disclosing new worlds

James 1: 17-27 NRSV text
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23 NRSV text

Christians, Jews and Muslims are “People of the Book” – that is, we all, in different yet ultimately similar ways, live according to God’s revelation within a set of scriptures which we believe are normative for faith and conduct. This means that we cannot escape the burden and responsibility of interpretation. It is a task that is necessary for at least two reasons: firstly, there is no obvious single way of reading the texts we regard as scripture, despite assertions to the contrary, and secondly, Truth is always contextual (which is to say that it is hammered out in a dynamic “conversation” with the concrete circumstances of the community of faith.

Faithless interpretation
Within the Reformed tradition, we find two attempts to avoid the complexity of the interpretive task. The first is the reformers’ doctrine of the Perspicacity of Scripture – the notion that the meaning is plain to the faithful reader. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it is the way in which this has been understood that is the problem, because that is certainly not how it was intended to function! It’s important to understand the context and meaning of what the reformers were saying. The driving force was to make the bible accessible to ordinary readers. The scriptures were translated from Latin into the vernacular. Over against the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church, the reformers wanted to assert “the right of private interpretation”. While in practice this was often taken to mean that everyone became the sole arbiter of truth, the intention was to free the interpretation of scripture from the stranglehold of a corrupt Church. The Church needed to be under critical scrutiny by the bible in order to be reformed. In practice, the (mistaken) notion that every individual can and should read the bible in whatever way seems appropriate, and that all such ways are equally valid, has bedevilled the Church ever since. The root of the problem lies in the excessive post-Enlightenment individualism, in which the individual has no necessary connection with a believing, reading community. It is faithless because God addresses us not only as individuals but as a whole world! God’s self-revelation addresses how we make our world – our faith, our politics, our economics. The community of faith is meant to live out the truth of the gospel collectively, not simply in some radicalised private, individual, inner world of the self.

The second attempt is the fundamentalist option, which says that we must “simply” be prepared to take the “literal” sense of scripture. This is underwritten by a raft of assumptions, the most important of which is the inerrancy of scripture. If the bible is the Word of God, the assumption goes, it must necessarily be free of “error”. There is no room in this view for contradictions between different parts of the biblical canon. The bible is assumed to speak with one voice – the Voice of God. God’s revelation is given through human intermediaries, but they function more as God’s scribe receiving divine dictation than creative theologians who have anything of themselves to contribute. Consequently, the bible may be approached like a divine encyclopaedia, pronouncing on every necessary subject. We don’t have to interpret the bible, merely consult it! Any attempt to “avoid” the “plain meaning” of scripture is evidence of faithlessness.

The fundamentalist option is a latecomer in biblical interpretation, despite the assumption that it is “the way that it has always been done”. It grew out of the 19^th century Princeton school, with B.B Warfield. In its contemporary form, it is actually profoundly faithless: it refuses to take the bible as it is, but seeks rather to impose an artificial schema on it. It goes something like this: “If a book is to be the Word of God, it must be free of error and contradiction, otherwise it cannot be the Word of God”. In other words, it’s a question of facts. If it can be shown that the bible does, in fact, contain errors, then the whole edifice falls like a house of cards. If the bible cannot be trusted on its statement that the world was created 6,000 years ago over 6 days of 24 hours each, then the bible cannot be trusted on anything! The fundamentalists therefore find themselves embroiled in endless controversies about “facts” and “history”. What is faithless is the notion that the bible is actually up for question as the Word of God! Theoretically, the fundamentalists regard the bible as potentially no more important than any other book! That is why countless former fundamentalists have that “all-or-nothing” experience, and, in rejecting fundamentalism, find themselves rejecting both faith and the bible. For the Christian community of faith, the bible is not referred to as the Word of God because it can be squeezed into a formula or be shown to conform to certain criteria: it is the Word of God because it is the way in which God communicates! That is not open to (faithful) question: it is what it means to be within the Christian community of faith!

What the bible is, therefore, is what being “the Word of God” means. And a faithful, informed, searching reading of the bible finds itself grappling immediately with the interpretive task. We are compelled to engage in that conversation between the world of the texts, the tradition, and our own, contemporary context. It is a process – of formulation and reformulation in different contexts – that we see within the canon of scripture itself. And it is controversial! It is risky. It means making value judgements. It means changing what we once said, and saying something new – not simply saying the old things in new ways, but sometimes throwing out the old in favour of something that we believe and trust is more true. We see that, for instance, in the post-exilic re-reading of the tradition. And we see it right here in today’s gospel passage and in the selection of today’s epistle.

Purity laws and food: what was the problem, anyway?
Something very radical is going on in Mark’s gospel. Mark’s own context is the conflict between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. What is the status of the Law – particularly the Holiness Code? Note the structure of the narrative at this point: we have just had the feeding of the five thousand Jewish males. Jesus has crossed the lake to the Gentile side, where we will encounter the Syrophoenician woman as an example of faith in a discussion about healing within the metaphor of feeding (7:24ff). and where four thousand Gentile males will be fed (8:1ff). The parallel feedings are a clear indication that the Bread that Jesus offers is for all – both Jews and Gentiles. Sandwiched (sorry – no pun intended!) between is the debate with the Pharisees and scribes (who are significantly on Gentile territory) about the purity laws to do with food and washing. The text is multi-layered: it reflects the disputes between Jesus and the upholders of the tradition of his day, but also the post-Easter, post-Gentile mission situation of Mark’s community. It also forms a vital part of Mark’s presentation of Jesus as the Liberator who frees people from the chains of the purity system that declares them unclean and unfit for God.

