Bad dishwashers rarely get employee of the month

This week's verses are Luke 11:39-40:

But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Didn’t the one who made the outside make the inside as well?

 These are classic verses I have taught on before, and which you have probably heard others teach about as well. But they're worth revisiting, especially now, during the time of Lent, when all the church is preparing for Easter.

The Pharisees were criticizing Jesus and his disciples for not making a ceremonial show of washing their hands. The religious people would wash their hands ritually, like Muslims do. It was expected that before a meal you would go through this very dramatic hand washing to show everyone that you were clean.

But Jesus' position was that it's silly to be more interested in the ceremony than in the thing it is meant to represent. The Pharisees made a great spectacle of showing everyone how holy they were, but they were filthy hypocrites inside. Why put on a show, unless you think the show is the thing that matters?

It reminds me of how some people go through the motions of wearing masks during COVID. I ride the train from time to time, where mask-wearing is obligatory. There's always someone who gets on the train wearing their mask on their chin, or with their nose poking out, or who lifts the mask off their face to cough or sneeze. Yes, arguably they are wearing a mask and are compliant with the law, but it is obvious that they don't know what the mask is for or how it works.

So Jesus is telling the Pharisees, yes, arguably they are compliant with the law and the traditions, but it is obvious that they don't know what they are for or how they work. They obey on a surface level, but they miss the point of why those things are asked of them. It's not the ceremony of washing that is important. The important thing is to have clean hands.

Jesus compares them to someone washing dishes who only focuses on the outside of the dish and not the inside. How would you feel if you ordered coffee and soup in a diner and got a cup with lipstick on the inside, and a bowl with some of the previous customer's meal stuck to it? Yes, arguably the dish washer washed each dish before putting it away, but he obviously didn't know why he was doing it or what it was supposed to accomplish. 

Jesus' point is that ritual is not obedience on its own. You can't just hear and do. You have to not only do what is asked but do it genuinely from the heart. Do you tithe because you want to be able to say you tithe, or do you tithe because you genuinely want to give money to the church? Do you volunteer in the soup kitchen because you understand hunger and want to make sure people don't suffer it no matter who they are, or do you do it so that you can feel good about yourself, or tell others what you did that weekend?

Do you obey because you love the law, like the Psalmist last week, or do you obey because you don't want to be the guy who isn't doing what everyone else is doing, or, worse, because you want to be the guy who does it better, and is better, than everyone else? It's not enough to do the right thing. You have to do it for the right reasons.

The Pharisees saw the whole game as one of outward appearances, and that caused their priorities to get skewed. "At the end of the shift, the manager comes and looks at all the dishes in the cupboard to make sure they're all lined up and sparkling, so I'm going to focus on cleaning the outside because that's the part he sees." They wanted to be good, but they didn't see the big picture, so they failed.

It's a bit like the verses about fasting. You can do a great job abstaining from meat or sugar or Netflix, but if you're not focusing any more on God than before, and you're just as much of a scoundrel as you were without dietary restrictions, you're missing the point. On a surface level, medically speaking, the thing you are doing is called "fasting," but you don't understand what it's for or how it works.

Ask God to give you the correct priorities. Ask him to transform your heart as well as your behavior. Be as interested in developing good character as you are in the outer things that people can see.