A Holy Heart

 

A Sermon preached on Sunday, August 29, 2021 at St. Augustine’s

Song of Solomon 2:8-13, (James 1:17-27), Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Currently there is no danger at all of any of us being accused by the Pharisees or scribes of not washing our hands before a meal, or for that matter before we enter a building, or on the many other occasions when we currently feel the need to wash and disinfect our hands. Of course, we’re not doing this for any ritual reasons, but for our safety and the safety of others. You could call it an act of love – like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated are as much about the other as about ourselves.

To understand why Jesus is so dismissive of the Pharisees’ complaint that he and his disciples are eating with defiled hands, you need to know that ritual hand washing was originally not something intended for the whole population, it was restricted to priests when they were dealing directly with sacred vessels and sacrificial food. That’s why Jesus calls it human precept, which he accuses them of teaching as a doctrine. The Pharisees’ intention in introducing or expanding this practice was probably a good one: They wanted to make all of Israel into a priestly people. And we also speak of the priesthood of all believers or more commonly in the Episcopal tradition of the ministry of all the baptised. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has to behave or act or dress as a priest, just that everyone has equal access to God, and no need of an intermediary, and that everyone has a call to a holy life and that everyone has a call to serve God.

The purity laws are an attempt to codify that “holy life” and they also point to a real need of humans for a deeper purity, what we might call a purity of heart. The problem was – and is – that if we focus too much on outward purity, we avoid the deeper challenge of the gospel. As Jesus tells the Pharisees, their extra commands make us focus too much on outer signs and too little on the need for an inner change.

To help make his point Jesus then gives his listeners a list – a very long list – of all the things that come from within and defile a person, that make them much more than ritually unclean. He calls them evil designs or intentions, though many of them are more than just intentions, they are evil deeds. Is Jesus saying that we are inherently evil, that these wrong desires are all that we have inside us? Absolutely not. We are after all created in God’s image and therefore not only with a capacity, but with a mandate for good and we are created with the need to love and be loved.

Desire as such is not the bad thing. The Song of Songs, from which our first reading came, is a love song and all about the desire or two people for one another, and it is in the Bible because that sort of love is also holy. The problem and the cause of all the bad things on Jesus’ list is misdirected desire, a desire for more things than we need, a desire for what another person has, a desire for power, a desire to be admired at all costs, and the foolishness that allows us to believe that all this is possible without cost to us, our neighbours and creation.  

But while in this extract Jesus diagnoses the disease, he seems to say nothing about the cure, just that focusing on a bunch of rules is not the solution. In his letter to the Romans (7:19, 25), Paul also addresses this same problem of misdirected desire – and he points to the solution:

“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Jesus not only has the answer, in his teaching, but is the answer - in his life and witness to God and God’s love. He invites us, as his followers, to let go of human rules and obsessions and instead to focus on having a heart that is pure and filled with love for God and for others, as was intended. To keep the service shorter this morning, we only had two of our three possible readings, so we didn’t hear the extract from the Letter of James at the end of which (James 1:27) James tells us what we need to do practically to make our hearts pure and fill them with love:

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world,” that is by worldly desires in opposition to God.

For the society of that time, orphans and widows were the natural objects of charity – which is itself just a word meaning practical love for the other. Today the equivalent of widows and orphans are for example the recent victims of the flooding in Germany, of the earthquake in Haiti, and those who have fled or will soon flee from Afghanistan. Helping these people in their distress helps create what we can call a virtuous circle, a way of reinforcing the good, and driving out the bad. And it is a very visible witness to our faith.

Quoting from Isaiah, Jesus accused the Pharisees and scribes of honouring God only with their lips, while their hearts are far from God. If we follow Paul’s and James’ advice, if we follow Jesus and his example, we are at no risk of that accusation. And so we pray, in the words of today’s collect: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works.

Amen.