What exactly is the issue here? We’re used to washing hands before meals – it’s simply good hygiene! The complaint by the Pharisees and scribes here, however, is not about coming to the table with grubby hands! It’s about ritual contamination. And here, Mark takes the exaggerated, “super-holy” version of keeping the Levitical laws about purity in regard to food. The tradition on this point held that touching food with unclean hands rendered that food impure. But that was a “second-degree” impurity: eating impure food could not contaminate a “pure” diner. The problem was liquid. Unclean liquid was “first-degree impurity” stuff, that, if present on food, would contaminate both the food and the eater. The “tradition of the elders” that Mark refers to here was thus a super-scrupulousness that sought to avoid even the remotest possibility of contamination through hand washing.

A new view of holiness
So what makes Jesus radical at this point? Jesus, in v19, not only declares all foods clean but effectively says that they were never unclean! In other words, he’s saying that the “tradition” got it wrong. He’s scathing about “the tradition of the elders” – a phrase that contrasts the tradition with the Law of God (which is why he quotes Isaiah). Whereas the Pharisees and scribes saw their tradition and the Law as one and the same thing, Jesus accuses them of substituting human precepts for the Law.

Jesus, you will remember, is in the business of building a messianic community that is non-exclusive. He refuses the categories of exclusion that were used to draw the “we/they” boundaries: class, “race”, wealth, and religious purity. Jesus’ special contempt for the “human precepts” is reserved for the ways in which the ability to exclude operated as a “gate”, with the religious leaders as the gatekeepers. It was a means of power – the power to exclude. What was intolerable for Jesus is that exclusion from the social and religious life of the community easily translated into apparent exclusion from the life of God. Archbishop Desmond Tutu always used to say that the tragedy of Apartheid (exclusion) was its ability to persuade [black] children of God that they were not, in fact, children of God!

In this passage, Jesus takes on the purity system. He refuses the notion that ever-vigilant scrupulousness (holiness) is the appropriate response to God. This is not because Jesus isn’t concerned about God’s holiness; rather, it is because of his radical reinterpretation of divine holiness. God’s “holiness”, for Jesus, is seen in God’s compassionate love that welcomes rather than excludes, is gracious rather than judgemental, and embraces the excluded, the despised, the marginalised and the unloved. This is the “holiness” that ought to characterise any true concern for the proper worship of God. And, if anything – even divine Law – leads to a conflict of purity vs inclusion, inclusion wins every time! True worship (note again Jesus’ citation in v7) is seen in compassionate inclusiveness. If there is any doubt about how we ought to act and decide, we must let these be our compass-bearing.

Dealing with the tradition: a spectrum of possible responses
What happens when a changed context requires a re-evaluation and re-appropriation of the tradition? This is precisely what is happening here. What, then, is the status of what has gone before? And, to raise the stakes just as high as they can go, what is the status of what God has said in the past? Again, this is the conflict in which Jesus is engaged.

And look at how radical his answer is! He could have taken the conservative line, cited Leviticus and said: “This is what God has said, and it remains unchanged. We have no right even to ask the question in the first place!”

Alternatively, he could have taken a revisionist position: “This is what used to be, but now the old way no longer applies. It is not that it was bad, or deficient, or wrong: it has been superseded by something new, better and more appropriate to the changed context”. Interestingly, this is pretty much the position that Matthew and Luke both take.

Jesus, however, takes a third, radical option, which is to say that what has been believed in the past is quite simply wrong! Importantly, it is wrong because they have failed to understand God. Had they done so, they would have realised that the God whose kingdom is such Good News – especially to the poor and excluded – could never have intended a system that created poverty and exclusion. Therefore what has appeared to be divine Law and has been taught as divine Law – and can be justified as divine Law by appeal to “It is written …” – is in fact mere human precept, obscuring the true divine Law.

This is clear from vv 14-15. Jesus explains to the crowd that the problem isn’t contamination, but the evil that is within. Impure food passes through the system. What really does damage is the evil that is inside a person, is intrinsic to them, and cannot be got rid of either through ritual cleansing or even going to the toilet! You can’t flush these out of the system! They live inside – and they really defile!

