This Mirror is Clean, Are You?
James 1, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Happy Labor Day! What other day do you get to celebrate work without actually doing any? Why did ancient Egyptians have a hard time recruiting laborers? It was a pyramid scheme.
Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Univ of Arkansas. She came to the US with her parents when she was 3 ½ years old and grew up in a devout Muslim household. Several years ago, I encountered one of her poems titled: My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears. It’s a poem about the rituals of washing and how outsiders perceive a ritual unfamiliar to them.
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer [wudu], because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims. She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this August ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares.
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain…
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom.
My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems.
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo.
And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you’d make wider washbins…
My grandmother knows one culture – the right one;
As do these matrons of the Midwest. For them my grandmother might as well have been squatting in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor – Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which, when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.
“You can’t do that,” one of the women protests, turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”
“We wash our feet five times a day,” my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
“My feet are cleaner than their sink. Worried about their sink are they? I should worry about my feet!” My grandmother nudges me, “go on, tell them.”
Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers, all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum.
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed, is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse…
I smile at the Midwestern women as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them and shrug at my grandmother as if they had just apologized through me.
No one is fooled, but I hold the door open for everyone and we all emerge on the sales floor and lose ourselves in the great common ground of housewares on markdown.
The images in the poem of ritual washing and the significance the practice holds for some are what came to mind as I read this passage from Mark 7. Though daily cleansing is not part of our religious practice, we would do well not to ignore its place in Jewish culture. That’s why it is problematic when
Jesus’ disciples do not wash their hands properly before coming to the meal. A group of Pharisees get hyper-focused on Jesus’ disciples who have ignored the rule for ritualistic hand-washing. Hand-washing – not just a healthy habit – but the tradition of the elders. A rule established so that no one comes to the Table with defiled hands – that is hands that have touched something considered unclean while trading at the market (perhaps).
Handwashing – a fine rule that protects the community from the spread of germs at shared tables. Nothing wrong with hand-washing. The purity laws in Jesus’ time promoted the health and sustainability of the society. Thanks to hand-washing, people lived longer, healthier lives. Jesus has no problem with the rule, or the Law, for that matter. Laws serve the community. They govern society. They keep peace, regulate business, and allow people to coexist. But let’s be clear. It is not the hand-washing that Jesus has a problem with. The oral tradition that has evolved around the Law is the issue. It’s what one writer called “the fence around the law.” An oral tradition that referred to a body of case law that had built up to show how the Torah was to be observed exactly. By the time of Jesus’ day, the “interpretive tradition,” designed to protect the law had become this heavy burden imposed on the people by the Pharisees. The issue is not with traditions—”it is the privileging of human traditions over the commands of God.”[1] Instead of the rules making it easier for more people to participate in the life of the Jewish community, the Pharisees’ strict oral traditions had made it more difficult, cumbersome.
Amidst the verses we heard read aloud today is Jesus’ commentary on the Jewish leaders’ selective following of the oral traditions and circumventing them when it was convenient. In other words, Jesus critiques the leaders for inconsistency in their religious practices, while they hold others to the letter of the law. The Pharisees love the rules more than the people the rules were established to protect.
What’s happening is –as if the referees in a college football game take more joy in throwing flags and enforcing every rule in the book, because theeeeyyyyy love being seen and heard on the broadcast more than providing a safe playing field for the teams to have a great, competitive game. Jesus is coming in to say, this is not what the NCAA had in mind when they made this or that rule and hired you to enforce it. The fun is in playing the game, not making it more frustrating for the players to play.
The disciples are aware of the law and probably know that they have broken them, possibly to make a point to those who hold the law as paramount. But the law is rooted in love. Love results in including and accepting not denying or excluding. Where Jesus sees separation resulting from the law, he preaches connection. What
matters, he says, is that one’s outer cleanliness is a reflection of one’s inward commitments. And that inward commitment should bear fruit in outward action. The condition of the heart overflows into one’s personal interactions.
Verse15 is the heart of Jesus’ message: “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
One writer beautifully described it this way:
Imagine the incense of your heart burning all the time. Whatever it is will suffuse the air around you. If what’s in your heart is the burning tires of anger and resentment, your neighbors will smell it. If it’s the jasmine of forgiveness and mercy, they’ll know.
Attend to what is within, for it will come out… in conversation, in a late night rant on social media, in traffic, in the grocery line, yelling at the TV, the dog, or worse, the people you really love.
It's not what comes from outside that defiles us. What a hard truth to trust. When things go wrong, we often think, what did I do to cause this? What did I say? How did I jinx myself this time? We are not much better than our superstitious ancestors in the faith who believed that God punishes bad behavior with bad experiences; and that what happens to us is a direct reflection of who we are. Of course, sometimes, we deal with the consequences of our own choices. But there is a difference in natural consequences and divine punishment. “Victims of abuse or relationship violence need to hear this over and over. What someone else has done to you does not defile you.”[2] Or define you. At your core, you are made in God’s image and nothing can change that. Jesus, though put on the cross, scorned, and ridiculed, mocked and injured – was not diminished in his integrity, mercy, and loveliness. And because of the cross, neither are you. No matter what has happened to you and no matter what choices you have made – in Christ, you are set free, healed and whole.
What the world is looking to see is if our outward devotion, our rituals, spiritual practices, our words in public and in private are representative of what is in our heart. Does the outside match the inside?
One final story… “Camp Tamakwa – Adventure born in the heart of Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada…” This was the set for the movie, Indian Summer… about a group of 30-something adults who all go back to their childhood summer camp for one last hoorah before the camp is set to close… for good. They all come back to camp with memories from their experiences during its golden age. The aging camp director, played by Alan Arkin, insists they fall right back in line with the camp’s program… They’re awakened early by the clanging of the bell tower, subjected to a swim test, training to compete in the Tamakwa-thon…
Going back to this place they all loved as kids was like returning to sacred ground. The camp held so many of their core memories… working out their problems in the boxing ring; sneaking out of their cabins; the pranks they played on each other; the lifelong friendships they formed. The characters all look back on who they were in the season of ‘coming of age.’ How their lives had turned out and who they had become, however, was different than they had expected at that age. In fact, most of them were a little disappointed in the quality of their lives, some of the choices they had made in their careers and relationships. At a poignant moment in the film, one of the characters walks past a mirror – posted outside the big meeting lodge of the camp. //He stops to take in his reflection –where every camper would have walked past multiple times a day. //There is a sign above the mirror that says, “This mirror is clean. Are you?” His 13-year-old self would have checked his outward appearance and given his armpits a sniff to determine if he was outwardly clean enough to go inside. But the adult in the mirror, looking back at him, was one who had disappointed his business partner and not been faithful to his spouse. Both of whom are also back at camp. Watching the movie, you can see a fuller meaning of the question unfold on the character’s face in just a few seconds (and zero dialogue) because the problem is not with his outsides, but with his insides. The question is about the condition of the heart. That is what matters most. “This mirror is clean. Are you?”
[1] Buggs, Courtney V. Working Preacher Commentary Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
[2] Garnaas-Holmes, Steve Unfolding Light Worship Resources