Defilement and the Human Heart (Proper 17B)

Defilement and the Human Heart

Proper 17B
2 September 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

A few weeks after I came to Trinity Church, one of the parishioners took me aside and asked me, “I notice you start all your sermons with a prayer, ‘Give us hearts of flesh.’  So what is THAT all about?  I thought flesh was bad, something that resists the spirit.  Why do you pray for us to have hearts of flesh? Aren’t they set on the flesh enough already, dirty enough already?” 

I told him, of course, that this small prayer is taken from a social justice prayer of Catholic Worker organizer Dorothy Day, and comes from a passage in Ezekiel 11, where God promises to restore his people and turn aside all the bad things from them, by taking away their unfeeling, inhuman hearts incapable of any sympathy or empathy—their hearts of stone—and  replacing these with hearts of flesh, alive with natural emotions of compassion. 

The parishioner was thinking of passages in St. Paul’s letter that use the term “flesh” as a metaphor for the part of us that resists God and God’s plans.  But it is important to remember that even for crusty old St. Paul, the flesh could be seen as a positive.  He describes at one point people he had ministered to as “a letter,” “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh written by God” (2 Corinthians 3:3). 

We run into the idea that the flesh is bad, and is dirty far too often.  We must remember that our flesh is what God made when he created us, and said was “very good” (Gen 1:31).  It is what God became when “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”   The fact that we sometimes feel we need to disparage the flesh stems from our misuse of God’s gifts, and from the resulting alienation we feel, both from God and from ourselves.  The fact that the idea is often tied to feelings of dirtiness or impurity complicates how we think about these things.  

The Gospel text today is about the idea of dirtiness.  It is phrased in the language of the Hebrew Scriptures’ purity codes:  clean and unclean, defiled and undefiled, pure and impure.

The idea of “dirt,” is shared by almost all human cultures.  It is not about physical cleanness per se, and most certainly not connected to germ theory, though since Pasteur this idea has come to play a part in modern popular conceptions of dirt.  The simplest way of expressing the core idea of clean and unclean is the difference in our minds between food and garbage.  Though food, properly washed or peeled, is probably fine to eat, most of us feel some revulsion at the idea of eating food that has been fished from a garbage bin or picked up from a restaurant table, even when ostensibly clean.   Is in on the plate or off?  Food that has been in the wrong place is seen as garbage.  The difference is the sociological concept of “dirt” or “uncleanness.” 

A great thread in the Hebrew Scriptures is the ritual distinction between clean and unclean.  For animals to be clean, as food, they had to conform to the category to which they belonged, or at least to which the Law of Moses assigned them.  Fish had to be fish; land animals land animals.  Fish had to have fins and scales; marine creatures lacking these were seen as unclean.  Goodbye, shrimp cocktail.  Large farm animals had to resemble the archetypical one, a cow, by chewing cud and having a cloven hoof.  No eating camels or rabbits.  Birds had to have feathers and be able to fly.  No eating bats or ostriches.

General impurity or uncleanness in this tradition transmitted through specific environmental factors:  food and meals, birth and death, as well as bodily discharges, blemishes, and imperfections. 

You could become unclean through sinful disobedience to God’s commands (like eating an unclean animal), or by unavoidable things (like having a monthly period or a nocturnal emission) or even by doing things you were commanded to do (like having children, or washing your parent’s dead body and preparing it for burial).  While impurity and sin were not the same, there was no clear distinction in the Law between moral issues and ritual ones.  Some defiling acts are seen by us as clearly immoral.   Others seem morally neutral.   But the Hebrew Scriptures do not make such a distinction. 

Whenever impurity was acquired, it could be purged through a variety of ritual means, varied combinations of washing or immersing oneself in water, waiting a specified period, and/or performing certain sacrifices.   

Impurity was contagious; it transmitted from the unclean to the clean, and so it paid to keep yourself from situations and people where uncleanness was likely:  people who did not observe the ritual distinctions, including non-Jews and non-observant Jews. 

This striving for purity and ritual holiness, for being special and set aside for God’s service is a clear demand of the priests in scripture:  “You shall be holy for I am holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows the hundreds of detailed rules setting boundaries for holiness.  On the other hand, the prophets often lay more stress on striving for justice, for treating people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly. 

Walther Bruggemann says that these two traditions, purity and holiness vs. social justice, are both important and mutually corrective. The boundaries established by the Law define and preserve the People of God.  But holiness becomes empty ritual, a mode of oppression, if not tempered with the call for social justice.  On the other hand, calls for social justice absent an authentic call to holiness rapidly degenerate into the most obvious self-serving interest-group politics.   

