Years ago the late comedian Flip Wilson made us all laugh with his line, “The devil made me do it!” I believe that it is only human to look outside ourselves for excuses for behaving badly, and it has been going on from about day one. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree…” Who said that? “The serpent tricked me, and I ate…” Who said that? (Genesis 3:12-13)  With all due respect to the devil, however, the main source of evil and misery is not somewhere “out there” but somewhere “in here.”  Jesus said, “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” (Mark 7:22-23).

    I think there are two mistakes we commonly make when we read this Sabbath’s reading.  First, we mistakenly assume that Jesus is condemning “mere ritual;” second, many readers of this story assume wrongly that Jesus is saying that it is our intentions that make an action right or wrong.  Let us begin with some historical background.  The occasion for Jesus’ observation about the heart was the Pharisees’ criticism of his disciples for eating with unwashed hands. Jesus lived during one of Judaism’s greatest transformations.  The Pharisees represented the more liberal or progressive party in Judaism, and the Sadducees represented the more conservative party.  The Judaism of the Sadducees was centered on the Temple and its sacrifices; that of the Pharisees was focused on the Torah.  The destruction of the Temple in CE 70 allowed Pharisaic Judaism to triumph.  The “tradition of the elders” spoken of in today’s reading were compiled in the great commentary on the Torah we know as the Talmud.

    The issue that occasioned this dispute was the Pharisees’ teaching that observant Jews should wash their hands before eating.  The point of washing was to remove anything from one’s hands that might render one ritually unclean.  Notice that Jesus did not condemn ritual hand washing, per se. Rather Jesus took issue with the Pharisees for “teaching human precepts as doctrines.”  Christians have many rituals that make far less sense than ritual hand washing, and I am sure that all of us can think of silly and outdated practices in churches we have attended.  Woe to the usher who passes the offering plate in the wrong direction or to the minister who stands inside the door to greet worshipers rather than outside at the end of the service!

    The point, of course, is that ritual is neither good nor bad in itself.  Ritual is helpful if it keeps us from having to “reinvent the wheel” every time we do something.  Ritual is unhelpful and perhaps destructive if we are so tied to it that we cannot imagine another way of doing things or, worse, if it keeps God from leading us into new truths.  Jesus condemned the Pharisees not for washing their hands before meals but for not making the essential distinction between God’s commandments and human traditions.  There has probably never been a Christian church that has not done exactly the same thing.  Do you know how many Episcopalians, Methodists, and/or Seventh Day Baptists it takes to change a light bulb?  Why, my grandmother gave that light bulb to the church!

    The second and far more serious misunderstanding of today’s Sabbath reading is to believe that it is what is in our hearts, our intentions that determine the morality of our actions.  We have all heard people try to justify the most heinous deeds by saying, “Well, his heart was in the right place” or “But she did not mean to do it.”  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it does not matter what place one’s heart was in or what one meant to do.  Wrong is wrong.  What Jesus is saying it that much of the evil we encounter in the world issues not from somewhere “out there” but from somewhere “in here.”

    Why is there evil?  Why suffering? Cancer, AIDS, earthquakes, and hurricanes cause terrible suffering, but they also provide us the opportunity to exercise courage, compassion, and generosity.  I think far more suffering is caused by unfaithfulness, dishonesty, and deliberate cruelty.  Why, then, did God create us with such a dangerous defect?

    The heart is a remarkable organ.  It beats approximately 100,000 times a day, 365 days a year.  In an average lifetime the heart beats more than 2.5 million times and pumps more that 1 million barrels of blood – that is more than enough to fill one to three supertankers depending on the size of the supertanker!

    The heart is equally impressive as a metaphor.  In many languages “heart” is a metaphor for love and compassion.  We speak of “broken hearts,” “bleeding hearts,” “have a heart,” “from the bottom of my heart,” and of “giving my heart away.”  Similarly, we also speak of someone who lacks compassion as being “heartless,” and novelist Joseph Conrad entitled his great study of evil, Heart of Darkness.  We intuitively know the truth of Jesus’ observation that “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.”

    Why did God give us hearts of such moral ambiguity?  An old rabbinic tale helps me understand our dilemma.  In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the Almighty so filled time and space that there was no scope for human freedom.  God was all and in all.  When the angels pointed this out to God, the Holy One said, “Then I will withdraw from a tiny corner of creation.”  And so God left a corner of creation unfinished so that human beings may participate with the divine creativity in repairing the universe.  That corner of creation is found in the human heart.  To change the metaphor, a fault line runs through creation from top to bottom, and it passes through each and every heart.

      The great Indian nationalist leader Gandhi once urged his followers “to be the change” they wanted to see in the world.  God invites us to participate in repairing creation.  We begin by finding the holes in our own hearts and fixing them.  Amen.
     
      PRAYER: 
      Immaculate God, pour over us your cleansing waters and wash from us the pollution of self-righteousness, the stain of hatred, the filth of greed, the grime of pride. 
      Scrub from us our hypocrisy, which prefers the outward show of piety to the humility of inward transformation. 
      Purify us by your Spirit, so that we may think no evil, speak no evil, and do no evil in the creation that you declared good, we pray in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.