Not Radical Enough
Proper 17B
Sept 1 2024
In an era of unbridled political turmoil and unhealed ecclesial division, can a public fight ever be good news?
Jesus’ argument with his critics in Mark 7 does not inspire hope at first reading. As the longest conflict text in Mark, this passage may cause us to groan inwardly. It’s too much like the discordant world we live in. More specifically, when the Pharisees and scribes denounce Jesus’ disciples for not washing their hands, it reeks of our Covid-era fights over handwashing, masking, and social distancing.
What’s more, we might too easily slot Jesus into standard Reformation thinking: Scripture over tradition, grace over works. Or we might easily hear Jesus as merely voicing our American insistence on personal freedom from oppressive rules and authorities.
But our well-worn thought patterns fail to take Jesus' context seriously or get at the root of our own conflicts.
Strangely, our post-Covid perspective can actually boost our appreciation for what’s at stake in this text.
Jesus and the Pharisees aren’t fighting over hygiene. Washing food purchased from the market and cleansing one’s hands aren’t about removing pathogens. Much like facemasks in our 21st century pandemic nightmare, these first century practices were social/political/theological markers of identity.
Centuries earlier, Palestine had been a Jewish homeland until pagan powers conquered and colonized it from every direction. The current overlords were the idolatrous Romans, who demeaned the Jewish people with taxes and violent repression. When faced with such obscenities as pig-eating Roman legions parading their pagan symbols in the land, Jesus’ contemporaries reached for the stories of Maccabean times. In those days, heroic Jewish patriots defied the colonizers and suffered torture and martyrdom. They died for refusing to eat pork.
In a land drenched with imperial impurities, ritual hand washing and keeping kosher were ways that Jews could identify with the cause of righteousness. They refused to be complicit with the contamination in the land. The pharisaical traditions of hand and dish were a “democratized” way for lay people to level up to priest-like purity.
When the Pharisees and scribes scrutinize the Jesus movement, they call out the disciples, and therefore Jesus, for not being radical enough. By not following the traditions, Jesus’ disciples were failing to demonstrate the heightened rigor required in such polluted times. The Jesus movement was dangerously complicit with the impurity in the land.
In our own era, we might easily spot the purity culture of some Christian conservatives who are quick to draw boundaries to defend sexual morality in a sex-saturated culture. But it might be less obvious that a similar insistence on purity can run among progressives in pursuing justice for the marginalized. Richard Beck and Alan Jacobsobserve a “purity culture” of the left.
I’m not so much commenting on the validity of these diverse perspectives as wondering if the passion for purity is more universal and instinctual than we imagine. And all the more when our contamination alarms are sounding off. This pursuit heightens the stakes for establishing markers of being “in” or “out,” of belonging to this or that tribe. Whether you wore a mask or not in social and church contexts immediately placed you in one political camp or another with little rational consideration. Every word or action receives scrutiny among those who are striving to be radically clean in a world that is awash in unrighteousness and injustice. And any transgression can be grounds for exclusion, cancellation, shunning. No one wants to be tainted by association with someone certified as woke or unwoke (depending on where you live), impure, unclean.
I find that connecting the Pharisees to the desire in me to be radically against the injustices and contaminations of our day to be fruitful ground for hearing Jesus’ sharp word. Otherwise it is too easy to caricature and thereby dismiss Jesus’ critics as fussy religious traditionalists. Far better to see the scribes as the serious, the committed, who wonder how radical Jesus can be if his disciples can’t even do the basics of righteous living in a contaminated world?
When the Pharisees and scribes protest that he is not radical enough, Jesus turns that critique around on them. No, Jesus retorts, it’s your view of evil that is not radical enough. It doesn’t get to the radix, the root, the heart of the matter.
Citing Isaiah, Jesus identifies his critics as “hypocrites,” actors with masks, who say all the right things but whose hearts are far from God. Jesus isn’t accusing them of being all talk and no deeds. In fact, hypocrisy is hard work! Virtue signaling, boundary policing and the other practices of tribalism are exhausting. But they are deadly because they pretend to be the actual work that adherents supposedly strive for. Pious words are merely performative, a smokescreen for base desires.
Jesus cites their duplicitous corban practice of committing one’s estate to the temple so that it could no longer be regarded as an asset for supporting one’s aging parents. One was able to look clean and still indulge oneself. How many of our virtuous stances are merely a (self-)distraction from our consumption?
The heart is devious and seeks to twist virtues into avenues for advantage. “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (vv. 21-23).
Jesus’ long vice list is a condemnation of our tribalism because no one is clean.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.” Instead of belonging to tribes of the pure and impure, all of us are part of “the universal democracy of sinners under judgment” (Eugen Rosentock-Huessy).
This public fight between Jesus and his critics can be good news if it opens a way out of our vain, feverish, and self-deceived scramble for purity. It can be good news if it humbles us and opens our hearts to receive the gospel as announced and embodied by Jesus in the gospel of Mark.
From the beginning, Jesus gravitates to the unclean. He touches lepers (ch. 1), eats with sinners (ch. 2), liberates a demon-possessed Gentile surrounded by swine (ch. 5), and touches a menstruating woman and the corpse of a dead girl (ch. 5).
From the beginning, the corrupting powers of evil and darkness are on alert, asking Jesus, “Have you come to destroy us?” (1:24). Jesus’ answer is a resounding “YES!” as he delivers the demonized, heals the sick, and raises the dead.
The ultimate victory over sin, death and the devil isn’t won until the Son of God is crucified. At the foot of the cross, a pork-eating pagan colonizer is the first human to confess, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (15:39). Before the Crucified, our markers of who’s in, who’s out, and who is radical enough must fall away. We can only take up our cross and follow this Holy One of God.
