Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Cleanliness is not next to godliness
13 Pentecost

I come from a country where religious rituals are very important. And there is much to be admired of people’s diligence to practice religious traditions that have been handed down for many generations. We are a very ancient church too. We do things in the church that have been done in the same way for hundreds of years. For the most part our worship liturgy is the same as it was when it first got instituted many years ago. Apart from such traditions, there are also certain things that have become “tradition” in this church too. My point is, there are very good reasons why certain rituals get started in the first place. The reason behind washing ones’ hands before eating in the Jewish community probably started for very practical reasons of washing off the dirt from work, but it also began to have very strong religious symbolism attached to it. The practice of washing or purity rituals first came into being in the context of worship and sacrifice offered by priests, which makes total sense. Given God’s holiness and power, the priests naturally felt the need to physically cleanse, prepare and vest appropriately in order to come into the presence of God. The outward, visible, purity rituals were meant to reflect the inner attitude and desire for God of the priest as he entered into the presence of God on behalf of the people. Over time the purity rituals practiced by the priests were picked up by the congregants and slowly the practice spilled over into the daily lives of people in the community.  The intention was good, but somewhere in that process of expansion, keeping and practicing the rituals became more important than the purpose behind the rituals. I do realize that behind every religious ritual is our deep-felt human need to come closer to God, however there is nothing about the rituals in and of themselves that will make us more acceptable before God.

Traditions are much easier to follow because we don’t have to put too much thought into it, but it is in that ease that traditions often manage to become more important than obeying and worshiping God. We substitute the harder work of inner purity and holiness with rituals or traditions. Churches are famous for phrases like, “we have never done this in our church!” “We always do it this way in our church!”  Jesus heard the same thing from the Pharisees and the scribes that day as he sat down to eat. They said to Him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" That false sense of righteousness before God in the practice of rituals or tradition was not a new thing that Jesus was dealing with for he says, “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.” The commandment from God for His people is 'Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2) This command for the people of God to be holy in the manner of God Himself is found both in the Old as well as in the New Testament, and most of the time this command is qualified by other commands like respecting other human beings and their belongings, being mindful and providing for the less privileged in society, maintaining and striving for justice, being honest, trusting God, so on and so forth. In other words, cleansing ourselves of any evil intentions that originate in our hearts like, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things, which Jesus says, come from within, and defile a person.

We can come to church every single Sunday, we could be giving more than 10% of our money to the church, we may kneel at all the right places and at all the right times, we may even pray five times a day, and volunteer our time for all the worthy causes, but if all the good things that we do manages to affirm only our own sense of righteousness, I am afraid that we really have not come anywhere near God’s holiness. It is only in the acknowledgement of our inability to rid our hearts of all the evil and offering our wretched hearts for God to cleanse that we can begin to think about living holy and pure lives. Every time we come through the doors of this sanctuary we must remind ourselves that we are not here to show others what good Christians we are. We come here because we realize how miserably we fail to live the holy life that God has called us to. We come because we realize that we need to worship God whose mercies toward us endure forever. We come because we realize our need to be reminded that we are part of the body of Christ, being transformed into His likeness even as we struggle for purity.

May we learn to examine and look within ourselves always, and may God be merciful in freeing us from our preoccupation with outward rituals and traditions. Amen.