Brief synopsis of the readings: Much of the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy consisted of a series of speeches that Moses delivered. He knew he would not reach the Promised Land and wished to convey his wisdom to them as they journeyed without him. This reading comes to us early in the book. Moses instructed them to follow all the rules and commandments they have learned: “You must add nothing to what I command you, and take nothing from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God just as I lay them down for you.” He promised that if they do that, all would know that they lived with the wisdom of God. Today’s Gospel parts from the 6th Chapter of John and moves instead to the Gospel of Mark. Here the Pharisees were in crisis because the disciples of Jesus didn’t doing what they were supposed to do. They didn’t follow the rules of ritual hand washing before meals, as all Jews were commanded to do. The Pharisees turned to Jesus expecting him to support them against the disciples, but instead Jesus turned on them. To their surprise Jesus accused the Pharisees of being hypocrites. In an incredible break from the rituals of the Old Testament, Jesus proclaims that uncleanliness doesn’t come from what we eat or drink, but instead from what we do to others. We are not unclean because we don’t wash our hands: we are unclean because of our desire to think ourselves better than our peers. Our mouth does not make us unclean, our heart does.

I don’t know about you but I have to say this: my life would be much easier if I could pay attention to Deuteronomy and ignore Mark. Much of the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) describes what we can and can’t do, and what we can and can’t eat. Much as I love a ham and cheese sandwich, if my eternal soul depended on abstaining from that, I could. I’d be happy to not work on the Sabbath (apologies to those who make out my on call schedule), wash my hands up to the elbows before eating and, let’s face it, have the moral compass to live within the rules about sex.

But we are called to do more than just follow the rules that have been given to us. A child can follow the rules. As followers of Christ we are called not just to obedience but to faithfulness. We are called to a faith that calls us to more than an obedience we could have followed as children. We are called to much more.

I believe that’s the crux of the Gospel readings. The Pharisees did what they were told to do. They observed the ritual washing before eating a meal and they were horrified and offended when Jesus’ disciples didn’t. OK, we live in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century where we are concerned with infectious diseases. We know about MRSA, CDiff, and a host of other diseases that we transmit through casual contact. We know that washing our hands is a good thing that will prevent us from getting sick ourselves. But these readings aren’t about immunology: the folk in these readings had no idea of the concept of diseases being spread by bacteria, germs, and viruses. To them the idea of cleansing was a ritual of separation and not of health.

The earliest days of the Christian church the believers never understood that they were founding a new religion. They expected that they, along with the rest of the Jews, would see that Jesus of Nazareth would be recognized as the Messiah that all the Jews had been waiting for. The earliest disciples honestly believed that all the Jews (Israelites) would recognize Jesus for who he was and there would not be a separation between Jews that followed Jesus and those who didn’t

Except that many of them didn’t. This reality surprised many of Jesus’ early followers, but not everybody signed on to the whole Messiah thing. They thought that Jesus of Nazareth was just another pretender to the throne. This speaks to a conflict that becomes much more important in the first few generations after Jesus’ resurrection but I think we see some foreshadowing here.

But back to the Gospel, what’s a believer to do? If any of us were there, would we side with the Pharisees or with Jesus and his disciples? That’s a hard question, but a question of faith that all of us adults need to grapple with. Are we obedient or are we faithful? Or can we be both?

I believe we can, but I also believe that obedience exists to serve faithfulness.

Several years ago I had the privilege to speak to a room full of religious educators on this topic. Because they taught children most of them were women and I asked them this question: Are you obedient to your spouse? The temperature of the room dropped several degrees and I could feel the room bristle. I then asked: Are you faithful to your spouses? They all agreed that they were (as I hoped they would). I then explained that we demand obedience from children and expect faithfulness from adults; when I asked them if they were faithful I didn’t just mean that they were sexually exclusive.

I spoke about how we are faithful to our spouses when we live in a manner that gives honor to the vows we exchanged, and how we live within those values. I said that even though most of us spend several hours each day apart from each other, neither of us would do anything that would cause our spouse pain even if we were sure we wouldn’t get caught. I suggested that while obedience relies on a fear that we won’t be caught, faithfulness relies on a conviction that we live our best selves when we are the same person even when we know we can get away with something and choose not to.

Or put another way. I recently had a joyful conversation with one of my patients who is coming to the end of her life (hang on, this will make sense). She was raised Catholic but left her practice. She found as an adult that her spirituality required more than simple obedience to the rules. She told me that as a teenager she stopped believing that God will judge her solely on whether she followed the rules. She explained that she grew up, met a wonderful man, married him, had children, and lived her life in service to those who needed her gifts. By any metric she was a faithful wife, good mother, hard worker, and joyful Christian. Now, in the last chapter of her life she worried that God would judge her harshly because she didn’t spend more of her day reading the Bible.

I hope I helped her but I told her that the desire to be a kind, generous, loving person is what God is looking for. The rules she was given as a child were meant to lead her into a direction to become exactly who she became: a woman of deep faith and spirituality. She worried about whether or not she was “spiritual enough” and I told her that I believe she is exactly what God wanted her to do.

And so back to the readings. We don’t know exactly why Jewish purity laws were put into place. As I spoke of earlier they had no understanding of immunology or how diseases are spread; we think they had a good understanding that water was a good way to preserve cleanliness. And so water became a metaphor for making us pure.

But by the time of Jesus this metaphor had been corrupted. I don’t wish to bash the Pharisees because they were honest men who found value in radical obedience. But they strayed from the meaning of obedience when they ignored Jesus’ message because they were offended by his disciples’ decision to choose adult faithfulness over childlike obedience.

Instead of seeing these rituals as a way of making their hearts pure they concentrated instead on making their hands pure and stopped there. They believed God cared only about their hands.

The radical message of Jesus was this: it’s not about your hands, it’s about your heart. Ritual handwashing should make you aware of who you are as a Jew but it should also call you to look at the person next to you in a new light.

And yet we continue to struggle with these issues. We certainly need rules for the good order of society and nobody argues this. But I think we’re sometimes too eager to take the role of the Pharisees in the Gospel. A young woman becomes pregnant and chooses to undergo an abortion because she feels abandoned, trapped, and hopeless and feels she has no good option. Do we embrace her in love or accuse her of murder? Do we help her begin the process of being whole again or do we label her?

We are in an election season: do we support politicians who unite us or those who speak to our fears of being victimized and who promise to defeat our “enemies?”

And finally, do we want those who we love to obey us or be faithful to us? Do we want friends, spouses, or children who follow the rules or love boldly?

Let’s choose Jesus over the Pharisees and choose love.