Human tradition and the commandment to love

Reflection for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th September 2025

In that reading, Mark (7:1-13) recalls how some pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem came to listen to Jesus. They asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ – that is without washing their hands, as Jewish ritual purity laws demanded. I suspect they were trying to catch Jesus out, because they were offended by his and his disciples’ unconventional behaviour and growing popularity, which undermined their position as interpreters of the Jewish faith.

Jesus responds forcefully. He calls them hypocrites, and tells them, ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition’. He does not directly answer their question about ritual handwashing. But he moves on to challenge Jewish religious tradition that conflicts with God’s commandments.

In the passage immediately following (Mark 7:14-23), he goes on to say publicly, ‘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’. And he explains privately to his disciples what he means, ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? … It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 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.’

Nowadays we know it is important to wash our hands regularly, to avoid spreading germs rather than to be ritually pure. I feel sure Jesus heartily approves of us washing our hands before we eat. But Jesus is not concerned here about human tradition and petty rules. What matters for him is that we resist evil intentions.

So what can we take away from this episode? As Jesus tells us, God’s greatest commandments are to love him, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. We must always test the traditions we have received, our rituals, our dogmas, our unspoken ways of being and behaving, against these commandments to love. If there is any conflict between them, we must abandon or reform our traditions.

One area in which we should do so, I suggest, is the Church of Ireland’s traditional doctrines of sexuality and marriage, that sexual relations are forbidden except in the context of marriage, and marriage is only possible between one man and one woman. This causes immense pain to our Lesbian and Gay brothers and sisters in Christ, who seek the blessing of the church on their permanent, faithful, loving relationships. And pain to their families and friends too. These doctrines fail the test of Christ’s commandment to love. It is high time our church started to rethink and reform them.