Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Evensong
30th August 2009
Preacher: The Rev'd Gillian Moses, Assistant Curate

Theme: Would the Pharasees get Swine Flu?

Text: Mark 7.1-8, 14-23

How are you going with the Swine flu precautions?

How are you feeling about not shaking hands at the passing of the peace?

How do you feel about the common cup? Or the slight flavour of antibacterial handwash on the wafer? Are you ‘over it’ yet?

I couldn’t help but think of our ‘H1N1 Guidelines’ listed in the inside front cover of your Service Notes, when I looked at this morning’s Gospel reading. You might like to turn to it yourselves while I recall the reading –

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.

It is not included in these printed guidelines but in the Ad Clerum from the archbishop to all the clergy , there are also some notes about cleaning the vessels used for Holy Communion , and even about the ratio of water to wine. Does this mean that the Archbishop is a Pharisee? Or that we are? And if the answer is yes , what might that mean?

Context is really everything, isn’t it? Some years ago I took my daughters to Malaysia for a holiday. I was paranoid that they would pick up a gastric bug so I was ruthless with precautions – all water had to be boiled. No ice in drinks. No salads. All fruit had to be peeled before eating. Rigorous hand washing before and after everything. They would happily have called me a Pharisee, but we made it through 2 weeks with no tummy upsets at all. I was simply following the recommended procedures for Australians travelling to Malaysia.

And the point of all the purity laws which the Pharisees observed is that they were also the guidelines for staying healthy in that time and place – wash everything thoroughly. Wash food before you eat it. Observe good hygiene practices. Now over time these practices became ritualised, and a religious narrative attached to them. And let’s face it, wouldn’t a God who had chosen these people want to keep them healthy, by encouraging good practices? So if a God story became attached to these rules, then so much the better for encouraging people to stick to them.

With the passage of more time , these practices acquired a further layer. They became identifiers for the Jewish people. See how Mark refers to them - For the Pharisees , and all the Jews , do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands. One could tell that people were Jewish by these very customs , these purity laws. Conversely , if the people slacked off on their purity observances , it might be thought that they were also slacking off on their faith. So these things mattered a great deal to a people who , by Jesus’ time , were also an oppressed race living in an occupied country , under the rule of a culture that was very big on standardisation and uniformity – it was the Roman way or the highway!

When the Pharisees comment, therefore, on the haphazard observance of the purity code by Jesus’ disciples, they are not being petty and nasty. The Pharisees have earned a bad rap in some parts of Christian tradition. It is easy to laugh at them as people who missed the whole point of the Jesus event, who were out to dominate and manipulate the people, and who may even have been in collusion with the invaders. And to be fair, that is not far from the truth of the picture we get in John’s Gospel. But that is not Mark’s Gospel, and we need to be careful about cross-referencing too freely. Context is everything and the context of John’s gospel was enormous tension between the synagogues and the Jews who followed Jesus, who found themselves actively excluded from the synagogue. But that is a sermon for another day.

So if the Pharisees were not the bad guys for adhering to the purity code , what is this story about? If the washing was a Good Thing , why does Jesus dismiss it? And is Jesus talking about washing one’s hands at all?

The answer of course is no. Jesus was not suggesting that hand-washing was unimportant. His argument with the Pharisees was actually about how they had lost sight of the origins of this practice, and had elevated into a spiritual test. Hand washing was no longer important just as a way of keeping the society healthy. It had become a way of detecting who was in and who was out. And by linking it to God, it became a way of deciding who was in or out with God.

Jesus was at pains to remind them that God does not see it like that. God is concerned with a much bigger picture, with what comes out of someone, in other words, with how they live their life. The Pharisees, by focussing on procedural matters like hand washing and purity, chose to ignore the effects of their rules – the exclusion of people from full participation in society and even in worship. They set themselves between God and God’s people and determined who was in and out.

Jesus’ point was that only God makes that determination , and that in doing so , God looks at different criteria altogether. God looks at how we live , how we interact with others , how we speak and think. We can follow all the rules , dot the i’s and cross the t’s and still miss the mark. Because being godly people is almost never about following the rules , despite what many people think.

That can be hard to accept for many of us. Rules are good. Rules make it clear what we can and cannot do, or should and should not do. Rules mean we don’t have to think too hard for ourselves. They give us certainty. But God doesn’t promise certainty; quite the opposite.

God promises life, and life means mess and uncertainty and growth. Life rarely means order or predictability. But life always means new beginnings and change and opportunity. It’s scary, but full of promise.

The truth is that in our search for rules and certainty we all have a bit of the Pharisee in us. And that’s okay, although it is important to remember it. And when we find ourselves drawing up rules and commandments and laws and telling ourselves that they are God’s rules and laws we need to be a bit careful, because we are dealing with dynamite. Calling something God’s law can be a way of avoiding having to justify what is in fact merely a personal preference.

So while some of us may find it easier to have blanket rules that say for example homosexuality is wrong, or sex before marriage is wrong, or divorce, and because if we look hard enough we will probably find something in the scriptures that might seem to support our view, God is probably far more interested in how we treat the vulnerable members of society, or whether we are inserting ourselves and our traditions between other people and God, and telling them they are in or out with God.

Jesus made God’s instructions clear and simple – love one another. That is all. God loves us, so love God, and out of that love between God and humanity must inevitably flow love for one another. Sure there is a list of ‘evil intentions’ but look at them – none of them involve loving one another. They are all examples of objectifying behaviour – people treating others as objects, and that is what is wrong in all this. It is not a checklist that we can tick off to see if we are in or out.

Confusing? Yes, of course. And it is frightening because such an approach requires that we take some responsibility for our decisions and our behaviours. We are not let off with an easy legalistic approach; we have to let go of the safety net. The God who creates exuberant, overwhelming, messy life out of the abyss isn’t into easy ordered solutions. God expects us to get in there and wrestle and struggle and do the best we can to join in this project of life.

So back to swine flu and the Pharisees. There is nothing wrong with taking precautions and observing common sense guidelines. There is no virtue in getting sick, and no love in passing our illnesses on to others uncaringly. But if you come to church one Sunday, and find we have a new liturgy for the blessing of the hand wash, and bouncers at the door to cast those who intinct into the outer darkness, and a new letter from Paul to the Corinthians about how often to change the purificators, then perhaps you should worry!

In the name of God. Amen.

Gillian Moses, St John’s Cathedral Brisbane, 30 August 2009