Wednesday, July 23, 2025
“What sorrow
awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are
so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are
filthy—full of greed and self-indulgence! You blind Pharisee! First wash the
inside of the cup and the dish, and then the outside will become clean, too.”
(Matthew 23: 25 -26, New Living Translation)
It strikes me how much time all that washing must take. Not me, boy! I
am in, wash up using whatever soap is handy, shampoo my hair and get out in
less than ten minutes. Now I am wondering whether I am really clean.
The Pharisees were very strict about their washing routines. It was an
offence to them if one did not wash their hands before a meal. Don’t we tell our
kids to wash up before coming to the table? Sure, we do but for these religious
leaders it was virtually an eleventh commandment. They were in high dungeon
when Jesus sat down at the supper table “without first performing the
hand-washing ceremony required by Jewish custom.” (Luke 11:38) On another
occasion, they criticized Jesus’ allowance for his disciples’ lack of respect:
“Why do your disciples disobey our age-old tradition? For they ignore our
tradition of ceremonial hand washing before they eat.” (Matthew 15:2) Note
that the Pharisees were not so much concerned about hygiene as they were about
rituals, traditions, ceremonies and religious rules. A clean Jew was a good
Jew! Or we might say that a clean Baptist is a good Baptist. Sadly, they deemed
so many others as being unclean – Gentiles, women, Samaritans, foreigners,
lepers, and the list goes on for far too many. (So do some Baptists!)
Just so we don’t get too pompous about our own culture and times, we
still see how the pious and powerful treat immigrants, women and children, indigenous
people, the homeless, the poor, the hungry, the addicted and the like. There is
still this snobbish arms-length from the “unwashed.”
Jesus breaks and re-invents the codes of cleanliness. He understands
that it doesn’t matter how clean you are on the outside, i.e. how religious,
how pious, how religiously strict one is, how conversant one is with scripture,
how many times one goes to church in their best clothes and sits in the best
pews. It is what is inside the person which
counts the most. Jesus wants a cleansing from the inside out, Get rid of the inner
filth. “For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, all sexual
immorality, theft, lying, and slander. These are what defile you. Eating with
unwashed hands will never defile you.” (Matthew 15: 19 20) Get one’s personal
priorities straight and on the right side of God’s Love and Mercy and then one will
experience the truly fresh and purifying nature of walking with Jesus. “Purify me from my sins, and I will be
clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51: 7)
To this end, Jesus demonstrated the depth of clean living when he
washed the disciples’ feet. It was a
lowly, humble thing for him to do. You would have never caught a Pharisee doing
any such thing. That stinky, dirty job was for the lowest of servants, a slave perhaps.
But we see Jesus taking a basin and a towel and washing each of the disciples’
feet. He tells them “If you’ve had a
bath in the morning, you only need your feet washed now and you’re clean from
head to toe. My concern, you understand, is holiness, not hygiene.” (John
13: 10 -11, The Message Bible) I think he goes on to explain “holiness” i.e. cleanliness,
not as ceremonial observations but in terms of servanthood, how we treat and love
others: “You address me as ‘Teacher’ and ‘Master,’ and rightly so. That is
what I am. So if I, the Master and Teacher, washed your feet, you must now wash
each other’s feet. I’ve laid down a pattern for you. What I’ve done, you do.”
In the words of Paul to Titus: “It wasn’t so long ago that we
ourselves were stupid and stubborn, easy marks for sin, ordered every which way
by our glands, going around with a chip on our shoulder, hated and hating back.
But when God, our kind and loving Savior God, stepped in, he saved us from all
that. It was all his doing; we had nothing to do with it. He gave us a good
bath, and we came out of it new people, washed inside and out by the Holy
Spirit. Our Savior Jesus poured out new life so generously. God’s gift has
restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And there’s
more life to come—an eternity of life! You can count on this.” (Titus 3: 5
-7, TMB)
Time to wash up, people!
Dale