Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 16th August 2020, the 10th after Trinity.
‘Cleanliness
is next to godliness’, as surely we all heard as children.
A lot
of people think this proverb must come from the Bible, since the Bible has so
much to say about cleanliness, but it does not. The idea behind it can be
traced back to the Babylonians, to the earliest civilisations we know of. And
the first known use of the phrase in English is in a sermon by John Wesley from
as late as 1778.
As
we learn to live with Covid-19, we realise just how important cleanliness is to
our health and the health of our communities. If we are to beat the virus, we
must avoid contaminating ourselves and others. Among other things we must wash
our hands frequently. In particular, we ought to do so before we leave our
homes, in case we are infected, to lower the risk of spreading the virus to
other people. And we ought to do so again when we return home from public
places, to lower the risk of bringing the virus into our households from
outside. We must also for the time being avoid close physical contact with our
neighbours, even in our churches.
For Jews of Jesus’s time ceremonial cleanliness
was truly next to godliness. Jewish law forbade
anyone who was unclean from approaching God in worship, and such a person would
be shunned by all pious Jews.
They believed that a person or thing was made unclean by contact with a
wide range of things, from a mouse to a pig, to a dead body, a menstruating
woman, or a gentile. And this uncleanliness was, so to speak, infectious. If a
mouse touched a pot, the pot became unclean and anything put in it became
unclean. Anyone who touched or ate anything from the pot became unclean. And
anyone who touched such an unclean person became unclean themselves.
No doubt these ideas had their roots in sensible and practical hygiene.
But by the time of Jesus religious leaders had elaborated them into a
complicated system of religious law to purify unclean things to make them clean.
This included ritual washing of hands before meals. For the scribes and
Pharisees, following the correct washing rituals had become as important as keeping
every other aspect of the Jewish Law, including the Ten Commandments.
This is the background
to today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 15:10-28).
A party of scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem has just challenged
Jesus, saying ‘Why
do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their
hands before they eat.’ He
chides them, calling them hypocrites, for insisting people obey the details of
a man-made tradition while ignoring the spirit of God’s law expressed in the
Ten Commandments.
Then, in the first part of today’s reading, he turns to the crowd
telling them, ‘Listen
and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but
it is what comes out that defiles’.
As he explains to Peter, ‘What ever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and
goes out into the sewer. But what comes from the mouth proceeds from the heart,
and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder,
adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.’
In other words, Jesus says, what matters to God is not our ritual
observance, but the state of our hearts, which may lead us to do wrong. No
wonder the Pharisees took offence! If Jesus is right, their whole theory of
religion is wrong, their rules and regulations about purity have nothing to do
with being righteous before God. Instead God requires them to look inside themselves,
to control those human impulses which might lead to bad deeds, which might lead
them into sin.
We Christians
don’t have rituals to purify ourselves as many religions do, including modern
Jews, Muslims and Hindus.
Though that doesn’t mean we don’t have taboos – I’ve yet to see horse on
the menu in Ireland!
But we have built up great edifices of ritual and tradition over time,
as all religions have.
No doubt ritual and tradition can be helpful – but only to the extent to
which they help us look into our hearts and strive to live as God intends us to
live, loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves. In today’s reading Jesus
teaches us that we must not let our rituals and traditions get in the way of
this. But unfortunately disputes between Christians about ritual and tradition
all too often do just that.
Details of ritual and tradition keep Christians of different
denominations from recognising each other’s baptism, or from sharing in the
Lord’s Supper. And our Anglican Communion is threatened by schism over disputes
about the ordination of women, the acceptability of homosexual behaviour, and
equal marriage.
Christians engaging in such disputes should, I think, reflect on Jesus’s
teaching in today’s Gospel. What matters is the state of a person’s heart, and
the deeds it prompts, not their ritual observance and tradition.
And all who claim to be Christians should reflect
on Jesus’s advice on how to deal with Pharisees. ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father
has not planted will be uprooted.’,
he says. ‘Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind
person guides another, both will fall into the pit.’ In other
words, leave it to God to deal with those who we think are mistaken.
When we conscientiously disagree about what is right or wrong, we should
not try to bludgeon our opponents into accepting our view. We must do what our
God given conscience and reason tell us is right. But we should leave those
with whom we disagree to go their own way. If they are mistaken, if they are
‘the blind leading the blind’, our heavenly Father will deal with them in his
own way.
As he will deal with us if we are mistaken!
I shall finish in prayer
God our loving Father,
grant us wisdom to distinguish right
from wrong.
May our hearts bring forth only what is
righteous in your sight,
and make us agents of your peace,
spreading good news for all people.
We pray in the name of your Son, Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.
