This Week: Proper 17B
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
This week’s gospel plays with a natural tension between body and spirit, sin and grace, even certainty and hope. And in that way, it might read as pretty easy and simple. Or perhaps a bit obvious. I don’t really think it is.
Because these are tensions that seem pretty boilerplate, we might fool ourselves into thinking they occur naturally, almost innate to the human condition. Which is less an evaluation of truth than it is a way of assuming they sustain themselves, occur without our consideration, and would happen to anyone without having to think about it.
As easy as it is to fall into thinking about this passage with a kind of passive response to a developing reality, it isn’t so much natural as it is intentional and serving a purpose.
One of those purposes is in maintaining a binary vision of reality. That our faith is about either our bodies or our spirits, for instance. This is often what we proclaim when we say that Jesus doesn’t provide for our material needs, but our spiritual needs. Or when we argue that the church shouldn’t get involved in politics, but offer a spiritual life above it.
These arguments are pure gnosticism, by the way.
That Jesus and Paul both make hyperbolic statements about the flesh being “useless”, they aren’t actually saying the ratio is zero physical and 100 percent spiritual. They are telling people who have that ratio reversed to stop thinking you can do this junk without the Spirit at all.
Gnostic Attachment
There is a kind of fascinating attachment to gnostic thinking throughout Christianity, and it occurs differently for each group, but it is most obviously on display when we critique “the flesh” and suggest that it is somehow inferior than the spiritual or can be fundamentally disconnected from the world.
It is super-obvious when we see it in a text, when our eyes are open to it. But when we see it in our friends and neighbors? That can be a bit harder to swallow. Especially when they are earnest and expressing a genuine faith.
This also shouldn’t be read as a condemnation of gnosticism—that’s something the early church did and it destroyed lives and led to the following 1700 years’ obsession with having the “right” thinking. No, it is important to recognize that this thinking is inconsistent with our other values and represents a departure from the central theme of an integrated physical/spiritual world in God’s grace.
Jesus reminds us in this week’s gospel that we might be tempted to inverse the Gnostic impulse—flipping a loathing of the physical into an obsession with it. As we saw in the last few weeks in John’s gospel about the bread. It would seem Jesus’s critics are doing that in Mark now, mixing handwashing with ritual purity.
Tradition Inflation
The critique that Jesus offers that might be of real use to us today is how his critics use a technique we might call tradition inflation to make their case against Jesus.
Jesus is violating purity laws. He’s caught red-handed.
But they take that fact and inflate it by invoking…TRADITION! As if this particular affront is disqualifying—as if he has revoked all of tradition.
You’ve seen this, I’m sure. People do this all the time. And with this very idea of TRADITION!
The late Phylis Tickle argued that people only use the word “traditional” to describe a thing that is less than a 100 years old. Which makes sense because if it is older than that, it is just something we all do. We don’t say “reading the Bible in church” is traditional—because we have been doing that for centuries.
The word is there to impose tradition onto something new. It is also often used to ascribe consistency to something controversial; history to something new; or familiarity and universality to something minimally accepted.
Lots of stuff born of the 1950s is “traditional” precisely because we want to pretend it is more than 70 years old. We want that to mean forever.
We use tradition inflation to create power and control over the use and adoption of concepts. So when Jesus’s critics claim TRADITION! as the response to the violation of handwashing, they aren’t merely questioning him on a single practice, they are attempting undermine the whole thing. And not just for Jesus, but for everyone.
Think about it. In this particular exchange, they want the world to think handwashing is the most central part of being a person of faith. Apparently; if we take the critique to its natural conclusion. This is absurd, of course, but the argument is powerful precisely because this conclusion is implied and most importantly, Jesus’s own fault.
This is the power of TRADITION! because it doesn’t have to prove anything. It doesn’t even have to be real. Or important. It just has to convince people that it is important to do in all cases. And that the violation of it in this case is disqualifying of a person’s integrity in all cases.
That we still do this—and fall for it—reveals how this bit of gaslighting is old as dirt. And we might say that it, too, is traditional.
So where does that do to its veracity as an argument? And more importantly, where does that leave you in reading about it?