Title: Why NOT To Wash Your Hands
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With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this past week, a lot of
memories from my recent home in Houston came back to me. Of course,
the people of Houston were effected by the devastation of Katrina in a
different way than the people of the Gulf Coast—we were one of the
main places to receive those who had left or been evacuated. That was
a heady and uncertain time, if you happened to have lived in Houston
during those days. The Senior Pastor of the congregation I served was
on the tail end of his sabbatical, and I had been pastoring First
Congregational Church of Houston during the summer of his absence,
and it was near the end of tenure as the lead pastor, and then all of a
sudden Katrina happens and Houston becomes flooded with refugees,
many of whom are in the Astrodome. It was an overwhelming time—not
only because of our attempts to coordinate some sort of response to the
Hurricane ourselves, but also because First Congregational itself was
flooded with calls from well-meaning UCC congregations throughout the
countries trying to help the refugees and who thought contacting a local
Houston UCC was the best way to go. I remember dragging a small TV
into my office, so that I could keep up with the minute-by-minute
information that was coming through the local Houston stations. The
church responded wonderfully to that situation—many of the Houston
church members went directly to the Astrodome to find some way to help,
and most of those folks had a chance to work directly with the newly
displaced people of New Orleans.
In the days following the Hurricane, the issue came up about who would
feed all these people, and a plan was devised by some of the larger
churches in the city to take care of the cost of the food, as well as have
people from our local congregations serve the meals three times a day.
First Congregational in Houston alone raised $10,000 dollars, though
that was nothing to the megachurches like Second Baptist who
surrounded us who pledged a million dollars or more by themselves.
Before we could go and serve food down at the Astrodome, we were
required to complete a food handling course, but, of course, the problem
was that A LOT of people wanted to help, and training 30,000 people for
this task was clearly not something that could be done at the local
Department of Food Safety or wherever food handlers would normally
get the training. The solution: do the training on a massive scale, so
literally, people were trained on food handling measures at some eight to
ten thousand AT A TIME. Folks were stuffed into the Second Baptist
chapel, which JUST seated 1500, and the rest of the folks were in main
sanctuary that seated many thousands more. Of course, the food
handling training we got was very minimal, and most of us was just
common sense—don’t come to serve sick, don’t touch your nose or
mouth while serving food, and, the most obvious one of all: always wash
your hands thoroughly, for at least 30 seconds, before you handle any
food, and even if you are going to be wearing plastic gloves anyway.
Common sense, stuff, really, stuff we were taught by our parents, but
sometimes you just have to spell out the obvious to people. Well, the
people Jesus was talking to in our Scripture passage today thought
washing your hands was a pretty obvious thing to do: in fact, in our text
today, they confront Jesus on the fact that both he and his disciples don’
t do what everyone else around them is doing, which is to go through the
process of ritually washing your hands. Now, the reason they were
washing their hands wasn’t because they thought the Houston Health
Department knew what they were doing in laying down the rules for
servers—no, they washed their hands because their religious tradition
had called for a ceremonial washing of the hands before handling any
sort of food. Actually, if you look at the early rules, the Levitical laws that
were believed to be handed down directly from God, you’ll find that
actually the ONLY person who was required by religious law to clean
both his hands and feet was the high priest of Israel before he entered
into the temple: it was a ritual cleansing, to note and denote that the
priest was entering into a holy place, a place where both mind and body
needed to be pure, undefiled, unpolluted by the spiritual dirt of the
world. And this ritual designed to symbolize something became
something different in the hands of the Pharisees: not only should the
high priest ritually wash his hands and feet, but ALL who seek to be
good Jews should do the same before they eat, though there was
nothing in the rule book, so to speak, nothing in the law, that prescribed
such an action for anyone beyond the high priest.
Now, on one level, it’s a great thing to do, to wash your hands and all.
We know something that the Israelites didn’t know, of course, and that
was that our hands often carried harmful germs, some good, and that
disease is often spread from human to human when we don’t clean the
one area of our bodies that has the most contacts with other human
beings. You find that a lot in the Levitical law of the Old Testament:
common sense stuff, stuff that they probably just observed from
experience that eventually gets prescribed into holy law. You shouldn’t
eat shell fish, the Jewish religious law says, for holy reasons, but a
practical reason is that shellfish spoils quickly in the Middle Eastern sun,
especially with no refrigeration. You shouldn’t east pork, for holy
reasons, but pigs are notorious carriers of diseases of all sorts. Now,
some of these holy laws didn’t have any clear root in logic: sometimes
good old prejudice came into play, like some of the prohibitions around
female menstruation: those sorts things have more of their roots in
sexism than they do logic.
Nonetheless, you have Jesus challenging the tradition of the day, by his
refusal to ritually wash his hands as the Pharisees and their followers
believed one should do before eating dinner. On level, from our modern
perspective, the Pharisees were right on about this issue, at least on
practical level: without really meaning to because they had no
understanding of germs and microbes, they had instituted a ritual that
probably cut down on the amount of disease in the community. On the
other hand, they had done this not because of concern for the health of
the community, or at least not for the medical health of the community—
they wouldn’t have the understanding, probably: they had created a
tradition around washing one’s hands because of their misplaced
concern for the SPIRITUAL health of their community. And the rule, the
rule about washing your hands, had become a way of distinguishing
themselves, the Pharisees, from those other groups of Jews, people like
the Sadducees, and others, who clearly did not love God like these
Pharisees did, so they thought. You sense the frustration in Jesus’
reply—and it is forceful and almost angry in many ways. He’s not into
doing something for the sake of doing it; he doesn’t believe that things
should be done the old way because the old ways are the ways these
things have ALWAYS been done.
