Offering grace to the world
Proper 17B  |  Mark 7:1-23

The last time we were in the gospel of Mark, it was mid-July. I had to look it up! That feels like forever ago! We had summer camps, vacation trips, and the Summer Olympics was still a week away! That’s how long it’s been! 

And we just pick up this morning where we left off. We all remember right? Right?

Year B is tricky because we have both Mark and John to cover, so there are two stories to work through. And they aren’t incompatible—just different.

In Mark’s gospel, there is a bit of narrative development happening. We read a lot of healing stories, but they escalate quickly to mass healings, healing without Jesus touching, even to his raising children from the dead. Jesus exorcizes demons and that escalates to exorcizing a legion of demons. Jesus’s power over the environment escalates as he stills storms, feeds thousands, and walks on water. And the disciples’ fear of Jesus escalates with each new vision of power. All of this is culminating and combining with his sending his disciples out in pairs to do this same, incredible stuff. 

So when we say that there’s a lot going on here, we mean it.

Keeping Busy

Where we left off was with an intensely busy chapter six. Jesus was rejected back home in Nazareth. And this rejection fuels Jesus’s sending his disciples out as apostles, saying they are to live on people’s hospitality and keep moving forward in the face of rejection.

And it is news of the work of the disciples that freaks out King Herod. His guilt over murdering John the Baptizer has him believing John is back. But this isn’t some bit of trivia to us because Jesus has taken up John’s mantle—literally proclaiming the good news in repentance that John did.

Then it is the teaching all day, wanting a break, feeling sympathy for the thousands of followers, feeding them all on bread and fish, leaving for another shore, resting in the boat, freaking out at the sight of Jesus walking on water, coming to the other side, and finding the fame has spread there. Now Jesus and the disciples are healing people all over the place.

And this is when some critics come along and challenge Jesus about his adherence to tradition. This sounds just like today’s heresy hunters who don’t trust that maybe God is doing something here—just that you are doing something wrong and they need to tell you about it. Or tell other people about how evil you are.

Notice, too, that it is “tradition” they charge and defend. A big, vague term that refers to…everything we do. So the charge acts as if it were about everything and one particular thing. Notice how that works in the mind as it inflates the crime to all of the things. And that crime is about handwashing. Which is a great stand-in for purity. And purity is a great stand-in for righteousness. And righteousness is a great stand-in for the divine project. So failing to wash your hands must mean you hate God and reject all of tradition! Obviously!

This is still how heresy hunting works today.

Tradition

Christians have long struggled with this escalating of conflict and of tradition—without wrestling with Jesus’s escalating power and the disciples’ escalating fear as communicating something important to us. In fact, many in history have doubled-down on purity maintenance, with the belief that they must prevent sinful behaviors, thoughts, or concepts from infiltrating their children’s (and wive’s) consciousness. So we don’t let them hear pop music. We need CCM (Contemporary Christian Music). No Disney cartoons, just Veggie Tales. And no sex education, just purity rings and promises.

The cult of purity maintenance is built on the idea that we avoid sin through ignorance rather than reject sin through education. But there is a deeper issue for us. At its core, this cult (remember, you can’t spell purity culture without cult) reflects the critic’s position in this story in opposition to Jesus’s!

Jesus says to the critics that purity isn’t something stolen or destroyed by contact with the world. We can’t ingest something and become impure. We expel impurity! It’s our waste product. And Jesus isn’t mincing words here. Impurity doesn’t come from a lack of handwashing. It comes from the movement of our bowels.

In other words, when we “speak excrement” to each other.

So you may have been taught purity maintenance or grew up with purity culture and you already know this is messed up and doesn’t work. That it doesn’t reflect the joys and truth of Jesus. That’s right on.

Or maybe you grew up as I did with a more restrained version. One where you learned to not swear, mess around, and were taught to keep your parents happy.

Unfortunately, none of this reflects the spirit of Jesus’s teaching here! Which isn’t to say we’re all wrong, just off-base. Our priorities are in the wrong order.

A Better Tradition

Jesus has been confronted twice now on commandment teaching in a synagogue: first in chapters two and three about the Sabbath and here about ritual purity. And just as when he said that Sabbath is for living, Jesus is rejecting the true defilement that prevents our living. 

The list of sins is familiar to many:

“Fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly”

And there’s a lot there—enough to make our eyes (ears?) glaze over.  But let’s consider them. Just because Jesus says they come from within a person, our vision of them shouldn’t be individualistic. Notice how these rhyme with the Ten Commandments: theft, murder, adultery, abusive relationships. What is common among these defilements is that they don’t reflect individual sin. They reflect abuse, manipulation, and exploitation of other people.

Sin is the abuse we heap on others. Which means our focus needs to shift away from private purity or civility in our community as the highest vision of righteous behavior and shift toward works that bring life into our communities, relationships, and neighbors.

Our job isn’t to police the sexual or chemical behaviors of others or avoid hard conversations that impact our neighborhoods. These can’t be our highest priorities because they aren’t Jesus’s priorities.

Our Greatest Priority

He is inviting us to live into our tradition by offering life to the dying. Offering joy to the disheartened. Offering relief to the overworked. Offering welcome to the stranger. Offering kindness to the immigrant.

We feed and care for people. And we allow others to feed and care for us. We encourage a world in which feeding and caring for people is our greatest priority.

Jesus’s message is liberation. Which means, if we think about it, the sexual liberation movement is closer to Jesus’s teaching than purity culture is! So what do we need to work on to see why? And how might we offer an even more life-affirming option than either?

A good place to start is probably the great commandment: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And this requires each of us to figure out how to love ourselves and everyone else. And many of us are only passable at one of those.

But here’s the true grace of what Jesus is saying:

We bring life with us when we walk with liberated hearts. 

When we share love and joy and hope with neighbors. When we enjoy our lives in ways that connect and encourage others to enjoy theirs. When we resist our critical impulses, our fears, our perfectionism, and embrace our freedom to love and serve and feast with jubilation and joy.

We are liberated to love. That is the heart of our tradition.