On Not Trying to Get Closer to God

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

The gospels record many incidents when Jesus and the Pharisees get into controversies.  And because of this, the Pharisees get kind of a bad rap, even though the Pharisees and Jesus were actually quite similar in many ways.  We always have our biggest fallings out, the differences we feel most intensely, are with the people we agree with on almost everything. We just wish they would see that one last little thing the way we do, and it bothers us so much that they don’t.  People we don’t have anything at all in common with, we don’t worry about what they think so much.

In fact, the Pharisees were not bad people at all.  They were deeply religious people.  In fact, they had a couple of ideas that were, I think, in their own way quite praiseworthy.  One of their ideas was that holiness is for everybody.  A second was that many of the Pharisees lived in places that were very far from Jerusalem, where the Temple was something maybe you visited once in a while, but where you really needed a way to practice your religion and find a way to be a good person, find a way to be part of the community, in another place, wherever you actually were.

And so the Pharisees looked at something like the commandment in Exodus 30:20 that said, In the Temple there shall be washbasins, and when the priests offer sacrifice in the Temple, they first have to wash their hands and wash their feet before they come before the Lord in prayer and sacrifice.  The idea is that we need a ritual to remind us of our need for grace and mercy before we approach God in worship.  And that’s something we have even within our own liturgy.

The Pharisees said:  You know, this principle doesn’t just work for the priest who goes to the Temple to offer a sacrifice.  That same principle applies to all of us, every time we come together to eat, to partake of the good things that God has given us, we should be giving thanks and recognizing our need and our dependence on God.  So they developed a tradition where this washing was for everyone, no matter where you were, every time you sat down to eat.  It’s not a bad impulse, to take the Law that was written for a few people in one place, and find a way to make it practical and relevant in their everyday lives.

As Christians, we often look back at the conflicts that Jesus had with the Pharisees and we say, Oh those Pharisees, they were hypocrites, they were only about the letter of the law. They were so worried about the washing and keeping kosher and all the rules about the Sabbath.  And Jesus is about things like faith, and loving God and loving your neighbor.  And isn’t it a great advance that we’ve left behind all that legalistic stuff, because Jesus has taught us to live only in faith and in love.

But in reality, the Old Testament was never about mindless ritual in the way that caricature often portrays it.  We see that in our Scripture readings today.  Psalm 15 asks, “Who is worthy to come into the Temple and offer worship?”  From the law, you might think it’s the person who washed their hands.  But no, Psalm 15 never mentions washing.  It says it’s the one who practices justice, it’s those who speak and act well towards their neighbors, it’s those who keep their word even when it costs them something, it’s those who refuse to take advantage of their neighbor in need.  So in saying that the Law is about these weighter matters, Jesus is not being original.  It’s already right there in the psalm.

Or take the reading we had today from Deuteronomy, where Moses poses two questions: What nation has a God who is so close to it as the Lord is to us?  And what nation has laws that are as just as the law God has given us?  Of course, these are rhetorical questions, the answer is nobody.  The Law is a sign, Moses says, that God is close to us. That God has given us a blueprint for how to practice justice toward our neighbors.  The Law, in other words, is about loving God and loving our neighbor.  Again, Jesus is not original.  It’s all right there in Moses already.

And yet Jesus reproaches the Pharisees in the gospel today, and says to them:  You actually are far from God.  The Law is supposed to be a sign that God is already close to us, but you, by the way that you observe it, make yourself far from God.  Why?  What’s the problem?

One clue comes from a part of this passage that, for reasons of time, gets omitted from our formal reading.  It might be worth going back and looking at Mark 7, you can see it there.  One of the things the Pharisees did was to encourage people to make gifts to the Temple.  That sounds like a good idea, right?  Donate things to the church?  But then what would happen is their parents would grow old and need help from their children, and when they turned to their children, they would say, Oh, sorry, I can’t help you, I’ve already promised these things to the Temple.

And Jesus doesn’t approve of this.  He says:  You think you’re being devout and holy by donating to the Temple.  But the Law says: Honor your father and mother.  And it says this for a reason.  Because God wants a community where everyone is included, and that means a community where the aged know they will be cared for when they are no longer able to provide for themselves.  You don’t need to make a donation to the church to get closer to God, Jesus says, God is already close to you.  And by neglecting your obligations to your parents you’re running away from God, you’re not getting closer.

I think Jesus says something similar about the practice of washing hands.  Now, we know that washing hands before you eat is important, but that’s because we know about germs.  But in those days they didn’t.

Here’s where it’s important to remember that Mark is an interconnected narrative.  It’s written with a plot, and individual stories like the one we read today are part of a larger story and the way a story connects to the larger narrative is very much part of the point.  As we begin chapter 7 in Mark, Jesus has arrived to be among Gentiles, among people who are not Jewish.  Next week we’ll read a story about a Gentile woman who comes to Jesus at table, during a meal.  And then there is a story that we’ll actually skip over in our Sunday readings where Jesus does another miracle of feeding thousands of people with just a few loaves, but this time they are not Jewish but Gentile.

So our story today is part of a larger narrative in which Jesus goes to the Gentiles and eats with them and feeds them and provides for them just as he did earlier for Jewish people.  And I think we can infer that the disciples of Jesus weren’t following the strict ritual of the Pharisees about washing before eating because they were eating with people who weren’t Jewish.  And this is the heart of the disagreement:  The Pharisees ask, Why don’t you follow the traditions of the elders?  You should follow those traditions, keep our identity as Jewish people, profess your faith and your piety before God – even if that puts up a barrier between you and the people you want to sit down and eat with.  Even if it locks out and doesn’t include the strangers with whom you’re eating.  And the disciples of Jesus have decided not to do that.

This conflict between the Pharisees and the disciples of Jesus that Jesus comments on in this reading is not a conflict between Jewish people and Christian people.  This is a conflict that cuts through every religious tradition, including our own.  Sometimes we prefer trying to get closer to God, because then we can be in control of where we are and how close we get.  

But Jesus says:  This is not how our relationship with God works.  We are already close to God, because God has drawn near to us.  We’re just invited to live into that.  We don’t have to do anything to get closer to God, and when we try we actually drive ourselves away from God and away from what we owe to one another.

Every reform movement in every religious tradition that I know about is always calling people back to this original insight.  Jesus is not teaching something new, he’s reminding the Pharisees of what’s always been there in the law of Moses and the psalms.  Just as Martin Luther didn’t come up with anything new but called the church back to the original insights taught by Jesus and Paul and the apostles.  

God has already come close to us.  We don’t need to do anything to get closer to God.  All we need is the faith to believe and to trust that God that God is already close to us and there’s nothing we can do to get closer.  God has already given us a community where we can experience justice and love and inclusion and the crossing of all the boundaries that human beings have set up to divide us from one another.  

The faith that God has already brought us into this community, through Word and baptism and communion, this is what actually overcomes differences.  This is how we become more just in our daily lives and are drawn into communion with one another.  Not because we have done any of it.  Not because we’ve washed ourselves clean and made ourselves worthy to stand in God’s presence and be in communion with others.  But because God has done it, because God has already made us clean, because it’s God who calls us into fellowship and communion with others.  It’s God who has promises this to us, and we believe that God is faithful.