In replying to the Pharisees, Jesus answers back using a tool he knows
that they respect, which is the very Scriptures they believe they are
honoring in their ritual cleansing of their hands. Jesus quotes something
from Isaiah, and then later in the chapter he goes back to the issue,
which is actually unusual for him, perhaps because it bothered him so
much to see people condemn him and his disciples for not going to the
wash basin before eating a meal. In a flash, in a moment, he seems to
abolish the Levitical laws around what is and is not permissible to eat:
“there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the
things that come out are what defile” he says to the crowd around him.
And he is not talking about those things that come out of us in our
restrooms, as he points in a portion of this passage you didn’t hear this
morning: he is talking about something more important, something more
spiritually toxic than anything we could ingest or eject out of our bodies.
Jesus moves his readers along from outer world into the inner world, and
he says to them that what comes out of the human heart, that metaphor
we use to describe that center within us that hates and loves, that
chooses either spiritual death or spiritual life, or sometimes things in-
between, it is what flows from THAT place within us that purifies us or
pollutes us, that makes us holy or unholy, not anything we touch or eat
or anything we don’t touch and don’t eat.
But that’s quite a challenge, isn’t it? To think now about what motivates
our actions as much as the actions themselves. Jesus moves us to think
inwardly about the outwardly actions we do everyday. When Douglas
and I were thinking about our move up here in Michigan, one of the
things we thought about was our own personal practice of praying before
meals, at home and even when we eat out, and how others might
perceive that here in Michigan. In the South, because of the religious
climate, oftentimes very conservative religious climate, people pray
before meals all the time in public, and though I am not a religious
conservative, I’ve really come to appreciate that personal prayer practice
for us. I didn’t grow up doing stuff like—its just something we’ve chosen
to do together, but I think the thing that has always worried me is whether
or not people might perceive that as religious “showboating” on our
part. And, please know that I don’t think everyone should necessarily
say grace before meals—there is no value judgment either way, whether
one does it or not, because we all can show gratitude to God in a million
different ways, the most important of which is that we give away the very
gifts we thank God for giving us. But I still worry I might be doing the very
thing Christ asked us not to do, which is to just make a public, outward
show of our faith, and not have it match up with my private, inner
practice. And I hate show boaters of all sorts, believe me, especially
religious ones, so I’ve really wrestled with this issue. But wrestling with
that issue is the very thing Christ asks us to do in the very text we have
before us this morning, to ask ourselves what is coming from our hearts
and what is coming out of tradition or habit or, perhaps the worst thing,
doing it because that is what quote “what religious people are supposed
to do.” Whether I am right or wrong about praying before a meal in
public, the part Jesus is concerned about is where my heart is, in the
midst of doing it, whatever that might be. In my better moments, I like to
think that I thank God for the food before me, even when I don’t feel like
it, because one of my core values is gratitude for what I have been given
by God in this world. Still, the question that Jesus wants us to ask of
ourselves is this: where does what I do come from? What are my
motives for washing my hands, either in the first century, or praying
before a meal in the 21st century? The inward heart and the motives of
that heart are what concern this Jesus of Nazareth, more than following
the rules in the rule book.
The other thing that I think Jesus confronts in this passage is very much
connected to that inward heart is the symbolism that the ritual of hand
washing was meant to convey. That first century Pharisee was cleansing
himself of the sin of this world, the un-holiness that was all around him,
the contamination that he believed spiritually polluted the world they lived
in. And yet, I think one of the reasons Jesus confronts those first century
Pharisees about this issue is that he knows that they aren’t just wanting
to wash away the dirtiness of the world away—this ritual, for many of
them, was an attempt to wash away their responsibility for making the
world right again, their responsibility to do justice for the poor, the sick,
the homeless. They were attempting to wash themselves of the
situation, the messiness of the world, with the less than perfect people
who surrounded them and couldn’t follow the rule book like they did.
Pilate, the Roman governor, does the very same thing, when he
symbolically washes his hands of Jesus at Jesus’ trial, right before his
death: Pilate knew that this crucifixion was going to be a messy affair and
he didn’t want to be responsible for any of it.
The challenge for us, if we want to attend to what Jesus asks of us, is
NOT to wash our hands of the situation, but to do as Jesus did, with the
people that he did it with, and to get our hands messy with the business
of helping to heal this hurting world. That is why we shouldn’t wash our
hands, because for the Christ, messy hands show him that we have
immersed ourselves in the work of transforming and healing this world,
just as he did when he first walked among us, as one of us. Now, if there
are any kids in this room, don’t listen to me: wash your hands, but your
parents or grandparents know what I am talking about when I say that we
ought not to wash our hands of this broken, this less than perfect world.
To do so would show that we have given up on what God has never
given up on, which is this world that God has lovingly and beautifully
created. Our hearts, that place that so concerns the Christ, our hearts
must come to reflect the heart of the One who created us, and our
hands, our dirty and messy and cut up hands, they reflect, in our better
moments, they mirror the messy hands of God. It is my hope, and
hopefully, our hope, that our hands become even messier and dirtier in
the coming days and weeks and years ahead. Amen.
