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| You Aren't What You Eat 21 Septembre 2003 TEXT: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 © 2003 Gregory Turner |
We are about to have a feast here. You all are invited for
fellowship and many nice morsels. And I thought that since Mark 7 had been overlooked
this year so far in this pulpit, we ought to see what Jesus says about eating.
On first hearing this gospel passage sounds silly, even off-putting, and surely
so ancient and irrelevant as to be beyond our caring. Jesus is involved with
some Pharisees in a dispute over hand washing, ritually clean or unclean food
and tedious temple traditions. I mean this is exactly the sort of thing that
threatens to make the Bible into that dry-as-dust, boring relic we turned off
in our teenage years. But then we read a little closer, and see there’s
something more than archaic controversies here. In the end, we may stumble upon
a great truth of our faith: that vital line between genuine spiritual life and
a judgmental “religiosity”.
Let us recall the flow of the story Mark presents to this point. By this time
Jesus has gained quite a reputation, an unorthodox and startling one for some
people. The Pharisees, a reform group hoping to restore the religious purity
of Israel, naturally come to check what the stir is about. And seeing that Jesus’
disciples eat without first washing their hands (mothers and fathers of all
eight-year-old boys take note), they make a quick judgment: “Why do your
disciples not live according to tradition, but eat with hands defiled?”
To which Jesus, never one to mince words, fires back, “Well did Isaiah
prophesy of you hypocrites, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but
their heart is far from me…’ Hear me, all you people, and understand:
there is nothing outside a person which by going into him can defile him; but
the things that come out of a person are what make him unclean. For out from
within you come evil thoughts, theft, murder, coveting, envy, slander, pride,
foolishness.”
This is good news for all us dieters in the congregation. You aren’t what
you eat after all. My slogan has always been “Never Say Diet: It’s
a Four-Letter Word.” And, to be serious, far too many of us are worried
about “what goes in” to a person: growing cautious, picayune, and
fearful in the bargain. There is a far deeper message here. Halford Luccock,
long-time dean America’s professors of preaching, interpreted this passage
saying:
Here is one of the great contributions of Jesus... to the life of the world.
Part of his profound originality lay in his stress on the inwardness of religion.
These words…sweep through the world like a hurricane, the very ‘wind
of God,’ flattening down ever perversion that would lay its emphasis on
outward things. It is the heart that matters, the moral and spiritual consciousness.
Nothing outward can defile or purify. (1)
And we thought this argument was about washing our hands before dinner.
Think of the implications here. How long has a strong segment of our religious
experience focused its moral gunfire on forbidding certain “outside influences”
for exercising their “corrupting effect”? Undoubtedly many in this
room grew up in churches hearing, “Watch out for that, stay away from
this, don’t expose your children to the other.” Some of that is
necessary, I suppose, if “prohibition” is not the primary message
we convey. But invariably this negative approach to religious practice centers
on externals, while Jesus’ liberating message is our independence from
the tyranny of external things. He looked in the soul of human beings, and could
have said what Lord Byron later wrote:
Eternal Spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart -
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;And when thy sons to fetters are confined-
To fetters,and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their (spirit) conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame find wings on every wind. (2)
This freedom from what is outside, peripheral, is a most liberating
thing: and particularly for parents who carry such unnecessary burdens in the
effort to monitor anything their children see or hear. One wise member of a
church I served, a teacher and child psychologist, insisted that we would all
be much more relaxed if we knew just how little we shape and determine what
our children learn and do. Most of them manage to grow up fine in spite our
anxieties about them. And we would all do well to learn that the word “education”
springs from the Latin “educare,” meaning not to put knowledge into
someone, but to draw forth, to educe, the quest for learning in each human breast.
Take it from a preacher, being “preachy” never quite works. One
teacher learned that the hard way. On the day of a big snowstorm, she felt called
to warn her charges against playing too long in the frigid weather. With her
heart in the right place but her pedagogical skills needing help, she said:
“Now children, you must be careful about colds and overexposure. I had
a darling little brother, only seven years old, who went out into the cold and
snow with his new sled and stayed too long. He caught a cold, pneumonia set
in, and three days later he died.” For a moment the class sat in awed
silence, the message seeming to take hold. But then a hand shot up in the back
of the room and a youngster asked: “Where’s his sled?”
What Jesus’ encounter that day does for us is to lay down the important dividing line between narrow moralism and the genuine morality of humanism. We have already mentioned one sure sign of the attitude Jesus criticizes: the tendency to focus on what is good for others and what outside evils we think they should avoid. It’s a long list: don’t see that movie, monitor the TV well, purge the library of undesirable books, don’t let that person teach here, on and on. Externals all. What they boil down to is overlooking the inward spirit by concentrating on the outward influence. Jesus is saying these anxieties are a false concern. We cannot and ought not protect each other forever from so-called “bad influences,” but focus our efforts on the nature and quality of the behavior generated in a person.
Humanism, rather than protective religion, is far more moral in that it places its bets on what is best for the person involved. It insists that human beings have an inherent worth and dignity that requires they be allowed to discover what the response to life’s temptations and challenges will be. Wise guidance is the key, helping someone draw forth the talent and understanding he or she has, not moralistic prohibitions that claim to protect that person from all possible evil. Humanism, in other words, trusts us to fulfill our own destinies as children of God, free from those who would dictate our course for us. Again, it is not what goes into a person, but what comes out.
The political nature of Jesus’ message here can hardly be more obvious. For years we have heard some of his later-day disciples rail against “humanism,” largely without knowing what they are attacking. For the humanistic impulse, not Humanism as a religion faith but as an approach to life, embraces the thoughts and abilities of people, and in the words of Paul Gilbert, helps each one of us to discover:
You are writing a Gospel,
A chapter each day,
By the deeds that you do
By the words that you say,We read what you write,
Whether faithless or true;
Say, what is the Gospel
According to You? (3)
That is, Christian humanism sides with Jesus’ concern that what comes out from a person be socially committed. Underscoring the point, each evil Jesus lists as coming out from a person, those that do defile, are social in nature: theft and murder: violations of another’s person, envy: the laying of mental claims on what others have; slander: the defamation of the character of another; pride: putting oneself before another; and foolishness, which here does not mean being innocently dumb minded, but a certain recklessness, a confusion of values, a blindness toward all that ennobles our world. All of these are social in nature.
We often hear it charged that Christian humanists spend all their time trying to change social conditions, when what Jesus wants is a focus on individuals, changing their attitudes and behavior. Let me overlook the simplistic nature of that charge, ignoring whole fields of knowledge, to say that no humanist I know claims that changing social structures necessarily changes much at all. That would just be another version of what goes in rather than what comes out. What a Christian humanist would say is that when we are moved inwardly to help make the social conditions healthier and more just, we tend also to experience a transformation of consciousness. We come to grow and thrive as we see ourselves as partners with God in the quest to shape a bit of creation more in line God’s original purpose. Jesus aims, in other words, at empowering us to be responsible people; to recognize, claim and use the hearts, heads and hands God give us. What marks a disciple is the inward spirit reaching out to others in care for their whole lives, personal and social. What we choose to give, and what we withhold – that which comes from within – marks the purity or the defilement of our lives.
Poets write time and again of the importance of what comes from, rather than what goes into, a person. The great Goethe put it this way:
We must not hope to be mowers
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.It is not just as we take it,
This mystical world of ours,
Life's field will yield as we make it.
A harvest of thorns or of flowers. (4)
Amen.
Notes: