14th Sunday after Pentecost

Our reading from Mark is a telling moment in Jesus’ ongoing dialogue with the Pharisees. The conflict is so clearly focused: The Pharisees challenge Jesus, “Why are your disciples violating the law?” Jesus responds to the Pharisees, “The law doesn’t matter. What matters is motive.” This is the heart of Jesus’ strategy. What differentiates right from wrong? At a time when truth and right and wrong seem to become more and more relativized, good people of faith want to have some idea of how to follow Christ. We’re going to try and figure out how to do that today.

Let’s start by trying to understand the Pharisees. The Pharisees believed that being pure was the way to be close to God. They understood God to be so pure, that impure people simply couldn’t approach God. So, they had laws of ritual purity, which told them exactly how to be acceptably pure. Cleanliness is next to godliness. When they see Jesus and his disciples eating with dirty hands, the Pharisees weren’t just taking another page out of Emily Post. They saw the impurity of dirty hands as something that separated Jesus and his disciples from God. Their concern was that such impure people, claiming falsely (in their opinion) to be holy, would mislead and corrupt everyone who came to hear what they had to say. The Pharisees would have been derelict in their duty not to confront and challenge that kind of behavior.

I know that the whole issue of ritual purity is a bit foreign to us, and we might wonder what all the fuss is about because of that. But we need to understand that the Pharisees took purity laws as seriously as we take our moral law, because it was integral to their relationship with God. They believed that failing to keep the law corrupts us and compromises our relationship with God. In their view, with no ritual purity there can be no relationship with God.

At their best, the Pharisees devoted themselves to the law so that they could do good, be good, and build a society of good people that would be pleasing to God. In spite of the bad press they’ve received because of the crucifixion, they were not evil people. They were, shall we say, overly-enthusiastic for the good as they understood it. In that regard, they’re no different from the vast majority of human history, and those who’ve thought themselves to be the sole possessors of truth.

Relying upon the law is actually a very attractive option. The law gives us clarity in the murky, often confusing world of human motivation. Whether its Jewish purity law, Roman Catholic sacramental regulation, or Protestant morality, the law says what’s good and what’s bad in a way that’s easy for the human brain to understand. Criminal law, of course, is pretty nuanced in the way it handles the question of motivation. Motivation clarifies the seriousness of a crime. Motivation is the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example.

Jewish purity law and Christian morality don’t leave much room for motivation, however. What’s wrong is wrong. The question of motivation only compromises the clarity of the law and gives us more wiggle room. The law gives us the clear, understandable boundaries necessary for good order in public life. The law gives us clear parameters for limiting people’s behavior. The law gives us permission to separate ourselves from those who don’t follow the rules. The law puts powerful tools for control, progress, and self-regulation into human hands.

In the right hands, at the right time, and in the right place, the law is an amazing social tool. Just ask anyone who has suffered through the lawlessness of a failed state or a civil war. We think of ourselves as a nation of laws. Good civil order is what any nation is supposed to provide for its people. The law makes for good civil order, which is what nations are about.

But is the law what religion is about? Apparently, Jesus doesn’t seem to think so. He and the Pharisees were in deep disagreement with one another, to the point of enmity. He realized that the application of the law too often resulted in separating the non-conformists, and that this was inconsistent with the Good News of salvation through love. And today, Jesus blatantly tells the Pharisees that the law doesn’t matter, only motivation does. That puts us in a world that’s very different from one that’s based upon the clarity of law. It puts us into a world that’s outside of our comfort zone.

For the Pharisees, Jesus’ position is shocking! Does he want chaos and confusion?!? We’re so accustomed to the law, we can’t imagine our existence without it. It would be akin to suspending the law of gravity.

But Jesus said what he meant, and he meant what he said. In the beginning of the Gospel of John we read, “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” For John, the law was just the first step. It’s succeeded by the grace and truth of Jesus.

