These days, we are very aware of the importance of washing your hands as part of ensuring good hygiene. From the earliest days of the pandemic, it has been made clear that one of the most effective things we can do to prevent us from getting the virus is to make sure we wash our hands properly and often. Indeed, even before this, didn’t we always ensure we had washed our hands before we ate? I don’t think you’ll find anyone that says we shouldn’t be washing our hands, yet our reading today seems to suggest the opposite.
Jesus is being criticised by the Pharisees for not washing His hands before He or His disciples eat. Fair enough, we think, until we realise that this isn’t to do with hygiene but with ritual purity. The Pharisees engaged in a public act of hand washing to demonstrate they were ritually pure to carry out holy tasks. Yet while they made this public act of devotion to God, in their hearts, they did things that were against God. The example Jesus provides is that their rules that allow a person to avoid honouring their mother and father as stated in the ten commandments. Jesus points out that ritualistic gestures are no use if they obstruct the commandments of God. He calls them “hypocrites”, literally people who don a mask to play a role. While on the outside they may appear to be clean, the same cannot be said for their inside!
Jesus stresses that we should be less worried about what goes into us than what comes out of us. How we act is informed by our character, and that is stuff that is already inside us. Jesus calls us to change our hearts, to become more loving, compassionate, and gracious towards each other. If we change our hearts then what we do, how we live, will come from our character, who we are. How many Christians go to church and look holy in public, yet behave in a way that runs completely counter to the gospel message? No amount of public displays of piety will wash away the harms caused by this, nor change the heart of the person concerned. Let’s concentrate on cleaning our hearts first, then we will find our actions will follow. We will become far cleaner if we clean ourselves from the inside out. We must continue to wash our hands for hygiene reasons, but not for spiritual reasons. As St Theresa of Avila may have said, “from silly devotions and sour faced saints, good Lord, deliver us”