Beyond Clean Hands

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?”

He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” [Mark 7:5-8].

Mark records miracle feeding stories in the chapters that we number 6 and 8 of his Gospel. In chapter 6, Jesus feeds at least 5,000 persons with five loaves and two fish. In chapter 8, he feeds some 4,000 more. Between those stories one encounters the Gospel reading appointed for this Sunday, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 [the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year B]. Here, Mark relates a different type of eating dilemma. The issue isn’t the availability of food, but rather whether Jesus’ disciples are following the strict rules and boundaries related to eating.

On the surface, the questions posed to Jesus by the Pharisees raise issues about who may eat and who may not? Who has properly prepared himself to eat, and who has not? Beneath the surface, however, the Pharisees have a more complex question: “Jesus, why haven’t you required your disciples to adhere to the ‘traditions of the elders?’”

Even at this relatively early point in Mark’s Gospel, the Pharisees are trying to paint Jesus as a law breaker. It isn’t just that Jesus allows His disciples to eat without performing the appropriate handwashing ritual. It’s also the other stuff that Jesus does. He touches sick people. He is touched by a woman with a hemorrhage. He interacts with those who are possessed by evil spirits. He eats with sinners and tax collectors.

It’s interesting that in his response, Jesus does not condemn the Jewish washing practices. After all, Jewish food practices helped build a strong community and helped remind people who they were and whose they were. For Jesus, the problem isn’t Jewish tradition. Instead, it is the practice of favoring human traditions over the full commandments of God. Jesus saw that the Pharisees had elevated “the tradition of the elders” to such an extent that it excluded a large segment of society.

Jesus criticizes the Pharisees not for their apparent devotion to God. He criticizes them because their devotion is only skin deep. It fails to reach deep to the level of their hearts. In a few words, Jesus isn’t interested in the condition of the Pharisees hands; He’s interested in the condition of their hearts.

Jesus goes on to make a revolutionary statement about what truly defiles a person. He tells the crowd that it’s not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out [Mark 7:14-15]. With these words, Jesus shifts the entire paradigm of purity from external observances to the condition of one’s heart. He’s saying that true righteousness isn’t about following a set of rules or traditions, but about cultivating a heart that produces goodness. This teaching challenges us to look beyond our outward actions and examine our inner motivations and attitudes.

In 1967, at the age of sixteen, my twin brother, Todd, and I briefly broke through an unspoken barrier in our hometown of Gastonia. Our father, an executive manager at Matthews-Belk for more than 25 years, reluctantly allowed us to become the first white porters at “The Store.” This role, formerly reserved for young black men, involved menial tasks deemed beneath white Southern gentlemen.

Our motives were less than noble—we wanted the early shift (6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.) to free up our afternoons. But the job thrust us into a new world.

One morning we were all sitting around in a stockroom, opening up our lunch. The other porters had been kidding Todd and me all morning, poking good natured fun at us because we were the only white guys ever to wear the grey porter’s uniform. They teased about how far the civil rights movement had come for us to be allowed to work with them. Our talk drew a bit more serious as we began to discuss black and white relations, the school consolidation that had just taken place in Gastonia, with the resulting closing of the old “colored” high school, and about whether blacks ought to be allowed to see movies in the two downtown movie houses.

I think it was probably me, not Todd, who said that a person shouldn’t be forced to share his business with people with whom he wasn’t comfortable. And it was certainly one of them who said, “Well, look at us, we ain’t real comfortable havin’ you eat with us, but you’re here anyhow, and nobody had to get arrested at any sit-in to give you the right to eat that sandwich.”

After his well-put sentence, my thoughts trailed away a bit, to a dime store in Greensboro that I’d never seen, but had heard about, how a few years earlier a few black college students had refused to leave a lunch counter until they were served, how they’d been arrested, and how important that act of peaceful defiance had been in opening up shops, restaurants, and even bathrooms to Blacks here in the South.

I heard the naive, rather stupid, words pour forth from my mouth, “Why did they choose the Greensboro Woolworths? Have you ever tasted Woolworth’s food?”

And then came a serendipity …. From off to the right, I heard the gentle, yet firm, voice of a woman who had been left out all her life. One of the Black matrons who operated the Store’s two elevators, she said, “Child (only she pronounced it without the “d”), you’re missin’ the point. We’re not talkin’ ‘bout food. We’re talkin’ about community, about who is included, and who is always excluded.”

It would take decades for me to understand more fully what that gentle lady was actually saying that day, that when it came to matters of racial justice, I had been looking at things superficially. Like Jesus, she wasn’t concerned with the condition of my hands; she was interested in what was happening within my heart!

The encounter at Belk’s was a pivotal moment in my understanding of inclusion and the importance of heart transformation. Just as I had been focused on the superficial aspects of the civil rights movement, we often today find ourselves fixated on external actions while neglecting the internal work of examining our hearts. My experience as a young porter mirrors the challenges we face in our modern context, where it’s easy to pay lip service to ideals of equality and justice without truly transforming our hearts and actions.

The Pharisees saw the “traditions of the elders” as the means of preserving the Jewish faith and way of life, especially in the midst of Roman occupation. They suspected that the carelessness of Jesus and his disciples with regard to those traditions threatened to undermine respect for God’s law. Their problem, said Jesus, was that they had become so focused on the externals of faithfulness that they had neglected to examine the true nature of their hearts. Quoting Isaiah, Jesus lamented that the Pharisees honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from God [Mark 7:6].

In our modern context, we often see examples of honoring God with lips but not hearts. We might attend religious services regularly, recite prayers, or engage in charitable activities, yet harbor prejudices, engage in gossip, or ignore the needs of those around us. Some may loudly proclaim their faith on social media while treating others with disdain in their daily interactions. Others might advocate for social justice causes publicly but fail to examine their own biases and privileges. These disconnects between our words and our hearts are not unlike the hypocrisy Jesus confronted in the Pharisees.

I have a good friend who, like many of us, is frustrated and disappointed by the level of evil and raw meanness in the world. Our culture teaches that the way to counteract or counterbalance that evil is to organize the community politically, and to speak loudly so as to force legislators to enact new laws and change the old ones. Yet, this week’s Gospel lesson tells us something quite different: If we are truly serious about transforming the evil in this world, then we must begin with the evil that exists with us, the evil that lies within our hearts.

Just as the Pharisees focused on external rituals, our modern tendency is focus on external solutions to societal problems. C.K. Chesterton was once asked to contribute a magazine article devoted to the theme, “What’s wrong with the world?” He response:

What’s wrong with the world? Me.

Chesterton’s pithy response echoes Jesus’ teaching about what truly defiles a person. The problems we see in the world—exclusion, prejudice, injustice—often stem from the condition of our own hearts. Just as my experience as a young porter opened my eyes to my own superficial understanding of inclusion, we are all called to look beyond external actions and examine our inner motivations.

The “eating dilemma” Jesus addressed wasn’t just about clean hands, but about who we welcome to our tables—literally and figuratively. Today, we must ask ourselves: Who do we exclude from our “tables” of community, opportunity, and justice? How do our actions align with the words we speak?