Mark 7:1-8, 14-23 (NRSV)
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
...
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
~
"Jesus is telling us that just as foods do not make us unclean, other people do not make us unclean either. It is what we do with the desires of other people that make us clean or unclean. We can indeed be corrupted by bad company but if we spew out the envy and slander and pride we ingested from others back at them, or, more likely, at others with fewer defences, then we ourselves are bad company threatening to corrupt others.
"This gives us another angle on Jesus’ famous warning that if we judge, we will be judged, because when we judge, we see the speck in the eye of the other but don’t see the log in our own. (Mt. 7: 1-5) We think that any envy, deceit or licentiousness we experience in ourselves comes from the other, and maybe we do catch these traits from another, like catching a virus. But a virus caught from another only hurts us if our own bodies react in destructive ways to make us sick. Likewise, the envy, deceit and licentiousness of another only make us sick if allow them to flare up inside of us. If we then expel them in the direction of others, they become the victims of what has come out of us. Even when defiling desires really are coming out of other people, our own defiling desires in response only magnify the impurity in the social atmosphere. That is, the uncleanness is neither in ourselves nor in the other. Defilement occurs only in relationships built upon projecting and expelling the perceived defilement of others."
- Andrew Marr, from blog post titled "What Really Makes Us Unclean?" (https://andrewmarrosb.blog/2015/08/26/what-really-makes-us-unclean/)
~
"[T]he fall into sin [is] something that happens in the relationships between people. In this respect it is akin to gravity. In the Aristotelian physics, the property of falling to the earth was an inherent quality in each object as part of its Final Cause given to it by God. In the Newtonian physics, gravity becomes a forcefield that isn’t strictly inner or outer but resides in the relationships between objects. It surrounds them.
"I think that [...] the source of sin lies neither strictly in the objects of desire (e.g., alcohol, pornography, guns, etc.) nor in the persons themselves. It lies in the fallen nature of the relationships of desire between people. It lies in the fact that we model one another’s desires rather than God’s loving desire for all of Creation. And so we have [imitatively] fallen into desiring that is rivalrous, covetous, conflictual; and we can’t get out on our own. It takes the incarnation of the One who came to perfectly model the desire of his heavenly Father."
"Most important is that [this understanding] gives us a picture of original sin that requires outside, gracious intervention, yet is not inherent to us. Original sin is not something internal, not something we are born with; rather, as we proclaim in our Lutheran Book of Worship baptismal liturgy (p. 121: “We are born children of a fallen humanity”), it is something we are born into (like we are born into the forcefield of the earth’s gravity). The [imitative] nature of desire accounts for how it can be hopelessly fallen, save for a divine intervention into the fallenness...
"We have no models of a non-rivalrous desire until Christ enters the picture. In the special (Trinitarian!) relationship that Jesus had with his heavenly Father, we finally have a human (peer) model for us of non-rivalrous desire. Jesus perfectly acted according to his Father’s will without becoming his rival. Through the Holy Spirit this same non-rivalrous desire can be mediated to us, redeeming us from the fallen desiring of the “original sin” which has otherwise been [imitatively] passed on through the ages."
- Paul Nuechterlein, from Reflections and Questions section on this passage on the Girardian Lectionary page (link in comment below)
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"So here we get the understanding that what we have in today's Gospel is the explanation which Jesus gave the disciples over time, including after his resurrection, as to what this might mean, and how it was that Christianity became the form of Judaism that prioritizes the desire of the heart as being what is absolutely central above all things. Any other things that you may hold on to, they might be fine, they might not be fine, but the really important thing is the desire of the heart.
"Jesus then gives a list of twelve of these forms of disordered desire which make us genuinely unclean. He starts with evil intentions, these englobe all the things that he's going to talk about, all the twelve that are to follow, suggesting that he is talking about something with a determinative, a conscious quality about it, that form of wrongdoing. Then he starts with fornication, strangely enough, and probably that means idolatry, idolatry coming before theft and murder. The reason I say it's probably idolatry is that to use fornication to refer to idolatry was standard in the Jewish world at the time. And the sexual elements that we associate with fornication come in adultery and licentiousness later in the list, so it's reasonable to assume that he's not simply repeating himself here, he's talking about different things and starting as a good Jew would with idolatry as being the source of all other evils. So, idolatry, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, and folly - the different ways in which our heart, our pattern of desire can take us away from God.
"And of course it's going to be the working out of that after the resurrection, after the coming of the Holy Spirit, starting with what Jesus taught about that which is inside coming out may defile rather than which is outside coming in, which is to be the whole basis of how we learn to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Following our origin of Spirit, [we discover] how to become holy bodies by working through the patterns of desire such that the Holy One may live in our hearts."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 22nd in Ordinary Time, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss2VBOjnvN0)
[Source of Paul Nuechterlein quote and link to Andrew Marr blog, and for extensive analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/proper17b/]
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