Abstract
“Cleanliness is next to godliness”: or maybe not, if Jesus’ reprimand to the scribes and Pharisees for washing their hands before eating is anything to go by. There are many modern preachers who would take this further and claim that messiness is next to godliness, revelling in Jesus’ condemnation of the formalism of the religious hierarchs – to the extent that a hymn I recently stumbled upon exhorts us to “crush the mountains of tradition.” Well, whatever the truth or kerygmatic value of “a God who likes to get His hands dirty”, and so on, these (arguably dated) inclinations towards informality risk missing the point here: namely, the priority of inner, spiritual change.
Two of the keys to this passage are sadly lost in translation, and a third excised by the lectionary. The first is at 7.4, where the NRSV explains that the Pharisees do not eat anything from the market unless they “wash” it first. But Mark’s own word, in the overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts, is much more nuanced than just “washing:” the word he uses is “baptise.” What’s more, it can apply grammatically to the Pharisees themselves just as much as to the things they have bought: so it could mean either that they eat nothing from the market before they have “baptised” themselves or “baptised” the food. In the same verse, Mark also talks about the “baptising” of pots and pans. This is more than some contrast between cleanliness and messiness. Rather, the Pharisees are so busy “baptising” themselves and all sorts of other things on the surface that they leave no room for the true baptism of the heart, which Jesus brings.
The second loss in translation is to do with what the Pharisees teach. Jesus in the NRSV version censures them at 7.7 for “teaching human precepts as doctrines”. The translation is too fancy. The King James Version gives the proper sense of the Greek, rendering it: “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” And this makes much better sense of Jesus’ next words: “You leave the commandment of God.” Jesus is making a direct comparison here, one which is masked by our modern translation, and it is about commandments: how dare we replace the commandments of God with those of men?
And that is precisely what the Pharisees are doing, as we would see if the Lectionary had not cut out verses 9-13 from the gospel passage; because there, Jesus gives a clear example of how they are subverting even one of the Ten Commandments for their own ends. You are supposed, He says, to honour your father and your mother, but you Pharisees are encouraging people to give so much money to the Temple that they have nothing to give their own children – so with what, exactly, are those children supposed to care for their parents and so honour them? You’re putting your stipends above the filial duty commanded by God.
The two keys to this passage, then, are (1) inner change effected by true baptism and (2) the priority of God’s commandments. Holding these keys in our hands, perhaps we can now unlock the meaning of Jesus’ elusive words of conclusion: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (7.14-15).
Let’s take the matter of commandments first. What might they have to do with the human heart? Well, Jesus famously answers this question later on in Mark (12.29-31) when He summarizes the Law with reference to the first of the Ten Commandments, the foundational Jewish prayer known as the shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Along with the second, “love your neighbour as yourself ”, Jesus makes this the priority on which all the rest of the Law hangs. It is the internalisation of love of God, the absolute openness of the heart, which allows true obedience to His commandments.
All well and good: but how might we move from Pharisaical observance, lip-service, to the internalisation of God’s loving will? This is where our other key comes in: Mark’s editorial decision to use the word “baptism.” No amount of washing the body will purify our hearts if, as Jesus puts it, those “hearts are far from” God. For if that is so, they merely brim with the muck of evil intentions. Now, Jesus does not refer to baptism here, but Mark certainly implies it, as well as a baptised Christian might: because, through that sacrament, God’s grace does indeed work to cleanse and purify the heart from within, regenerating the baptised into a new life in Christ, opening up the spring of His love for the Father, which lies sealed in every human heart. It is this which allows us to obey the rest of the Law, to honour our parents, to help the widow, the orphan and so on: with the help of God, and by His initiative, not ours.
Jesus is not exalting messiness over cleanliness or unequivocally condemning all religious tradition as contrary to the will of God. We can bathe ourselves as often as we like, we can follow all sorts of rules and rubrics, and, insofar as these bring us closer to God’s loving will, they are not to be despised. But as soon as we believe that we can win our own salvation, or, worse, overturn God’s prime commandment of love to our own ends, we fall into the shibboleths of the idolater. We can begin to obey God only by accepting gladly the invitation He extends to us all: to be cleansed from within.