I come from a Christian tradition that eschews the organisation of worship. Drawing on an approach to worship developed in the 20th century which drew on Romantic thought, spontaneous worship was seen as more authentic and repetitious liturgy deadening to the soul. My own experience has been quite the inverse. I found spontaneous worship to be surprisingly repetitious and only different in that the level of care was lower and many crucial elements of worship (particularly confession and absolution) were often omitted. I love the prayerbook and find worship using Cranmer’s prose to be uniquely nourishing to my soul.
I bring this sensibility to my reading of liturgy, particularly those texts in the New Testament which are so often wielded as weapons by the anti-liturgical. One of these came up today in the sermon, and liturgy was far from the topic which was eloquently covered by the preaching today, it still struck me as an interesting challenge for biblical interpreters striving to remain contemporary while not anachronistic.
The text is from Mark 7:
“Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:1–13 ESV)
The Pharisees and scribes, described as coming from the liturgical police in Jerusalem, were probably sent to undermine Jesus’ ministry by pointing out the lax conduct of his disciples here. Mark even provides his readers with a gloss in verse 3 explaining the basis for their criticism. There is a polemic against the Pharisees on several levels here.
First, that they are slavishly attentive to ritual behavior without getting at the heart of the matter. Jesus drives this home by quoting Isaiah 29:13.1
Second, and perhaps worse still, this attentiveness to ritual is based on an overwrought respect for the “tradition of the elders” (Greek: paradosin tōn presbyterōn) as Jesus notes, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). He goes on to intensify this critique of tradition in verse 9 and following as he notes that the practice of corban is a “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”
As I’ve seen, our response to this very incisive critique by Jesus can be overextended, and I tend to think that an over-reaction which seeks to abolish ‘tradition’ and purge our religion of ‘ritual acts’ has its own consequences. In some ways, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s appeal to tradition as a basis for the cultivation of coherent moral action, is a 20th century reaction to the 19th and early 20th century to the sort of over-reaction by Protestant Christians I am describing here.
So if we are to try and avoid overreaction, I would like to explore some possible ways we can read this text (and others like it) more carefully and less anachronistically.
First of all, as my good professor of NT studies at Regent college suggests, it is important to get the Phrarisees right: the trouble with the Pharisees is not that they sought to construct impossibly elaborate ritual schemes that imprisoned people. Rather, as Rikk Watts suggests: “we often hold them to be hypocrites and fairly nasty people” but actually, “you’d probably like having a Pharisee next door, they were good people: no late night parties; no wild women or loud cars; no drugs; a bit over keen on being religious, but not too bad. In fact they were respected by the people; even though the people couldn’t live up to their expections… Why then did they come in for such flack [from Jesus and his disciples]? Because they are the ones who are offering the most serious alternative to Jesus. Populist to a degree; not distant and self-interested like the Sadducees; not violent like the zealots, nor off with the visionaries in the desert: which for most was just not an alternative.” (a few quotes from Rikk’s brilliant Introductory NT course, in the lecture on Jewish and Palestinian Backgrounds to the NT).
Jesus’ rejoinder to the Pharisees changes the language slightly, which is also noteworthy – while the pharisees are concerned that the disciples seem to be unconcerned with the “tradition of the elders” (paradosin tōn presbyterōn), picking up on the opposition posed in Isaiah 29, Jesus suggests that they “abandon God’s commandments” and instead “hold to the tradition of men” (krateite tēn paradosin tōn anthrōpōn) – in verse 9 his reference is just to “your tradition,” elders are not mentioned again until Mark 8:312. It helps if we note that this opposition is a specific one: between the commands of God, probably a reference to the Torah (or books of Moses) and the tradition of men (which is probably a reference to the accumulated oral tradition of rabbinic halachah, which involved exegesis on scripture). Taken in this light, Jesus’ example in vs. 10-13 makes a good deal of sense: primacy is given to the Torah where we read in the law of Moses that one is to honor father and mother3. We may interpret that text, but if our interpretation overrides its plain meaning, this is unacceptable. But this example is itself a noteworthy defense of tradition, both in the sense of affirming the primacy of the original statement of the covenant over against innovative new interpretations, and in the very basic affirmation to honor one’s parents – which is itself the most basic definition of tradition.
So we can not only rescue tradition here, but in fact affirm that Jesus is calling the Pharisees to a conservative form of tradition reception. But what of the dismissal of liturgy that we find in Jesus’ words here? There are two different sets of ritual acts noted in the text: first ritual handwashing which Mark observes is not merely Pharasaic practice, but universally Jewish (in vs. 3 “…and all the Jews” GK: pantes hoi Ioudaioi). The second is added by Mark in vs. 4, where he refers to other sorts of ritual washing: “And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.” I’ll have to do a bit more background work on this before I’m confident about my conclusions here, but I’ll preliminarily suggest that the same opposition holds for this example. Ritual washing for all people is nowhere prescribed in the Hebrew bible. We find the instruction in Exodus 30 that Aaron and his sons wash their hands before approaching the altar (which may have provided the basis for the rabbinic instruction), but this is as specific as the Hebrew bible gets on the matter. So the rejection here of ritual washing is not a rejection of a liturgical practice prescribed in Torah, but a creative extrapolation of one. This seems to me to be an important distinction, and affirms that we are not rejecting liturgical worship, but a dangerous method of interpreting scripture as the basis for commending certain liturgical forms.
Of course, I’m not so sure that the intention here is to reject creative biblical interpretation either, but I’ll save that one for another post!
- 1. “And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” (Isaiah 29:13–14 ESV)
- 2. “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31 ESV)
- 3. ““Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12 ESV)