Washing your hands of righteousness

 This week's verses are Mark 7:8-13:

Having no regard for the command of God, you hold fast to human tradition.” He also said to them, “You neatly reject the commandment of God in order to set up your tradition. For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever insults his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone tells his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you would have received from me is corban’ (that is, a gift for God), then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like this.”

 These verses are Jesus' response to some Pharisees who were religiously nitpicking his behavior. We've talked about corban before. It was a gift or donation that was given to the temple at the time to cover minor sins for which someone had repented.  The religious organizations had convinced people to mortgage their parents' retirement money, basically, in order to justify giving more to the temple.

From a perspective of morality where religious activity is the highest possible good, it makes sense. Who cares if some people suffer if it means performing the most religious activity possible? The people doing the convincing didn't have to experience the consequences, because they were generally wealthy enough that they could afford to care for their elderly regardless of how much they donated. But what about the other people, whose family lived in squalor so that they could be big givers in church?

It reminds me of a scene I still remember from college, decades ago. I went with some friends to a sale for stereo and computer equipment at a convention center downtown. At one of the vendor displays, we saw a young family, whose kids were dirty and wearing ripped worn-out clothes, negotiating to buy a set of $500 speakers (which would be like $1500 nowadays.) We were disgusted! How can a family who can't even take care of their kids be looking to buy luxury items like that?

Two thousand years ago, people's elderly parents would have been as helpless as  those children. They didn't have retirement accounts, or social security, or welfare, or food bank, or other charities to cushion the end of their wage-earning years. They were completely dependent on their family to feed and house them.

And yet the Bible says to honor our parents. How can we honor them if we've taken their retirement money, reverse-mortgaged their house, and given all of that money to the church? We're breaking a commandment in order to try to appear as righteous as possible. We've taken food out of the mouths of children and spent it on a flashy set of speakers so we can show our neighbors how good and successful those children's parents are.

Jesus calls them out on it. Their misplaced priorities and focus on religiosity have caused them to betray the people they love in order to decorate themselves with that religiosity. The result is that they are less righteous than if they'd overlooked the "cherry on top" corban and just lived their lives like normal people. The thing they've done to appear righteous is worse than useless in terms of real righteousness.

It's a great example, because the Pharisee behavior in general could be symbolized by ignoring a blood relationship to spend money on ritual. Rather than have a relationship with God, and to relate compassionately to others in the context of that relationship, the Pharisees reject relationship entirely in order to focus on ritual details. The family dinner becomes less important than whether people made a show of washing their hands beforehand.

The Pharisee view of religion rejects obedience to God in order to focus on self-righteousness. Obedience to God is often invisible. We can't always know where people stand with God, but we can always come up with a grading system for self-righteousness. Human behavior, and its checklist of do's and don'ts, lends itself well to measuring oneself on a kind of mental leaderboard. It's way easier to keep track of who is winning, and who is a loser, when you have a scoring system.

When people approach morality through the eyes of a Pharisee, their whole life becomes consumed by the things on the checklist. They become like heroin addicts who will rob their own parents to get their next fix. And Jesus points that out too. He tells them "And you do many things like this."

Do we do many things like this? Do we nitpick about details while ignoring the big things? Are we more concerned with religious activity than relationships? Do we throw our time and money into religious causes while neglecting care of our own friends and family? 

And when I say religious, I don't necessarily mean Christian, but anything that we do that defines our sense of value. For most people in modern times, it would probably be career or social media. If your spouse never sees you because you're always trying to get promoted at work, or your kids have to suffer with hand-me-downs and government cheese because you spend all of your money on gaming equipment, you're no different than the well-meaning people who put all of their chips down on corban.

So what started as a conversation about hand-washing ended up turning into a conversation about how we perceive value, and how pervasive our error can be when we get wrapped up in the wrong things. Much like the Pharisees, who out of one side of their mouths would tell people to care for their family, and out of the other side of their mouths would make that impossible, we probably have some conflicts in our lives that make us hypocrites.

So that's something to look at this week. Are we working against ourselves? Are we nitpicking over the wrong things? Are the things we are doing in order to virtue-signal that we "get it" showing instead that we've missed the whole point? Instead, let us focus on relationship and God's grace.