How to Wash Your Hands According to the Gospel

It really is a shame that I often miss how clever the biblical writers can be. Sometimes these points of cleverness are sometimes illusions or call backs to other stories. Other times the cleverness shows up in the language. If I were a more avid reader of Greek and Hebrew I would hope I could see these clever moments. One of these clever points came in my studies the other day around Mark 7. Specifically the first three verses:

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;

What is clever about these verses? It is the word pygme which is translated above as “wash their hands”. Pygme is a bit of an obscure word and it could mean a few things. It could mean the part of the body that is from the wrist down. It can also mean the area of the body that extends from fingertip to forearm. The note may be that the Pharisees don’t stop at their wrist when they wash, but they wash all the way up their arm as though they were super hand washers. More generally though the word pygme means “fist”.

Rather than being super hand washers, this note from Mark could suggest that the Pharisees wash their hands with closed fists or with hands clenched together. I don’t know about you, but it is very difficutl to wash ones hands with clenched fists. Sure the outside of the hands may be clean, but the inside is not.

Perhaps the disciples did wash their hands, but they did so in a different manner than what had become the custom of the Pharisees. The disciples washed with open hands.

Funeral Shift's Impact on How We "Do" Church

Over the years of attending and officiating funerals, there are a few shifts that are interesting.

The rise of the picture slideshow is among the more obvious ones. Not long ago I would ask if the family would like tables set up for pictures to be displayed at the entrances of the sanctuary. This happens occasionally, but by in large the pictures are all digital and all on a slideshow halfway through the funeral. Perhaps not a big deal but it is notable.

The shift from calling it a funeral to calling it a memorial or a celebration of life is also fairly common. It makes sense that we want to remember the life and not the death of our loved ones. I get it. This may not be a big deal, but it is notable.

These are obvious shifts, which all point to the more subtle and yet more profound shift. There is a shift in funerals in what is being said. Specifically, the funeral is becoming a place where the plea is “Do not forget me.” This is a shift from what funerals had been for so long. Part of the point of a Christian funeral is the community promising “we will remember you.”

Shifting from “we will remember you” to “don’t forget me” may not be a big deal, it is. It suggests that we are more aware of how disconnected and unrooted we are from one another and a place. We move from place to place and from people to people, so of course when we die we are concerned that we will be forgotten, so we ask that we would be remembered. Our final request echoes our deep longing for relationships that are so meaningful that there is no way we would be forgotten.

The more disconnected we are from long time friends, family, a place and a community the less likely we are to have these deep and meaningful connections. The Church is a place that says, in part, there is no need to worry about being forgotten because we promise we will remember you. There is no way we could forget you. You are important and valuable to us and this community that we promise to tell your stories and see your love in this place.

Churches may be “old fashioned” and slow to change. Churches are not “nimble” and churches often don’t have the means to adapt to the “new”. Some see this as a detriment to the church and are looking to change it. It makes sense that we would want to change the church and make it more relevant so that people don’t forget the Church. This sounds similar to the funeral shift. Rather than asking “don’t forget us” the Church could be investing into the lives of people so deeply that there is no way that the Church would be forgotten.

Perhaps the most faithful Church is the one that when someone dies, the community says, “we will remember you.”

Repent By Hugging a Tree

Every preacher I know has a sermon on repentance. The difference is in degrees. There are those with an intense repent message and those with a mild one. The intense message are those messages you and I see in popular culture. It is the guy on the street corner. It is the preacher in Footloose. It is the message that says you need to give up some action. The ol’ “We don’t smoke or chew or hang with those that do.” Stereotypically this is found in conservative circles, but it is not limited to it. There are liberal circles that have their own version of an intense repentance, but the knock on liberal circles is that the call to repent is more mild. So mild in fact that some might not even say that liberals call for repentance. This mild message often comes as a reaction to the more intense repentance message and sometimes is a message that is not preached often in liberal circles.

Of course these are broad stereotypes and there is much more nuance in the messages of repentance. However, if the call to repent is intense or mild, one thing seems to hold true across conservative and liberal circles. The call to repent focuses on substance, and less on form.

When repentance is focused on the substance of our lives, then we begin to think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, as Dallas Willard says, a gospel of sin management. When we think that repenting means that we need to turn away from one set of actions that lead us to hell or unhealth, and take on a new set of actions that we think will lead us to salvation or health, then we are in the realm of sin management. We can get a life coach or a trainer to help us change the substance of our lives. We don’t need any divine help to change the substance of our lives, individuals and human communities can do that. The Christian call to repent is not focused on the substance but on the form of our lives. For this we need divine help and cannot do this on our own. Of course, the paradox is that if we repent in form, the substance of our lives will change.

Psychologist at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Canada Dr. Kenneth Hill looked at 800+ people who were lost in Nova Scotia and found that most of them repented of their substance. What I mean is when a person was lost, they stopped walking in one direction, turned and walked in a different direction. This is often how repentance is thought of. We are going one way and we need to stop and then start going a different direction. But this way of repentance is just in substance, not in form.

https://nasar.org/education/hug-a-tree/

Dr. Hill found there were two people who were lost who repented not in substance, but in form. One of these "repenting-in-form” people was a 11 year old child. When this child was lost in the woods, they did not stop walking in one direction and begin walking in another direction. This child just stopped walking. This child repented from the act of walking altogether. This child repented in form.

This 11 year old was taught in school that if he was ever lost that he should “hug a tree and survive”. 

Of course, this runs counter to what we would think is the “correct” thing to do. You may think that to hug a tree is to be passive and that we really need to work to be found. We think that if we are not working for our salvation then we will not be saved, if we are not working to be found then we will not be found. We are not confident that anyone is coming to save us or even that we are lost to begin with, and so in our efforts to “save ourselves” we get more lost, walking in circles. 

Christianity says that we are to repent of our form. Specifically we are to hug the tree of the cross and in doing so we will be saved. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! We are to repent (turn) from trying to save ourselves, we are to turn from our refusal to admit we are lost, we are to turn from the very form of our lives and hug the tree of the Cross.

We are to trust that there is One who is coming to find us, save us and bring us into salvation.