The apostle Paul, himself a Pharisee, experienced freedom from the law as a kind of personal deliverance. “The law was our disciplinarian until Christ came… but now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian; for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.”

So, what do we do? Do we force people to be pure, holy, and decent by applying a law that’s simple and orderly enough to be grasped by the human brain? That’s the quick and dirty approach taken by all kinds of religious leaders. Progress is measured by an external focus on conformity to rules.

Or, do we seek to draw others and ourselves to God through love? This is a more internal approach that focuses on what’s going on inside of us, where our identity truly lies. It’s an approach that’s more concerned with where we’re going, that is to God, rather than where we’re coming from.

Jesus’ incredible statement says it all. Jesus says that nothing, neither food nor anything else external to ourselves, can defile a person. Only what comes out of a person in the form of bad motivation and an evil spirit can defile a person. External conformity or non-conformity to the law is not necessarily relevant to our relationship with God. It’s our motivation which counts. Not what we do, but why we do it. Our internal mind and spirit define the meaning of our actions.

A lot of people do very good things for evil, self-serving reasons. For example, the hypocrisy of the Pharisees that corrupts their law-abiding behavior. And there are a lot of people who do things that make them social outcasts, but have redeemable motives, like the sinners with whom Jesus chose to spend so much of his time.

So, it doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. It doesn’t matter if you’re a heteronormative white Anglo-Saxon man. It doesn’t matter if you’re a transgender person of color. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or Socialist. If you’re loving and faithful, you warm God’s heart. If you’re abusive and exploitative, you defile yourself and damage others. If you’re a decent person who’s trying to understand the world and make it a better place, good for you. If you’re smug, condescending, and secretly deceitful, you’re defiling yourself and damaging others.

Our job, as Christians, is not to focus on external behavior but inner motivation, and to do it in a way that points forward to God, and not backward to sin. Our calling is to love people, not shame them.  Our job is to confirm the goodness in people. Our job is to call people away from damaging, defiling motives. Our job, as Christians, is to encourage one another to look beyond the body, so we can know one another as souls. Because the soul is where our true motives lie. The soul is where our true identity and our best selves are to be found.

If our ultimate salvation in heaven is being face to face with God, then our interim salvation is to be face to face with each other in the name of God. But if we use law to put people in boxes and dismiss them, we are not moving in the direction of heaven.

Implicit in everything Jesus says and does is this truth: Christianity is a religion of relationships. It’s not a religion expressed by and defined in its laws, but in the vitality of human relationship in God. That's why Jesus' last commandment was that we love one another as he has loved us. When we shed our selfish motives and lose ourselves in one another, we will finally find who we truly are, and it will be heavenly. We cannot move toward that goal isolated from one another, just by keeping rules.

The role of the law in religion is to point us in the right direction. It's good to be pure. It's good to be holy. It's good to be moral. We will be all those things and more in heaven. But if we surrender our hearts and minds to obedience to the law as an end in itself, we make a false idol of the law and of the certainty our limited and easily frightened brains crave. Law itself becomes a violation of the First Commandment.

The law can show people how to be good, but the law cannot make people good.  As Paul says, "if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law." Only love can make us alive.

If we use the law to keep our hands clean of our own motives – if we use the law to feel superior, better than, or always right-then the law works against relationship and kills the mission of Jesus in the world. The Pharisees crucified Christ for the sake of their law. So do we, every day, when we judge and distance ourselves from others to the exclusion of love.

Don't be afraid to go beyond the law into the uncertainty and peril of human motives and of people who don't fit your idea of "right." Life is messy, and God won't hold it against you if you get messy. After all, God has been getting the divine hands dirty in human affairs for millennia.

Can we do any less as we try to reach out in love? If your motive truly is love, God will bless you for it. Trust God for what doesn't yet fit neatly into your brain, and relax.

Our mission is simple: to love others as we love ourselves, and to love God with everything we've got.

AMEN