Twelth Sunday after Trinity

Date:30th August 2009

Preacher: Revd Hilary Barber

Mark Explains

I read a book about jokes the other day (not just a book of jokes, you understand, though there were plenty of them, but a philosophical book about jokes: humour is, as you might say, a very funny thing). One of the crucial things about jokes, the author was explaining, is that the less explanation you have to give the better. What makes telling and hearing a joke fun, as well as funny, is that teller and hearer discover they share a little bit of private world together, the bit you have to understand, without it being mentioned, in order to get the point of the joke. Some of the best jokes are Jewish jokes (the book was written by a Jewish Philosopher), but it is part of the deal, that you have to know the Jewish world on the inside to get the point.

One of the difficulties with Mark 7 is that unless your inside the Jewish world you won’t get the point. Mark already knows this, which is why he’s explained to his readers something which, if they were Jewish, they wouldn’t have needed to have spelled out like this. (This passage, about ritual washing of hands, pots and so on, is in fact one of the reasons why scholars conclude that his audience was primarily Gentile). Suddenly Mark’s stories about healing have stopped for a minute, and we have a debate instead, focusing on a controversy about the interpretation and practise of Judaism by Jesus and his followers. And for this, even if it spoils the story for those who live in that world, we need some explanations.

Mark gives us the first one: ritual washing of hands before food, and of cooking vessels, was one key part of a highly complex and developed system of purity regulations. These were eventually codified and written down about two hundred year’s after Jesus’ day, but they were already well known, in the form of oral traditions, by his time. Of course, all societies have purity laws of one sort or another; western children today are taught quite strictly when and how to wash their hands to prevent infection and disease, and woe betide any restaurant owner or delicatessen manager whose staff don’t observe a very strict code of hygiene. So what’s the problem? Why would anyone grumble about purity laws?

The problem comes in three layers, like a joke within a joke with an extra twist at the end. We need to take it slowly and look at each in turn.

First, we need to distinguish the surface issue from the underlying one. The question Jesus was asked was about purity; but the first answer he gave was about people obeying human traditions rather than God’s word; and he gave a particular, and complicated example. We’ll come back to purity, for the moment let’s concentrate on tradition.

Part of the difficulty here is that many Christians have grown up knowing that there is a longstanding debate in the Western churches about the relative place and value of ‘scripture’ and ‘tradition’. We are in danger, if we’re not careful, of hearing this story with this debate in mind – like somebody who goes to a lecture on Irish literature but whose only previous knowledge of Ireland comes from hearing English people telling ‘Irish’ jokes (which usually assume, scandalously, the Irish are ignorant). The debate in the churches has usually been between Catholics (placing a high value of tradition) and Protestants (placing a high value on scripture), often in relation to various practices of the church and to theological doctrines such as justification. That’s the sort of thing people often think of as soon as they hear a question raised about ‘scripture’ and ‘tradition’.

The debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, however, was between two different ways of understanding what it meant to be a good Jew in the first century. This wasn’t just about doctrine or (what we would call) ‘ethics’, but about political agendas as well. Of course there are parallels and overlaps between our meanings of Jesus’, but its important to go back to the first century at this point and not get stuck in the sixteenth, or in times closer to our own.

The charge Jesus levels against the Pharisees and legal experts is that, by teaching as fundamental law what is in fact only human custom rather than divine revelation, they are guilty of hypocrisy, play acting. They are claiming to be teachers of God’s truth and law, but in fact they are only teaching human traditions.

The question comes up, obviously, because the early question was about the tradition of purity. But to make his point, Jesus instances a clever way in which a tradition, or custom, was being used to enable people to get round their financial obligations to their parents. Like a cunning tax accountant finding a loophole in the law, which enables someone to get away without paying any tax at all, the legal experts have found a way in which someone, by declaring their property to belong to God, can be free of all further obligation to their parents. Hypocrisy indeed: it was God who commanded the duty to parents in the first place, and officially ‘giving the money to God’ actually makes a mockery of the God they are claiming to honour.

The wider issue for Jesus and the Pharisees was: who speaks for God today? Who is offering away of life which honours the God who spoke through scripture (something Jesus assumes throughout)? The Pharisees had built up, over nearly two centuries by Jesus’ day, an agenda which was (in our terms) both political and religious. The two went together. The traditions they had developed meant that scripture was being interpreted and applied in particular directions, supporting particular programmes, not least the move towards revolt against Rome. The way the biblical purity laws were applied worked in the same direction. That was where you might get if you went all the way with the ‘traditions’ that the hard-line Pharisees were urging people to accept.

Jesus, then, wasn’t simply supporting an abstract idea, ‘scripture’, against another one, ‘tradition’. He was challenging, by his whole kingdom-movement, the very basis on which the Pharisees had built up their edifice. If the kingdom was indeed coming in the work he was doing – by healing, by feasting with outcasts, by rolling back the kingdom of darkness – then the way that the layers of Pharisaic tradition had been pointing for long enough was quite simply ruled out from the start.

Jesus’ knockdown argument for what he was doing was that it was the fulfilment of scripture. Go his way, and you got scripture thrown in. Go the Pharisee’s way, and scripture – supposedly the basis for tradition, but actually often undermined by it – would lose out.

Thinking our way through the complexities of first century debates is always tough (though anyone who wants to read the New Testament seriously has to get used to it). It’s like learning jokes in a new language. But it alerts us not only to similar debates in our own day, but to a bigger principle. Often when people get angry, and start asking questions as to why someone’s doing something, it’s because there is a larger agenda at stake. Often it has political dimensions to it which don’t appear on the surface. Part of being a Christian, is to learn the art of spiritual discernment. And part of that art, is learning to understand scripture, and to test human traditions against it.

Amen.