trinity twelve

I don’t know whether any of you have seen the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.  It’s centred on a Jewish family in Russia about the year1900, which is a time of a rapidly changing and violent world. The father Tevye, mother Golde and their five daughters, and how Tevye tries to maintain his family and religious traditions, while outside influences encroach on them all. The matchmaker keeps finding suitable men for the daughters, who are fiercely determined to marry the husbands of their own choosing, eventually the daughters move to other countries to be free of the stifling traditions of their faith, and the continuing persecutions inflicted on the Jewish people.

For many centuries, the Jews had been persecuted in many countries, and in the 18^th and 19^th century many thousands had left the countries they called home to settle in America and Britain. Tevye and his family faced being expelled from their village because the Tzar wanted to remove all Jews from Russian soil. The thing that kept them going through all the persecutions and upheaval was their traditions, handed down to them from the elders of Israel. And over the centuries, many Jews have chosen death rather than deny and forsake those traditions.  One of the most famous songs from the musical is ‘Tradition’, which tells of the importance of tradition in holding the Jewish people together in succeeding generations.

In Mark’s Gospel, however, we find an increasingly popular, revolutionary Rabbi from Galilee apparently ignoring all these traditions, and creating a great deal of controversy in Jerusalem, especially among the Scribes and Pharisees.  So concerned were they about what Jesus was teaching the ordinary people about the Jewish traditions, which had sustained the faith for centuries, they came from Jerusalem to confront Jesus, which is a distance of about 90 miles.

The more we read into this New Testament reading, the more confrontational it gets. These were the men from “head office”, from the Ministry of Religion, who had come there specifically to deal with Jesus.  They really couldn’t allow him to preach against the traditions which had held the Jewish people together, BUT set them apart from other people and religions, for so many centuries. And there, right in front of them, they see with their own eyes some of the disciples eating with unclean, unwashed hands. As insignificant as it may seem to us, this was a direct contravention of the purity laws which governed what and how Jews ate, how they lived their lives. Mark lists characteristics which drive these traditionalists.  Firstly, they take great pride not in what they do, but in what they don’t do, twice we hear the phrase, “They do not eat unless”.  A sure sign of a traditionalist! Secondly, Mark tells us the source of their concern was not the scriptures but the ‘tradition of the elders’.  Nowhere does God tell them to do this, but the religious teachers, the great legal experts of the old days had developed these rules to set them apart as God’s chosen people from others who they considered to be ungodly, and unclean, like the Samaritans, and Gentiles.

Then Mark tells us of their passion. The term ‘observing the traditions of the elders’, is a rather weak interpretation of the Greek.  What it really means is to ‘hold fast’ to the traditions developed by the religious teachers, who considered the rituals, ceremonials and regulations laid down to be the essence of the service of God.  And these rituals, ceremonials and regulations held the people so forcibly to the traditions of the Jewish faith, they cannot escape from them.  Those that do are literally dead to the Jewish community.  If anyone married outside the faith, the parents would tear their clothes as a sign of death, the child was dead in their eyes. And finally, Mark describes in great detail the breadth of their application of the tradition.  There was a set ritual for washing the hands, and the cooking utensils, and it was carried out with meticulous care.  There was none of this ‘go and wash your hands before we eat’, which we say to our children and grandchildren, this was a laborious act, with set strict rules to follow. Let me enlighten you, but remember this hand washing was not in the interests of hygiene, it was solely for the purposes of ceremonial cleanliness.

Before every meal, and between each course, the hands had to be washed in a special way. The water for washing the hands had to be kept in a special large jar, not used for any other purpose to make sure it was clean. First the hands were held with the fingertips pointing upwards, water was poured over them and had to run down to the wrist, while the hands were still wet, each hand had to be cleaned with the fist of the other, and then the hands were held with the finger tips pointing down and water poured over them beginning at the wrist and washing over the finger tips.  Only then were the hands ritually clean.

Jesus doesn’t defend his disciples against the charge of eating with defiled hands, rather he takes the offensive, puts his accusers on the stand and charges them with a more serious offence, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites,….You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition”. Jesus accuses them of being hypocrites because tradition may give the appearance of a zealous religious life, but in reality it veils a hard heart, bereft of any tenderness that marks an authentic relationship with God, and when we elevate human tradition to what is sacred, we try and place humans on equal footing with God as the source of revelation. 

This is exactly what spurred the Reformation, when the church thought it had the absolute right to prescribe not only what people believed, but how they had to believe, and then corruptly went about getting richer and richer, selling indulgences, venerating idols and relics, and ignoring the poor people. And once we humans think we can take over from God, tradition and scripture will inevitably come into conflict.  And that is when humans cast aside God’s commandments in favour of their traditions, and God is deposed from his rightful place as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all creation, and we think we can manage it all by ourselves. Jesus is determined to hammer home his advantage over the Scribes and Pharisees, and calls the crowd round him and tells them a parable, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in  can defile, but the things that come out are what defile”. Now we see where this issue of purity and cleanliness is leading.  What began over a dispute about hand washing, and escalated to an attack on tradition over Scripture, now finds it’s climax in defining the real issue of what constitutes cleanliness.  Purity, says Jesus, is not defined by what we eat, but what comes from the heart.  Nothing that goes into people can defile them, because it goes into the belly and is passed through the body, without touching the heart. Things cannot be either clean or unclean in any real religious sense, only people can be unclean through their own actions, through what we think and do and say.

Jesus has just undone fourteen hundred years of the tradition of Israel’s dietary and purity laws, those very laws that set Israel apart from other nations. But in doing so we must remember Jesus didn’t come to overthrow the Jewish law but to fulfil it, by inaugurating a covenant renewal that would place God’s law in the hearts of the people instead of the phony laws and traditions they had created for themselves. All the Old Testament prophets had prophesised when the Messiah came, God’s law would be written on the hearts of his people and the ceremonial and cultural aspects of the law would give way to the new reality of God’s grace and unconditional love for all people. A time when the only laws needed were the commandments to ‘Love God with all our hearts, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves’.

Instead of us having to wash in the right way to purify ourselves; instead of us eating the right food; instead of us making animal sacrifices in our temples to purify ourselves so we could come into God’s presence, Jesus turned all that on its head and instead sacrificed himself on the Cross for us to wash away our sins once and for all, and to make us God’s children. We have the promise of eternal life through Christ’s saving power, and are washed clean by the blood he shed for us. With clean hearts washed clean by Christ’s sacrifice for us on that Cross, there would be no need for dietary laws, or laws that set them apart from other nations.  All peoples would be united under God in the new Covenant brought about by that first Good Friday.  So as we reflect on this message, we must remember we are a new covenant people, free and unburdened by cultic rules and regulations which keep us away from the one true God.  The only hallmark we need is a heart that loves God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength, and love our neighbour as ourselves, and a real a determination to keep his commandments. Amen.