Philip Jones

We continue our sermon series looking at the ways in which Jesus was challenging so many aspects of the culture of his day, and was setting himself on a path of direct confrontation with the most powerful and influential members of the Jewish ruling body.

Today we hear of him not only dismissing a whole raft of long-standing dietary customs and practices, but also telling scribes and Pharisees that they are hypocrites who pick and choose which laws they will observe.  In a key sentence Jesus is quoted as saying, 'You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition'.  This is not far removed from spitting in the faces of those who believe themselves to be a kind of aristocracy within their community.

The human tradition that Jesus was challenging in this passage was a whole battery of rules and regulations which were not directly scriptural as divine commands, but had come about as teachings of past experts in the Jewish faith. 

These entirely human teachings and interpretations were called the Tradition of the Elders, and in Jesus's eyes they were simply barriers to the kind of relationship which he believed Jews should be able to have with their God and which God sought to have with God's people.  

He even describes how, in the case of a person's dealings with their parents, the Tradition of the Elders actually served to contradict the Law of Moses and reduced the degree of responsibility which was expected.

Note that Jesus is not saying that people should eat their food with dirty hands - and it could even be that the early versions of this ruling found their way into the Tradition of the Elders as a series of perfectly sensible hygiene precautions. 

What Jesus was challenging was the way in which the simple tasks of personal cleanliness had been turned into a long and complex ritual which had little or nothing to do with the practicalities of life and said nothing about the core values of the Jewish faith. 

The whole emphasis was wrong: a complicated rulebook had been devised to control what people could eat, how they should eat it, and when they could eat it; but little was being said about the self-centredness, deceit and corruption which these ritually clean people were engaged in on a daily basis. 

Traditions which served to divide the included from the excluded - and usually also separated the rich from the poor and the powerful from the powerless - had replaced values which Jesus felt should include everyone.

This was not the first time that Jesus had accused the local guardians of the faith of hypocrisy, and it wouldn't be the last.  They didn't like being told that their treasured traditions were pointless, or that their refined and impressive theological interpretations were baseless. 

This teacher from Galilee was too good at undermining their positions of power and privilege with his debates and declarations.  And, what was more worrying, he gathered huge crowds to listen to his views.  Some were even suggesting that there was a smell of rebellion in the air.

It could well be that, even as Jesus was telling people to pay less attention to what they took in and more attention to what they gave out, the charge sheet against him was being compiled quietly in the background.  Before long, things will come to a head and he'll be out of the way.

And isn't that still the price that counter-cultural teachers continue to pay in oppressive regimes?  How many people in modern times have been 'got out of the way' when they challenged the traditional precepts and vested interests of the ruling elite? 

Those value judgments which a society turns into its own 'Tradition of the Elders' can be a very powerful collection of ideas and received wisdom, which are not easy to challenge because they're often not entirely rational. 

For example, there is a tradition which held that women are not equal to men.  There is a tradition that lesbian, gay and bisexual relationships are unnatural, and that gender is fixed and divinely assigned.  Some religions maintain a tradition that they are the unique pathway to salvation and eternal life.  There is probably a deeper tradition than we're comfortable with behind the recently expressed opinion that the people who travel in standard class railway carriages are a different type of person to those in first class.

There are people in our society who would defend at least some aspects of each of those traditions.  And yet we have a hope and a belief - and some evidence - that society is evolving beyond such prejudice, exclusion and self-centredness. 

It does seem that the more people cling to traditions which may start out with an element of truth but which then become wrapped around with all kinds of human interpretation, the more they are restricting their dietary intake and the less nourishment they receive.  Whereas those who can find the courage to set aside irrational traditional boundaries, who will challenge themselves to experience different tastes, and who place the emphasis on the standards and values which emerge from their lives, will be helping society evolve beyond its self-imposed boundaries.

We are blessed to belong to a church with few traditions, a wide-ranging diet, a focus on what goes out of here rather than what comes into here, and an ever-decreasing of number of Elders!  We stand in contrast to some other churches which have 'Traditions of the Elders' which go back millennia and which are a continuing source of inequality between women and men, between people of differing sexual orientations and gender identities, and even teach unequal and exclusive access to the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ.

We teach what Jesus taught: we do not place human tradition above the commandment to love one another.

Amen.