus isn’t actually talking about ordinary cleanliness at all but about washing your hands for purposes of ritual purity. I presume Jesus would be quite in favour of washing your hands before meals as a matter of elementary hygiene, but he had no patience with the Pharisees’ fussy insistence on ritual washing on all sorts of occasions.
The Jewish Law did not require ritual washing on everyday occasions like meals, but the Pharisees had elaborated traditions that went a lot further than the demands of the Law. And this is what Jesus was objecting to.
What we see among the Pharisees is an example of a very common tendency among religious people: to complicate people’s lives by working out elaborate rules and practices that become burdensome. As Jesus said on another occasion:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You ... lay heavy burdens on the shoulders of others and do not lift a finger to help them.
I’m talking about the tendency to get away from the simplicity of basic ethical principles and to develop elaborate systems of case-law; the impulse to codify everything down to the minutest detail. The tendency to obscure basic scriptural principles by a confusing undergrowth of traditional rules and regulations, and so to lose the wood for the trees.
We see this often in Christianity. Think of the elaborate moral theology of the old-fashioned Catholic confessional; think of the fussy rules of old-fashioned ritualistic Anglicanism, when people used to get into a real panic if a drop of water had passed their lips before receiving holy communion; think of the restrictive rules of the Puritans or the “wee frees” in Scotland. And so on.
We see the same tendency in other religions too. This is the sort of thing that keeps coming up these days in connection with Islam. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that on the vexed question of female dress, the Quran simply says that women should dress modestly. Whereas some traditions within Islam have elaborated the highly detailed and restrictive women’s dress codes that often cause such controversy in Western society. So what starts off as a very simple and reasonable requirement gets turned into something much stricter, something which imposes all sorts of unreasonable constraints on women’s lives.
Jesus, then, is pretty sceptical about over-elaborate religious codes, especially if they come from later tradition rather than from Scripture.
Mind you, he is even prepared to set aside the written Law of Moses on occasion. In the same passage as today’s Gospel, Mark goes so far as to say that Jesus “declared all foods clean” – which means that he threw out whole chunks of the Law of Moses. Now it’s probably rather unlikely that Jesus himself went that far, but what we know is that the early Christians soon did because it became clear to them that this was the logical conclusion of Jesus’s teaching.
It seems to me that the principle Jesus goes by is this: he has great respect for the Law of Moses, rather less respect for the traditions that had grown up to supplement or elaborate the Law of Moses, but he was not afraid when the occasion demanded, to set the traditions aside, and even sometimes the Law. And the occasion demanded it when observing the letter of the law or the traditions seemed to go against the demands of common humanity.
In other words, Jesus had great respect for the Law, but he did not absolutise it. He is prepared to set it aside when abiding by it would lead us to deny the demands of love. As Paul said later on, “love is the fulfilling of the law”, so the law of love is a sort of higher law that can on occasion override the written code.
This reminds me of the function of human rights law. If you look at the European Convention on Human Rights, for example, you will see that it is a set of very general ethical principles for the exercise of government power. It functions as a higher law against which ordinary laws and regulations have to be judged, and this can sometimes result in their being set aside. So while as a general rule we should, of course, respect the law and abide by it, we should not be wholly uncritical of it, and we should not regard it as fixed and unchangeable.
So we should be on our guard against the tendency for religious rules, practices and traditions to take on an absolute and unreformable character which they should not have. No doubt they are usually good, and Spirit-breathed, and no doubt normally we should do our best to abide by them – but not so blindly that we fail to notice when they are leading us to get things out of proportion, to get our priorities wrong.
Now when you say things like that, people will often accuse you of trying to water down the demands of Christianity, pandering to the spirit of our permissive age, and so on.
Not at all! This is not about an easy way out of inconvenient rules. I’m not saying that if you don’t like the scriptural laws or church rules and traditions, you can just ask Jesus for a “derogation”.
No, the point is rather this. Jesus was actually very demanding, but he was not a legislator. He did not tell us in detail how we have to behave in any given situation. Rather, he laid down broad general principles, but very demanding ones:
Love your neighbour as yourself.
Treat others as you would like them to treat you.
and even: Love your enemies.
Jesus told his followers that their righteousness actually had to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, so he certainly wasn’t an easy option.
Laws and legal codes are convenient. If you’re faced with a moral problem, you can just look up the answer in a book. With a legal code you know where you are (the lawyers call this “legal certainty”), you know what your obligations are, where they begin and where they end. You know what your obligations are, but you also know what are the limits to your obligations.
Whereas the demands of Jesus are completely unlimited, open-ended. “Love your neighbour as yourself”: there’s no knowing where that will take you.
So living the Christian life is not a matter of looking up the answers in a book of rules (and this is emphatically not what the Bible is).
Living the Christian life is exactly what the promises in the baptism liturgy (which we shall shortly be using) say it is. Living the Christian life is a matter of recognising Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth and the life”, and making him the Lord and Master of your life.
Because if we place our faith in him, he will send his Spirit to inhabit us, to transform us from inside. And when the Holy Spirit gets to work on us, we shall start to become more Christ-like; or as Paul puts it, we shall start to “have the mind of Christ”.
And what that means is that we will start to see naturally what the law of Christ requires of us in any given situation; doing the will of God will start to come naturally.
I suppose that most of us feel still very far removed from that state of grace. But we should never forget that this is the goal of our pilgrimage. And we should be aware too that this is the road on which, through her baptism, we are setting Amy today.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church
30 August 2009, Proper 17, Year B
Gospel: Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
