Let’s remember that it’s been pretty rough going for Jesus recently. At this point in his ministry, his friend, mentor, and cousin, John the Baptist, has been executed. Since then, Jesus’ ministry has really taken off, but that has its own challenges: he has been beseiged by crowds demanding healing and wisdom; he had to feed five thousand of them, then had to walk out across the water to rescue his disciples from a storm.
As soon as the boat came ashore, people recognized him and 
began their sick people out on mats, stacking them up in the marketplaces of every town he entered and then dragging him amongst them. The cries wake him in the morning, swirl around him all day, and echo through his mind at night: “Jesus, save me! Jesus, heal me! Jesus, make my daughter well again! Jesus, make my father clean again! Let me see again! Let me walk again! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Every day brings more of the same. Though he is clearly full of compassion and concern for them, he must have been just plain worn out, too.
Then one day, a group of surprisingly healthy people appear, scowling as they step over and around the figures lying on mats all around him, picking their way closer and closer. You can almost see him sitting on a stool, finally resting for a moment, maybe leaning over with a damp rag on his head like a prize fighter in his corner between rounds, too tired even to join his disciples in wolfing down a few pieces of bread. He straightens up as he notices their approach. The scribes and Pharisees gather around him, look him up and down, then turn around and survey the scene. And then, after taking it all in, what do they do? They ask him why his disciples are eating with unclean hands!
So we can understand why Jesus goes after the Pharisees with a little more gusto than usual. And he lets them have it, doesn’t he? He’s calling them hypocrites, he’s accusing them of defying God’s commandments, he’s quoting the prophets and the Law at them, and he’s being downright sarcastic about it: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” And they stand there in silence taking verbal blow after verbal blow; they don’t get another word in after that initial question about washing hands.
We are often conditioned by centuries of interpretations to identify the Pharisees as the “bad guys” whenever they appear. Then we sit back and wait for Jesus to jump in, stop them, and send them away humiliated, proving that good triumphs over bad. It’s particularly easy to do that in this scene, where the battle lines seem to be drawn so clearly.
But is that really fair? Let’s look at it from their perspective for a moment. In their thought and practice, the Pharisees are trying to work out what it means to live as the people of God. Their emphasis on ritual purity is part of their response to Scripture, where God calls Israel to be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation (Ex 19:6). On that basis, they advocate for all Jews to maintain the level of ritual purity required for priests, hence their question about hand-washing. In other words, they believe in the priesthood of all believers 1500 years before the Christian Protestants started talking about it!
And like our own Reformed Christian tradition from which Presbyterians come, the Pharisees refuse to compartmentalize existence into the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, religion and “real life.” Instead, they want to sanctify all of life, to include everyone in the active fulfilling of the covenant, not simply relying on the priests and the Temple to act out their religion for them. They want maintaining a right relationship with God to be an integral part of people’s everyday lives. The truth is, we have a lot in common with the Pharisees, as did Jesus, for that matter.
But there are some important differences, too, like the “traditions of the elders” that is so disputed between Jesus and the Pharisees in this passage. The Pharisees are focused on looking into the Torah as a mirror to reflect back the adjustments they need to make to maintain their covenant with God. The traditions of the elders are how the Pharisees “polish” the mirror to make God’s will reflected in the Torah more clear. And in a context where Jewish identity is threatened by Roman political dominance and Greek cultural dominance, the Pharisees’ emphasis on tradition is quite understandable.
Traditions can play a very positive role; they can be a way for people to forge a common identity and culture, finding points of contact with each other and maintaining continuity with the past. But they can be negatives for the exact same reason. As you may have heard me say before, when I was a child, we used to visit my mother’s parents, who lived on a small farm in rural Alabama, for several weeks every summer. My brother and I would follow my grandfather everywhere, and he taught us how to fish, how to shoot, how to drive a tractor, how to feed the cows, and so on.
Often, his good friend Mac would come along with us. My grandfather and Mac were virtually inseparable; they were about the same age and had both lived in the little town their whole lives, and they had been friends as long as my mother could remember. They would work the farm together, go off riding or fishing together, or simply sit on the porch telling stories.
