Sermon Buckland 30th August – Trinity 12 September 2, 2009
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The Rev’d Sonia Falaschi-Ray
MK 7:1 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; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
MK 7:14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Sermon
Here we have Jesus and his followers being accused of breaking with the traditions setting Jews apart from their surrounding peoples, which daily emphasised their choseness by God. Jesus turns the tables on his accusers. Here, as on other occasions, he points beneath the surface of events to their underlying meaning. He highlighted that performing flamboyant, symbolic actions, when not living the life of closeness to God which they should symbolise, was hypocritical. He dispensed with showy set pieces but did the real thing. So again in his teaching he said, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Returning to our story, it’s not that the disciples didn’t wash their hands at all before eating, they may well have done because, although the ancient world had no concept of germs or bacterial infection, they had plenty of experience of what happens when you don’t wash. They had a sense of cleanliness and purity. (Some very practical hygiene laws were included into the Torah to oblige people to adhere to them, e.g. undercooked pork carries the risk of tapeworm and, given what pigs lived on, avoiding it all together was wise. Similarly with shellfish poisoning – very likely in a hot climate where raw sewage is flushed over shallow shellfish beds.)
So, for Jesus, flamboyant ritualized washing was similar to external shows of holiness which, if not supported by genuine loving of God and neighbour, counted for nothing. Jesus uses a graphic description which I imagine his hearers may have thought in rather poor taste, in indicating that what goes into the mouth is not absorbed into your personality, the waste passing into the drain. The early Church community for whom Mark was writing, will still have been struggling with which OT traditions were obligatory to observe and which were not, hence Paul’s banging on about abandoning circumcision and dietary laws. Jesus then lists sins which make us unclean; which separate us from God, often by the way we view or treat our neighbour. He cites fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Consequently I thought we might look at a one of what are known as the Seven Deadly Sins. Three mentioned here are fornication, adultery and licentiousness, which deal with sexual immorality so, initially, I thought we might look at lust. I see I have your undivided attention. However, that’s for another day. Of all the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, greed and sloth. The one the church fathers though the most pernicious was pride. So pride it is.
You may not immediately think that ritual washing or following kosher food laws has much to do with pride, (or even swine flu) but these are behaviours of symbolic separation. This separation in early Jewish history was important in God helping his people focus on worshipping only him and not being drawn away to other gods worshipped by their immediate neighbours. Insisting on differential external behaviour was a way of reminding the Jewish people of the special calling given to Abraham, to be a blessing to all the nations. However, by Jesus’ time, the actions separating Jews from gentiles had built up, but their wholehearted engagement with God had waned. They viewed the fact that their rituals were visibly different from others’ as an indication of their superiority in the eyes of God. Viewing yourself as better than others, that is the pernicious sin of pride.
Know yourself, gnwqi seauton was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Having a realistic view of your talents and social position was deemed a virtue in the ancient world. We all know people who have seemingly inexplicable blind-spots regarding their own character or the character of those close to them. One can think of Maggie Thatcher, who doted on her graceless son Mark while ignoring her better-balanced (and brighter) daughter Carol. We are also rather good at having these blind-spots ourselves. If you wonder what yours might be, think about the thing that really annoys you in other people. ‘No, surely not? – well possibly yes.’ Know yourself. In his letter to the Romans, Paul says ‘do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think’. But it is not enough to know ourselves. We are then urged to become more like Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross.”[1]
The danger of knowing yourself is that this can easily be linked to comparing yourself with others and deciding if you are superior or inferior to them and treating them accordingly. Ranking ourselves is prone to lead us to feelings of both pride and inferiority.
In considering pride, I have been helped by a book called The Seven Deadly Sins – and how to overcome them by Graham Tomlin, from which I shall quote liberally. In modern times pride is often seen as a virtue. Don’t we all like to hear, “I’m proud of you” from our parents, our spouses and our bosses. “We often appeal to children’s sense of pride in themselves to encourage them to behave. We strive for status, a sense of personal accomplishment promises security and pleasure. Being able to look back on our life with pride in our achievements is something we all aspire to. On the other hand, a sense of regret at not having made the best of ourselves is something we dread.” [2] “Augustine saw pride as the very thing that drew Satan away from God. The fallen angel then reproduced the same attitude of mind in humans, enticing them to be like gods. In the Divine Comedy, when Dante and his companion enter purgatory what is the first sin that needs to be purged? You guessed it. Thomas Aquinas thought the same; ‘Inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin – the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and His rule.’ What is it about pride that so attracted the hostility of these Christian writers and thinkers? After all pride is not the most noticeable of faults. Drunkenness, lust, rage – wander into any city centre on a Saturday night and you will see plenty of evidence of these – but it is hard to spot open, naked, obvious pride.
