Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr b, Sunday, September 1, 2024
JAMES 1:17-27; MARK 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
For if any are hearers of the word and not doers,
they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror;
for they look at themselves and, on going away,
immediately forget what they were like.
(James 1:23-24)
If we read between the lines of this morning’s Gospel and Epistle, we begin to see two different groups of people resisting the deep call of God’s living Word.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is challenged by the scribes and Pharisees on the issue of his disciples’ failing to engage in ritual handwashing before eating. Interestingly, it wasn’t hygiene that was at stake, although hygiene may originally have been the reason for including such regulations in the law of Moses. Rather, and Mark is quite clear about this, it is the disciples’ not observing the tradition of the elders that attracts criticism from Jesus’ adversaries.
In our time, it may be hard for us to get past the health issues when we hear this reading, but good hand hygiene is not the issue for Jesus’ critics. They raise a theological problem, specifically that God is not being properly worshipped because the law of Moses is not being observed. We also sense that the scribes and Pharisees are testing Jesus, wanting to discredit him for not being meticulous concerning the fine points of the law.
We soon learn that it is apparent Jesus understands the motive behind their challenge, but rather than reacting and taking the bait, he chooses to respond simply to the point his adversaries have raised, and consider the theological basis for the law they want observed. Quickly, he rejects as an avenue for holiness this custom that is more tradition than law. He responds, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can corrupt.” “But,” he says, “the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” As examples, he then recites a long list of behaviours that have the power to spoil relationships between people and destroy community. These things really matter, he teaches; these are genuine factors in separating people from one another and they do disregard the Word of God.
Jesus understands that by keeping God’s law people honour and worship God; but beyond that surface function he sees the law providing for the wholeness of community (the holiness of people in other words) by teaching them through the law to love and care for one another. And so, he admonishes the scribes and Pharisees for taking refuge in the surface application of the law and not reckoning with the deep wisdom that provides for authentic holiness, what we might call a clean heart. Appealing to their love of tradition, he does a bit of proof-texting by quoting Isaiah’s prophecy to the Babylonian exiles. Isaiah wrote, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
And there is a prophetic edge to this teaching as well as it addresses our own penchant for simplifying and reducing Christianity. God’s Word lives, this morning’s Gospel suggests, when we do as Jesus did and let God’s power loose in our lives and in our religious communities to challenge and change us, to transform and move us from the way it’s always been to ways in which more love is extended and more justice is enacted. In other words, there is no excuse for the mess our world is in, given the excellence of God’s Word that has been entrusted to the children of God for the healing of the world.
In a similar vein, the author of the epistle of James teaches in this morning’s reading that we fail as individuals and as communities when we hear God’s Word, but do not apply it. He uses the image of people looking in the mirror, but forgetting the image as soon as they walk away from it. God’s Word is internalized, James says, when we actually put it into practice, becoming doers of the Word. He then goes on to describe what being a doer of the Word looks like: the example he uses in this passage is caring for orphans and widows, but elsewhere in his epistle he broadens his examples to include no end of good works. And so, it is not a huge leap to say that both Jesus and James teach that our faith in God’s Word, if that faith is to live, if that faith is to be authentic, must find expression in our lives, in our world, wherever we are.
Today’s readings from James and Mark address their own faith communities and, by extension, all who were to come after them as followers of Jesus, including us, the faithful gathered here this morning. These two readings reveal with surgical accuracy how human nature leads us down the path of least resistance. We want the world around us to change, but we ourselves struggle with change. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about change, and therein lies the problem.
In Jesus, in both his person and his proclamation, God has given us everything we need for the living Word of God to take root and grow – within us and within our church community – so that when we look into that mirror James imagines, we see the image of Jesus looking back at us.