But as I got older, I began to notice some strange things about Mac’s visits. My grandfather always addressed his friend simply as Mac, while Mac would always call my grandfather “Mister” Charles. Many people would come by for a visit while we were staying there, but only Mac came around the house and knocked on the back door; everyone else came through the front. Finally, I asked my mom about those things. She sighed and said, “Well, honey, that’s how Mac and your grandfather were taught to act, and they simply wouldn’t think about acting any other way. You and I think it’s strange, but that’s how they have always lived and they’re not going to change.”
Mac, of course, was Black, and for people from their generation living in the Deep South there were strong traditions that governed how whites and blacks were supposed to act, even when they seemed to consider each other friends and equals otherwise. I have always admired the strength of my grandfather’s character and faith, which I believe enabled him to have a close Black friend despite being born, raised, and living all his life in the heart of the segregated Deep South except for his time fighting in World War II. Yet even so, there remained some tragic boundaries that they were unable to overcome, handed down to both of them in the form of the traditions of their elders.
Following traditions is a little like splitting the atom: if you take them in one direction, they can generate light and positive energy to fill up the world. If you take them in another, they can be explosively destructive almost beyond imagination. can be dangerous precisely because of their power to organize and regulate human relationships. They can give meaning and identity and purpose and shared values to a community; or they can become a means of controlling people: determining who belongs, and who does not, who is important and who is not, who is good or worthy or acceptable and who is not.
I think the reality of such negative uses of tradition is part of why “religion” is such a dirty word in contemporary culture. It’s hard to overstate the branding problem that Christianity has in the United States right now; the irony of the Conservative Evangelical movement turning off more people to Christianity than they have attracted is perhaps the most obvious dynamic of that, with Christianity becoming synonymous for many with bigotry, judgmentalism, autocracy, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness as a result.
But Centrist and Progressive expressions of Christianity have created our own problems, often by either clinging to traditions that no longer seem relevant to real life for people not steeped in them, or failing to recognize the extent of the work they still need to do on overcoming bigotry, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness themselves, or focusing all their energy inwardly towards maintaining their institutions..
That’s what makes this encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees in our passage for today so relevant. It’s clearly against using abstract religious practices, beliefs, or traditions as mirrors to hold up and congratulate yourself on how good you look in their reflection, or to show to others and say, “you look terrible!” Despite their best intentions, the Pharisees’ traditions are giving them a false reflection to of themselves like a funhouse mirror that makes scrawny weaklings look like body builders, and they’re believing what they see. They have deceived themselves into believing that their traditions cover every angle on how to do the word, that the elders got everything right, and all they have to do is pass down those traditions and follow them and they will be clean and pure in God’s eyes.
That’s where Jesus challenges them: he doesn’t tell them they have to reject their traditions, just that they are only really useful if they control what actually defiles a person. No matter how many times you wash your hands, it’s not going to remove stains on the heart; it’s not what goes into you that defiles you or makes you holy; it’s what comes out through actions of love and justice and compassion and peace. Jesus, after all, summarized the entire Law in just two commandments: love the Lord your God with your whole heart and mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. If you do that, everything else takes care of itself.
Therefore, holiness cannot mean separation from or opposition to or exclusion of the Other, whomever the Other might be, because for us there are no others. That long list of vices Jesus quotes all defile us because they all divide us from God and from each other, our neighbors. And if we are to love our neighbors, then we cannot be set apart from them; we must be engaged with them, connected to them, caring for them. Our neighbors are the mirror in which we can check to see if we are doing what God calls us to do, because in them is reflected God’s love and grace if we are truly sharing it faithfully.
So as you go from worship today back into the world, how is God calling you to reflect God’s love towards your neighbors? How can we better reflect God’s love as a congregation in our ministry, in our stewardship of the resources we have? Those are the crucial questions that can guide us well in our faith and ministry in the days to come. And we don’t need to worry about whether we are clean enough or pure enough or holy enough to do this work; we just need to worry about being faithful to the calling we have, for the neighbors we have, with the gifts we have. And in God’s hands, that will always be more than enough.