“Employees must wash their hands,” said the sign in the restroom. How often and how long do you wash your hands? Twenty seconds? Thirty seconds? Someone said we should say the alphabet while we wash our hands. I do this but I get some funny looks when people hear me singing. What if we only went through “M” as we washed our hands? Would we still be clean? Jesus’ disciples did not wash their hands like the elders of Israel had taught.
The Pharisees were the “gotcha” crowd of Israel. They knew the law better than the others. Not only did they pride themselves in keeping the law, but they loved to call out others who did not keep it perfectly. So they told on Jesus’ disciples. If religion were about rules, the Pharisees would have been the most religious people in the world. They knew the Old Testament backward and forwards, but it did not change the way they treated other people.
How did Jesus answer the Pharisees and their allegation about his disciples? Did he quickly send his followers to the pool to wash their hands and make amends? No. He quoted Isaiah, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.” Jesus taught that following God was more about relationships than rules.
If we know the Bible from Genesis to maps but we are not kind, it does us no good. This is the fallacy of those who claim to be leading us back to the Bible these days. They reduce the story of God’s redemption to a small list of rules. God’s moral law still stands. But we must resist the temptation to which the Pharisees succumbed. It is easier to memorize the rules and use them to marginalize others than it is to love God and our neighbors.
Christianity is finally about internal transformation more than external conformity. Has Jesus washed our hearts? What comes out of our mouths comes first out of our hearts. How do we get clean hearts? We wash them in the blood of the Lamb until we are clean. “What can wash away my sin?” Try harder to do better. No. “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
