Twenty-second Sunday In Ordinary Time
After five Sunday gospels from the Bread of Life Discourse of the Gospel of John, the gospel readings return to the Gospel of Mark. Jesus is in Galilee. A group of religious watchdogs come down to Galilee from Jerusalem to investigate this now famous preacher and healer. They notice an infringement of their interpretation of the Torah. The infringement: some of Jesus’ disciples ate with unwashed hands. Why would these city folks be so concerned about a bunch of hicks from Galilee eating with dirty hands? It was not a matter of hygiene. The Greek adjective translated as “unwashed” (koinos), means “common, profane, secular, unclean, defiled, the opposite of holy.” In parentheses, Mark, or a later editor of his gospel, explains Jewish customs for Gentile Christians, “The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, holding on to the traditions of their elders, and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves, and there are many other traditions they observe, washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze.”
Since Mark’s gospel is a manual or guidebook for Christian living, he included this episode for good reasons. All the early Christians, including Gentile Christians, considered themselves the real, the genuine Jews. Therefore the question arose about how many of the written laws of the Torah of Moses, how many customs, and how many “traditions of the elders” were binding on the new converts who were not Jews. Was there still such a thing as ritual contamination acquir-ed from touching this or that, plus the laws of “clean and unclean (defiled, unholy)” foods, or even “clean and unclean (defiled , unholy)” people? By this story Mark speaks to these issues. The tradition of “defiled, common, unclean hands” arose from interpretation of Leviticus 15:11, “If a person who has a bodily discharge touches anyone without having washed his hands in water, the person who has been touched shall wash his clothes, bathe himself in water, and be unclean until evening.”
This law and similar laws in Leviticus were intended for the priests in their liturgical functions. The scribes, however, as recognized interpreters of the Torah, extended the laws of ritual purity to all Jews. This extension was probably based on various Torah texts. The major text would be Exodus 19:6 addressed to the ancient Israelites, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” If they are all priests, they are all expected to keep the regulations applicable to priests in Leviticus. An interesting sidebar: the translation “carefully wash their hands” is not really accurate. Mark’s Greek uses the word pugme, which means with a fist, or better, with a fistful of water. (Our English noun pugilist, a boxer, derives from this Greek noun.) In an ancient collection of scribal opinions, we find this regulation, “A quarter-log or more of water must be poured over the hands….” A log is 2/3 of a pint in our liquid measurement. This is a small amount of water, but people in arid countries did not waste water as we so freely do. Besides that, it was not really for hygienic cleansing, but for ritual cleansing to enable one to function in religious rituals.
With all this in mind we return to the question Jesus’ critic posed to him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the traditions of the elders, but eat bread with common hands?” The Mar-can Jesus is not pleased. He rips into his critics with a devastating quote from the 8th century B.C. prophet Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as official teachings what are merely human commandments.” The sincerity of worship from a pure heart, not just empty ritual, is a common theme of Old Test-ament prophecy. See Amos 5:21-24. It is also a theme of the Sermon on the Mountain. See Matthew 5:23-24; 7:21-23. The Marcan Jesus adds his own criticism to the quote from Isaiah, “Leaving behind the commandments of God, you hold fast to human traditions.” Jesus next adds an example of setting aside the commandments of God through a legal loophole devised by the scribal lawyers, but this is not included in this Sunday’s gospel, so must be omitted here.
In Mark’s catechetical instruction Jesus next calls together the crowd and addresses them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him (make him ritually unclean, common, unholy), but the things that come out of a man are what can defile him.” Jesus is talking about clean and unclean foods first, then internal sins expressed externally – “for out of the heart of a man come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, etc.” Jesus enters the house, (the house of Simon and Andrew, Jesus’ center of operations in Capernaum). Mark characteristically depicts the disciples of Jesus as a bunch of dummies who understand nothing. So they ask Jesus to explain. First he reprimands them, also characteristic of the Marcan Jesus toward his disciples, “Even you don’t understand.” Then he continues in plain, peasant, country language, “Do you not see that whatever goes into a man… cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach, and is discharged into the privy?” Mark adds, “Thus Jesus declared all foods clean.” We could add, “Thus he also declared the human digestive system clean.” So much for clean and unclean foods. What about clean and unclean people? That will be next Sunday’s gospel.
