It’s good to wash your hands; cleanliness is good. To wash your hands engaged in divine worship, that’s good too. The Pharisees here were not altogether wrong; your mother wasn’t wrong when she told you to wash your hands. The disciples didn’t wash their hands. Maybe they should have. I wash my hands before Mass, before dinner too; I clean up before going out to a restaurant; all that’s good to do.
But clearly there’s more to it; that’s the simple lesson to be drawn from today’s passage from Mark’s Gospel. More is needed to make the dinner or the date special or to make the Mass an occasion for the fuller experience of the graces that are available. More is required than the mere mechanical perfection of religious practice; more is necessary than merely washing your hands. The Pharisees were worried about whether the disciples had washed their hands; Jesus was worried about the heart. That’s the simple point of this whole part of Mark’s Gospel, that you can’t have any sort of genuine religion without the heart; that religion without the heart is hypocrisy in fact. It’s a simple lesson, devastating to some.
You can tell in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus is getting serious. As he had spoken earlier to crowd along the shore, he says to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.”[1] It really is a Godlike way of talking; it’s like the “Hear, O Israel!” of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus is talking like that, like God to Israel, trying to say something important to his people, something necessary. Jesus wants them to understand.
The problem is that no one seemed to understand; both the Pharisees and the disciples are asunetos; the word means “stupid,” but morally as well as intellectually. Chances are the disciples were bothered by the fact they forgot to wash their hands, embarrassed, like when you say the wrong thing at Mass, when some people really get worked up by stuff like that. Jesus calls all of it asunetos, stupid. Because it’s dumb to forget that what truly matters is the heart. It’s dumb to buy your kids or your wife all that fancy stuff but not really love them, to say you love them but never show up when it really matters. The same is true with God. There is no real religion without understanding and no understanding without the heart. That’s why Jesus says, “Hear me…and understand.” Jesus is not opposed to handwashing, but he wants us to go deeper. He wants us to understand that other things matter too and matter more.
The heart in Hebrew imagination is where God speaks to a person most intimately; it’s also where a person speaks to God—within the heart. Later, we’d call this “conscience,” that part of the soul where we can know with God. And the blunt truth of the matter is that when God deals with a person in the heart, that person changes; that is, he or she does more than remember to wash their hands. When God deals with the heart, always justice is the result; charity is the result; communion is the result—real practical justice, real practical charity, and real visible communion. You not only know when to cross yourself and genuflect, you know when to see and help the poor; you know when to call your mother; you know when to love your enemy. As God said through Ezekiel once, “I will give them a new heart…so that they will obey my statutes and carry out my ordinances.”[2] As God said through Isaiah once: This is what I want, “releasing those bound unjustly…Setting the oppressed free…Sharing your bread with the hungry.”[3] That’s what Jesus was getting at if you read this passage from Mark closely. The Pharisees, in getting worked up about handwashing, maybe were forgetting all this; the disciples were at risk of forgetting it too. Jesus was not throwing away ritual here; he just didn’t want any sort of ritual to become heartless. He just didn’t want you and me to get the idea that we could ever be good Catholics without loving the poor, without ever serving the poor.
“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”[4] That’s why this passage from James is here; it’s a commentary on what Jesus was saying in Mark. That’s what it looks like to be a Catholic with understanding: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world; to worry about that as much as you worry about fasting an hour before Mass or any other ritual thing. That’s what it means to have taken God into the heart; that’s not just something sentimental to say, to take God into the heart is to love the poor, to see them, and to serve them. Otherwise, we are asunetos, just kind of dumb. But I don’t want to be that way, a Catholic without understanding. I want to be a Catholic in the heart, and I know you do too. But the thing is, we can’t tell each other we’re good Catholics, Catholics in the heart, we can only show each other we’re Catholics in the heart by what we give and how we serve.
“Hear me…and understand.” Jesus says that to us too. Now you know what that means. Amen.
[1] Mark 7:14; cf. Mark 4:3
[2] Ezekiel 11:19-20
[3] Isaiah 58:5-7
[4] James 1:27
© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
