In the Gospel today, we hear how Jesus and his disciples are criticized by the religious leaders for not performing the ritual washing before eating. In other words, they didn’t wash their hands before eating.
That criticism took me back some years to my youth when washing hands before meals was just something you had to do. In fact, when my brothers and I came in from playing outside, the first thing my mother would say was “have you washed your hands?” Even today, when I am invited to have dinner with a family, I witness the parents asking the children if they have washed their hands.
The reading also reminded me of the years I did some part-time work in a small restaurant while in high school. It was a small family run place and I was one of two employees. Sadly, it was not a very clean place. I remember being told by my boss to clean the toilets. While I’d be in the middle of doing that, he’d yell for me to come in because we had a customer. So, I’d go from cleaning toilets to flipping burgers usually without washing my hands. I’m hopeful that none of you ever ate one of my burgers.
My how times have changed! Today, employees are regularly reminded to wash their hands. Everyone who works in a fast-food restaurant must go through intensive food handling courses. Sanitizing your hands has become big business. Anti-bacterial hand soap is a half-billion dollar industry in this country!
Well, back to the Gospel.
Jesus and his disciples have been seen not performing customary Jewish rituals. The Gospel writer, Mark, tells us that all Jews carefully observed the traditions of their elders. This involved ritual washing of hands, cups, dishes, utensils and more. We know that ritual purification was a huge part of Jewish religiosity. To not perform these rituals was to become unclean or impure.
In response to this criticism, Jesus goes on the attack. First, he calls the religious leaders hypocrites. He quotes the prophet Isaiah and tells them “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines, human precepts.” In other words, Jesus accuses the religious leaders of making their own traditions more important than God’s commandments. As a result, they worship in vain— their actions are meaningless.
He then goes on to tell the people that all of these traditions about being unclean or impure have nothing to do with what is outside of you. Rather, impurity and uncleanliness come from the heart. Evil begins within a person and comes out as impure thoughts, speech, and actions. Obviously God is more concerned with what is going on in the human heart rather than some external ritual like washing one’s hands.
Was Jesus criticizing the actual Jewish practices that were part of the people’s religious piety? Was he saying that rituals were not important? No. Jesus honored the external rituals that were part of the practice of Judaism. What he was criticizing, however, was the fact that people tend to pay more attention to the externals of religion than the interior laws of God. And when this disconnect between the interior law of God and our actions occurs, our rituals and traditional practices become meaningless.
This is something that we should be attentive of in our own religious practices.
We are part of a religious tradition that possesses various customs and practices. These practices always have some profound religious meaning, but we may not know what that meaning is or we may not care what the meaning is, or it may have lost its meaning for us. Yet, we stick to these traditions and we perform these rituals. So much so, that those external practices become confused with God’s commandments. As Jesus says to the religious leaders, “You disregard God’s commandments and cling to human tradition.”
For instance, many Catholics who grew up with the Latin Mass could not necessarily tell you why we worshiped in Latin. Many did not know the meaning of the rituals which were part of that Mass. But they did it anyway and they came to believe that this was what God wanted for the Church. Many confused traditional liturgical practices with God’s law. But they were wrong. And when the liturgical traditions changed, many were shocked and scandalized. Many, in fact, stopped practicing their faith.
Even today, we may not know why we perform certain religious rituals or practices. How many people know why we stand, sit or kneel during the Mass? How many people care? How many couples have a “church” wedding because it’s just the thing to do? Or do the externals of a church wedding really mean something about the couple’s interior faith?
This does not mean that people are not good. What it means, though is that our practices of religiosity don’t always flow from a deeper religious conviction or from a profound experience of God. That disconnect is what got the religious leaders of Jesus’ day in trouble. As a result of that disconnect, people believed that their outwards actions and rituals were more important than God’s law of love, compassion, mercy and justice. They judged each other and criticized one another because of those externals. However, they themselves weren’t practicing love of God and neighbor which is why Jesus indicts them of hypocrisy.
I suppose the question that emerges for us from this Gospel is: “How can we avoid being hypocrites when it comes to our own religious practices?”
Well, the first thing we have to do is remember that God’s law of love, which begins in our hearts, must be primary. Along with that, we must have an active love and care for others. If we recognize that this is what true worship is about, then our external practices can become holy.
We must also realize that we are called to be holy in our personal and private lives. What we think and what we hold in our hearts is the measure of true worship. If we understand that and strive for that interior holiness, then the practice of human traditions and religious rituals can become holy as well.
Once that inner transformation is occurring, then the external practices of our faith can become genuine expressions of our praise and gratitude to God. Then, even washing one’s hands can become something holy and beautiful in God’s eyes.