Jesus’ option, in other words, is to set aside scripture on the grounds that it does not tell us the Truth about God! That is both radical and faithful. It is radical because it is extremely uncomfortable. We don’t find it too difficult … on this issue, because the question of obedience to the purity laws has long since to be a burning question for us. We find it quaint and anachronistic. It threatened to split the earliest Church, though! But what about our own burning questions? How uncomfortable are we, for instance, at the possibility of setting aside biblical pronouncements about homosexuality on the same grounds as Jesus uses here? I want to return to that issue in a moment, but first, I want only to note that Jesus’ option is faithful because it does justice to the nature of the bible itself. We do not believe that biblical “inspiration” is the same thing as dictation! The bible was not dictated verbatim from the mouth of God. Rather, God’s Spirit inspired the writers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, what we have is a record of faith. This is what people believed – genuinely and faithfully. But genuine and faithful belief itself is not a guarantee that we have got it right – something we have seen over the debates about slavery, the ordination of women and Apartheid! Instead, it is inspiration – the conviction that the bible genuinely contains the self-revelation of God – that compels us to engage in the risky struggle of interpretation. Jesus had to do it – so do we!

A slightly different model (James 1: 17-27)
We begin a study of the epistle of James this week. James, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He was a theological conservative. In the debate over whether Paul’s Gentile converts needed to become Jews (Acts 15), James was Paul’s opponent. Look at Galatians 2. This is no mild disagreement, but a vitriolic dispute! Paul is positively venomous in his condemnation of Peter, James and the “Judaisers”. The presence of the epistle in the canon is the record of a fundamental conflict within the earliest Church about how to cope with tradition in the light of what is new in Jesus Christ.

Paul is radical. Without wishing to over-egg the pudding, it is important to state that Paul saw the implications of what God has done in Jesus Christ as setting aside the Law. This isn’t the time and place to go into exactly what Paul means; suffice it to say that he sees salvation in Christ as ushering in a new creation – a different order of things in which the Law is redundant. Paul was accused of being antinomian as a result.

James sees it differently. Jesus, for him, makes a better understanding of the Law possible. It enables people to fulfil God’s intention for the Law. James, then, is unsurprisingly characteristically “Jewish”, but with a Christian “spin”. His audience is the Jewish Christian Church, peopled by believers steeped in the Jewish faith. His emphasis is on the continuity with all that has gone before, rather than discontinuity. Nevertheless, it is important to note that (a) he is in deliberate, conscious debate with Paul over how to interpret the scriptures and (b) they disagree – profoundly!

It’s interesting to tie up what James says about defiling with today’s gospel passage – particularly in relation to the tongue. We know how destructive that can be in Christian communities! And, in Jesus’ terms, it is the destructive, community-shattering words that equate to the evil within that defiles.

However, for the moment, I wish only to note the way in which the very texts of the New Testament face us with the intractable problem of controversy and conflict in seeking to interpret scripture and understand God.

Bringing it all back home
Those of you with a developed musical taste (!) will recognise the Dylan album title here! I want us to grapple seriously with the implications of today’s gospel passage by asking the question of what application this might have to the sexuality debate that churches are currently facing (even if they’re avoiding it). This is the equivalent of the debate over ritual purity at meals, with as radical and far-reaching implications – and the same temperature-raising capacities!

Once we accept that there is a need to interpret (rather than merely consult) the bible if we are to get some access to what we believe God’s will might be, we are faced with at least 3 possible ways to go – all of which might justifiably claim to be “biblical”! I want to stress that they can all lay claim to being biblical, because the discussion about sexuality has, at least in the United Reformed Church, been sabotaged by accusations and counter-accusations about “not taking the bible seriously”, when in fact, the issue is about biblical interpretation.

We could take the conservative option, that says, “Leviticus calls it an abomination! That is the Law! That is God’s opinion, and we have no right to deviate from it at all”. Those of us who take this option have a barrage of texts at our disposal. It is quite clear that homosexuality is viewed with outrage and horror. It is condemned. And, if reading the bible faithfully means finding the burden of the textual evidence, the case is open and shut.

A second, revisionist option, says that the biblical treatment of homosexuality takes place within a context that bears little or no resemblance to today’s context. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is not about homosexuality: it is about the abuse of hospitality through homosexual rape by “straight” men. This option says that we cannot sort out the matter by appeal to biblical texts: we understand far more about human sexuality than can be gleaned from the texts and need to make judgements on different grounds than textual ones on the subject. So, for example, the fact that God clearly calls homosexual people into ministry (at least, clearly does so by every canon and criteria we currently use to discern a call) means that we cannot assume that homosexuality is itself a disqualification for ministry.

A third, radical option says that we ought to judge the issue by what includes and what excludes. Because the blanket condemnation of homosexuality leads to exclusion, it shows that we are wrong if we assume that the texts that condemn it give us an indication of the mind of God. On the contrary: they are “human precepts”, uncritically equated with the divine will, and need to be set aside because they were never right in the first place! And the warrant for this approach is none other than the Markan Jesus himself!

The priority of compassion
Mark presents us with a Jesus who is alive to the deep-seated human tendency to exclude people who are “different”. The most effective way to do so is to declare them “unclean” – beyond the pale. Jesus makes a messianic community out of these excluded people first – on the grounds that this reflects the will and heart of a God who is primarily compassionate and loving, and whose “holiness” is expressed not in disapproval but in loving welcome. Ironically, Mark goes on immediately to show us that Jesus himself was not immune to this tendency, as we will see next week with the story of the Syrophoenician woman! May God bless us all as we wrestle with the biblical texts, day by day and week by week! And may God keep giving us the courage to persevere!

Amen.