There is a genuine dilemma here. Christian advocacy of humility can seem a recipe for low self esteem and a crippling inferiority complex. Psychological literature on the subject tends overwhelmingly to use the word ‘pride’ in a positive and approving manner. We are constantly told to take pride in ourselves, build a strong sense of self esteem and so on. Is it wrong to do so? The simple answer is no. But in order to understand this we need to distinguish between pride and self-esteem. It’s not that self-esteem is wrong. It’s more a question of how it is established. Is it attained by boosting my own sense of importance to myself and the world in general or by some other route? Pride can seem the most obvious and sure-fire way to build a solid sense of self worth. After all if we want to feel good about ourselves what could be more sensible than to remind ourselves that we’re not so bad after all; that, all things considered, we’re decent kind and thoughtful people, that we haven’t committed any real crimes, and that we really wouldn’t hurt a fly? The path suggested by the Christian faith – that the best way to establish an unshakeable sense of self-worth is to go in exactly the opposite direction, refraining from such reveries and instead reminding our selves of our faults, failings and mistakes –seems so odd, strange and counter-intuitive that it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.”[3]
In our gospel reading Jesus, knows that he is under scrutiny, but his challengers hadn’t been aware that they would be. Perhaps a more vivid illustration on the seductiveness and inappropriateness of pride was the story Jesus told about two men. “One was a Pharisee, a very religious, good, respectable person and the other a collector of Roman taxes – the first century equivalent of a traffic warden (only worse). “In a way the story is about self-esteem and how it is established. The Pharisee takes the usual route to feeling good about himself. He recounts in his own mind (and before God) his own moral achievements, his very real devotion and discipline. He admits to himself that he can honestly say that he is not a bad person: ‘God I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evil doers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get’. This by any standard is impressive. He doesn’t steal, never cheats on his wife, doesn’t swear or gossip and is generous to a fault. When we look at his life he is undoubtedly good.
Yet all this goodness hides a subtle trap. He has learned to build his own sense of value on the foundation of his own goodness. It seems promising. He goes away from his time of prayer feeling good about himself, secure in his own worth. After all he has not tried to justify himself by appealing to his money, status, power or looks – shallow things of course that other people might look to – no he relies on things of real worth – his discipline, generosity and honesty, upstanding reputation and happy family life. But in the story, Jesus says that however good the Pharisee felt about himself, God didn’t see it that way. He didn’t go home justified before God. This approach to building self-esteem never works in the long run, and it fails for two very important reasons.
The first is it is built on shaky foundations. It is like building an office block on land vulnerable to subsidence. It all looks good from the outside and works fine for a while – at least for as long as the Pharisee’s moral achievements remain constant and nothing much goes wrong around him. But when his wife tells him she has met someone else, his teenage son gets arrested for drug-dealing or he himself ends up in court for drunk-driving, his life comes crashing down and with it his sense of his own worth. The rest of his life is dogged by regrets, a sense of failure and of a life lived among the ruins of pride. Building self worth through pride is a risky business. It works for a while but we never know when it may come tumbling down.
The second reason why this strategy of building self esteem fails is hidden in the story. Bound up with the Pharisee’s attempt to establish his own identity and worth through his moral achieving is an inevitable comparison of himself with everyone else – especially the collaborating tax collector. ‘I may not be perfect but at least I’m better than him’. What results is a distancing, a sense of superiority; a small but fatal break in the fundamental bond that unites him as a human being and a frail, vulnerable fallible one at that.”[4]
At its root, pride is the desire to look down on everyone else, the refusal to admit the equality or superiority of any other being. Here we get to one of the key reasons why Christianity has it in for pride. If the essence of sin is that it renders us unable to build healthy relationships and societies, pride is the most isolating of all sins. Pride is essentially competitive. Placing yourself high up the table. Only inviting people to your parties who might be useful to your advancement in some way – not those who could never do you a favour. If greed is the desire to be rich then pride is the desire to be richer than everyone else. The ultimate end of pride is loneliness. We can all think of examples amongst celebrities who have died rich, friendless and alone. Randolph Hurst, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, perhaps even Michael Jackson.
Being proud is utterly unlike being like God. Jesus emptied himself. He washed his disciples’ feet. We worship a humble God who has authority over everything which he hardly uses and never abuses. So how can we learn to set aside pride and become more like Jesus? Graham Tomlin suggests two classic Christian disciplines which are the beginning of the road to humility. The first is confession. This flies in the face of all self-help manuals and how-to-succeed-in-life books. But unless we cultivate a habit of self examination, regularly reminding ourselves that we often boast, tell little lies, take the easy way out and fail to love those close to us, let alone our enemies and that difficult neighbour … as we know we should, we will keep thinking like the Pharisee that we’re OK. Confession is not wallowing in self hatred. We are meant to have a healthy sense of self-worth deriving from knowing that we are deeply loved by our creator. But, maybe once a day, we can reflect on where we took the wrong option and admit it to ourselves and to God.
The second discipline is service. When we lean to serve someone else, to do something which would normally be beneath us, it has the effect of helping us forget ourselves. As C.S. Lewis put it. ‘Humility is thinking less about yourself, not thinking less of yourself. It isn’t telling ourselves that we are useless wastes of space – that is self pity. Also it doesn’t mean lying about our qualities and achievements with false modesty. Humble people are not self haters or self-abnegators, they just don’t think about themselves much – they are far more interested in other people.
So let us try to come before God and confess prideful sin and serve others, We will receive his forgiveness and reaffirmed love.. It is in that we can find our self-esteem.
[1] Phil 2:8-8
[2] The Seven Deadly Sins, Graham Tomlin, Lion Hudson 2007 p 33-34
[3] ibid pp 35-6
[4] ibid 36-39
