What Matters
As Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went in and took his place at the table. His host was amazed to see that he sat down to eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony required by Jewish custom. Then the Lord said to him, “You Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and wickedness! Fools! Didn’t God make the inside as well as the outside? So clean the inside by giving gifts to the poor, and you will be clean all over.
“What sorrow awaits you Pharisees! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore justice and the love of God. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things.
“What sorrow awaits you Pharisees! For you love to sit in the seats of honor in the synagogues and receive respectful greetings as you walk in the marketplaces. Yes, what sorrow awaits you! For you are like hidden graves in a field. People walk over them without knowing the corruption they are stepping on.” (Luke 11:37-44)
Jesus was not against personal hygiene. But he used the issue of ceremonial washing as the opportunity to push a Pharisee outside his comfort zone, in order to help him reassess his relationship with God. If Jesus had simply asked the Pharisee what was most important in the law, he would have received the proper, canned response about loving God and loving people. But those words had little to do with how he conducted his life.
Like so many religious people, this Pharisee mostly concerned himself with boundary issues: the quantifiable things that separated him—the “righteous” person he believed he was—from them, the “unrighteous” people who did what he didn’t. It was easy to quantify and measure boundary issues: making sure that he gave the penny to God from the dime he found on the street. Or—to put it in a modern context—that he said a prayer before he put any food in his mouth. It was good to tithe and to pray. But it was more important to focus on how you cared for the distressed and needy, how you treated your neighbors and coworkers and family—let alone strangers like the clerks in the store or the beggar in the street.
Jesus wanted the Pharisee to look at the hard things of righteousness, not the easy boundary issues.
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