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I was told when I was a little kid that dirty hands were a no-no. My mother ruled our house and raised us with little disciplines and big ones, too. That was one of them, handwashing. 

Little or big, you decide. In this Labor Day week, as we wash up and rest from our labors, we have this challenging showdown in Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15 and 21-23, where Jesus taught us powerfully. 

I don’t know about you. But if I’m preparing food for my body or yours, the first thing I’m doing is to wash my hands. In fact, depending on what eggs or meat I’m handling, I may wash my hands a few times while I cook. 

Now, let me assure you that no matter who it was, Jesus or anybody else, my Mother would have taken issue with what our Lord said here on the surface of it. 

On the surface, his words right here are responding to the issue the Pharisees were having with his disciples. That was specifically around eating without having first washed their hands. 

Mark, ever eager to keep the story moving, does the opposite. Curiously, he gives us no less than five lines of documentary editorial. In a parenthesis, he explains Kosher Law as it pertained to the matter of handwashing.

Then, the Pharisees ask their question. Jesus responds by citing a prophecy from Isaiah that predicted hypocrites who would, among other things, insist on following human traditions even to the point of making them doctrine while abandoning God’s commandments.  

I would observe that looking around our prevailing Christian culture today, I’m afraid not much has changed in roughly two thousand years. There are a lot of Christians with clean hands but dirty hearts. Unfortunately, many of them are the ones speaking for the larger movement. 

Now, here is our problem. We can’t go further into unpacking today’s scripture just yet, because of the nine-hundred-gallon jar of hand sanitizer that’s in the room.  

You see, we know that on this matter, the Pharisees may have been misguided in the spirit of their accusations. But in a modern biological world, we also know that what Jesus said back to them wasn’t entirely true. So now we have to address that distraction. Else nothing we do moving forward is going to have full validity. 

I am not about to start reminding you of the full list of things that could get in the pores of your skin or stuck under your fingernails and then make their way in while you’re using your mouth to clean off that finger-licking goodness from the fried chicken, for instance. We are all one handshake away, one walk through someone else’s sneeze in the grocery store, from not feeling well. 

So many of us hear these words from Jesus and on the surface, we react by saying, “Yeah, but….” 

Here’s the thing. We are never supposed to just listen to Jesus on the surface. That is the modern-day infection that plagues Christianity, in my opinion. Trite, almost superstitious living that masquerades as theology. 

What’s that saying? Too many people have been inoculated with a mild strain of Christianity that keeps them from ever developing a full-blown case.

Because when we look a little more deeply, what he had to say here is powerful. It’s transformative, really. It should fill any of us with hope and encouragement. Yet it had absolutely nothing to do with dirty hands and taking in germs.

Someone has said that most of the war, violence and conflict in human history was ultimately perpetrated because someone was trying to get someone else to think they were important. 

I find myself pondering that over and over again in response to having heard Jesus’ words today. He knew that the well-intentioned Law was now being weaponized in cooperation with the empire and to an oppressive level.

His larger care was about people. His focus was on how things are supposed to run in God’s kingdom. Things that, in Jesus’ wisdom, outranked and outweighed the details and practices found in the Law. 

Into a legalistic system where all were destined to fail, Jesus turned to the crowd and spoke a word of hope. What was that? His message was simple. You can have dirty hands and still have a clean heart. No shame in that. 

But if you have clean hands and a dirty heart? Well, now that’s just a place none of us want to go.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.