Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, February 16, 2020
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Jesus demanded that people attend to the internal things that defile.
It had been a long time since Israel had had a prophet to help them see where they had gone off course from God’s word. As humans will do, they had held tightly to external things—rituals, rites, habits—instead of following God’s laws internally—love, compassion, justice, peace.
Jesus could see how far from God’s word people had gone. He could prioritize words and actions according to God’s intent better than anyone had before.
Jesus used ritual hand-washing as an example. God gave a law about hand-washing to keep people safe from germs that might make them sick or even kill them. But the people had taken the hand-washing to a new level. They had turned it into a ritual that was sometimes unnecessary (one can wash their hands without making a ritual of it). The ritual had become the focus, rather than a focus on eating clean.
But Jesus also saw that the things that come from within were being unattended. Things like “fornication, theft, murder...” were far more damaging to humans and human society than eating with clean, but not ritually-washed hands.
Even today, it is easier to attend to external things than internal ones. It is much easier to blame a co-worker for being late than to attend to our own lack of motivation to get our work done to the best of our ability. It is easier to auto-pay our bills for the luxuries we attain (cable and cellphone service are, globally speaking, luxuries) than to shift our perspective internally to make charitable giving a higher priority. External habits are easier to make than the internal perspective shifts that get those habits to stick.
Jesus could see that the lack of attention to the things that truly matter were tearing the community apart. Mothers and fathers were being neglected because the synagogues were demanding that their support be turned over as offerings to God. The poor, sick, imprisoned, developmentally and physically challenged, women, widows, and children were all being neglected or mistreated. If society really wanted to follow God’s ways, they would have to attend to the things inside that prevented them from attending to the people who were suffering.
Dear Jesus, rites and rituals often fail to reach what you really require of me; redirect my life to look only to you. Amen.
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