Many of the rabbis, seeking a means of avoiding inadvertent disobedience to God’s commands, built a “fence around the Law,” that is, established practices and observances that, while not commanded specifically in the Torah, had the effect of making it less likely that one would break one of the 615 commandments specifically found there.  That is why the Pharisees had established traditions of elaborate ritual washing of food and eating vessels before meals in order to remove any uncleanness that may inadvertently have been attached to those foods. 

Today’s Gospel reading in Mark has Jesus disagreeing with the Pharisees’ use of washings by saying,  “It is not what goes into your mouth that makes impure, but what words and actions your heart produces.”  “Thus, says Mark, “he declared all foods clean.” 

This phrasing is most likely a post-Easter reinterpretation of Jesus’ teaching, placed here back on his lips.  In the Book of Acts and in Paul’s letters, we read of the great controversy in the early Christian Church about allowing Gentiles to come into the Church as equal members without the purity laws.  If Jesus had clearly told his disciples that all foods were clean during his lifetime as Mark reports here, it is hard to understand how these later controversies could have occurred as they did. 

The graphic image, however, that the Marcan Jesus adds here, “what comes out goes into the sewer drain, and that is what defiles” is just the sort of startling peasant imagery that seems to fit on the lips of the historical Jesus.  In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus says against the Pharisees:  “You wash the outside of a dish, but inside it is full of extortion and wickedness.  Cleanse first the inside, then the outside will be clean as well” (Matt 23:25-26; Luke 11:39-41). 

Jesus almost certainly criticized rigorous ritual washings before meals by using an inside/outside metaphor.

In the Gospels, whenever social justice is placed in conflict with ritual purity and Jesus is asked to decide between them, in every single case he opts for social justice.  For him, justice trumps purity and holiness in this sense every time.   But he does seem to have kept a concern for kashrut, though his interpretation here was quite broad. 

Elsewhere in the Gospels, when Jesus is asked which is the most important of all the commandments, he relies that the greatest commandment equally is love of a holy God and love of your neighbor.  He thus puts justice on par with holiness in priority.  (Matt 22:34-36)

You see, he understands God as the God of everyone, not just of Jews ,  righteous people, or the pure and the clean.  “God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the righteous and the wicked” (Matt. 5:45).  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies’” (Matt. 5:43).   His answer about “who is my neighbor” is a story of an unclean Samaritan who helps a Jew who appears to have been beaten to death on the side of the road.    

This really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the unclean to the clean. People who want to please God must avoid it if at all possible, lest they commit sacrilege against the Temple of God. If impurity is inadvertently contracted, they need to purge it away through rituals.  They need to prevent it through washing before eating. 

As a Jew, Jesus respected the rituals. But he taught that goodness was different from purity, and far more important. In his view, moral goodness was spread to others by compassion and service. And the need for compassion and service trumped the need to avoid contamination at all times.  And since the hand-washings are not specifically ordered in scripture, he foregoes them altogether.

This is a subtext of almost all of Jesus’ public acts and teaching. He practiced open table fellowship and ate with people that his religion labeled as the worst of the worst, the uncleanest of the unclean.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says what really counts is not what one eats or abstains from but rather how we treat each other.  He discounts ritual washings because they do not touch what really matters—the heart, where our behaviors arise.   Here too, justice trumps purity. 

In the film Chocolat, a small French town tries to keep itself pure and clean by observing religious tradition.  In comes a dubious and wandering candymaker, Vianne, who opens a chocolate shop during Lent!  She begins to meet the very real human needs of the idiosyncratic very human villagers. An epic struggle results between her and the town’s mayor.  In the end, the young village curate preaches the following as his Easter Sermon, ending Lent and the struggle:  “I want to talk about Christ’s humanity, … how he lived his life on earth: his kindness, his tolerance. We must measure our goodness, not by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, or who we exclude.  Instead, we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.” 

Sisters and brothers, most of our struggles against the flesh, against dirt, against impurity all end up, as Jesus says here, in the sewer.   What truly defiles is having a heart of stone, of lacking compassion, and of justifying our own selfishness at the expense of those about us, even those we love.  What brings life, joy, a  truly “clean” conscience is this:  inclusion of others, serving and listening to them, our compassion and empathy for them, our following the call of Jesus, following him in our hearts and our efforts in bearing the griefs of others.     In the name of Christ, Amen.