In Mark 7, Jesus is responding to religious leaders who are criticizing his disciples for not living up to the teachings of the elders.  In this case, the disciples weren’t following a religious custom of washing their hands.

At one point, he seems to say,

You don’t care about what God says about how to live. You care about what people have said that God must have meant about how to live. You care about establishing rules about how to live.

+++

Our attention and our time are eaten up looking at other people. We wonder what they will think of us, we wonder what they would think of us if they even paid attention to us.

We look at people who say they speak for God. And we worry about whether we are measuring up to their standards for what God says.

We hear, “A real follower of God would say these things, vote this way, like these people. A real follower of God wouldn’t care about those people, wouldn’t say those things.”

And then we get to the hospital. And someone says, “God should heal me. Because look at how I’ve lived, how I’ve followed the rules that Pastor Spiritual taught, how much I’ve spent supporting Project Spiritual.”

And we slowly start to learn that God doesn’t heal because we say God should heal. And that the rules and people we’ve been following weren’t what God actually said, but were layers on top.

And so, we can start to listen to Jesus. We start to listen for Jesus. We stop talking so much about others. We start caring more for others. We stop thinking so much about what others think. We start thinking more about what Jesus actually thinks, which is, that he loves us and cares for us and invites us to love people more than hate people and to bring our own lives into loving allegiance with God before worrying about the allegiances of others.

The invitation is always to prayerfully look at the rules and say, “are we following God or are we following people who have turned suggestions into rules?”

It’s tricky, though. Because both our obedience to and our rebellion against people can take us away from following God.

+++

From my hospital chapel talk on the twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time.