Tradition and Hypocrisy, Humility and Gratitude
Mar 7:1-8

Jesus says to religious leaders
“Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Our tradition, Presbyterianism, sometimes called Calvinism is something about which we have mixed feelings. At the beginning of the week I attended a conference celebrating 500 years since John Calvin’s birth. It was called Calvin Rediscovered and there was a bit of rediscovery going on. Although there is still much I find myself in disagreement with John Calvin about, I also discovered some real depth of insight to the thought of John Calvin and some it has to do with this thing called human tradition. Calvin certainly wanted to distinguish very clearly between human tradition and the word and commandment of God.
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Calvin would have had a lot to say about that verse, and not just in relation to catholic tradition, also in relation to the radical new tradition that was emerging in Geneva associated with his name and his reforms in that city.
Two things
• hypocrisy – “this generation honours me with their lips (publicly), but their hearts are far from me
• traditionalism – abandoning the commandment of God and holding instead to human tradition
So there’s two quite close ideas here. Let me put it another way. Firstly the gap between the public me and my real me, my heart (hypocrisy), and Secondly there’s the practice of living at the level of tradition (this is what we do round here, the way of our ancestors) vs living with a sense of being commanded by God (traditionalism).

The background is quite simple. Vs 1 says
“Now the Pharisees and some of the scribes noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is without washing them…”
What that Pharisaic tradition had done is it had extended the Priestly ritual of handwashing before entering the temple, into all of life – it had nothing to do with hygiene. It was really about rituals which represented a well ordered world. Keeping clean things away from unclean things.
There’s a strange thing about the Old Testament. Alongside the creation stories which celebrate the goodness of all creation, and God’s absolute difference as creator of everything… alongside that, we have these codes or rules of purity in which it appears that some things – like menstrual blood, or semen or certain animals – are regarded as not good, unclean.
There’s no simple way (that I know of) of making sense of these two things together. But what we do know is that Jesus had a habit of breaking those rules. He openly ate with sinners, touched lepers and so on. Jesus broke the rules of purity.
The Pharisees on the other hand wanted to reinforce the rules of purity. They had basically said, if it’s good enough for the priests it’s good enough for all of us, in their own way they believed in the “priesthood of all believers”. God is to be Lord of all of life, not just life at the temple. Not just Sunday – or Saturday – worship.

And Jesus is deeply concerned about this… why? Not because he thought religion should be kept for the temple… not at all… but he is concerned with the gap that is opening up between public performances and the reality of people’s lives.
This brings me back to our tradition. What I learnt from Randal Zachmann’s powerful lectures on John Calvin was that Calvin was deeply perceptive when it comes to psychology. For Calvin there are three selves. There is the self I present to the world [Hello, how are you, so lovely to meet you, how is your family]. The self I present to myself. [what an awful tie, I do hope he does tell me about his cat again, when will I get a word in…, I hope my acne is not too bad, I wonder how I can impress her with my scholarship]. And there is the self I dare not present even to myself and so am barely aware of and constantly avoid. Calvin says to know oneself is the hardest thing. It is as hard as knowing God. In fact the two go hand in hand. I know God as I know myself and myself as I know God.
And there is a reason why Calvin thinks we find knowing ourselves so difficult. We know ourselves comparatively. We compare ourselves to other. Think about the things about yourself that you value highly… or not so highly but they help to strengthen your sense of your own importance. Maybe like me you play the piano and when you compare yourself to someone like Frances you think, oh no I’m useless, but then you think but at least I can play better than someone else, so that way you don’t collapse in a heap. I invest a lot of myself in theology so when I meet or listen to a very clever theologian like Randal Zachmann or James Alison I feel completely useless. But then I can take consolation from the fact that there are those who know less about theology than me. Or maybe it’s about how much work you do for your church or your family. Or maybe it’s your skill with engineering, or your looks, or your body image. We can always find someone with whom we can compare ourselves positively. But notice what happens when you know yourself comparatively to others. You gain strength by putting them down… in your own mind.… It is only when we know ourselves before God that the picture changes. For then we know ourselves in complete humility. Before God it is humility or nothing… Gratitude for who I am as a creature in the very image of God or nothing.
Vs 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
We might expect him to say the commandments [plural] of God. Everyone knows the Jews lived according to 10 Commandments and then a whole lot more which together made up the law or Torah. But for Jesus all of these laws are focused on one central reality. For all that the Law has many jots and tittles, it is very much a unity. We know his summary well. “Love the Lord your God with all your, heart and all your mind and all your strength”. At the center of obedience is love. To love God is to be ‘commanded by God’ and to be impelled into a certain kind of relation to others. As God commands in love, God creates love. Human tradition does not… or only in a very partial way. It is the passing on of human fragility. It is part of the process of knowing myself by comparing myself to others. Our relationship to God is of a completely different kind from our relation to others in the human community of tradition.
God knows us inductively (according to Calvin) (from the inside out) … not deductively, like God makes deductions from what we offer, like we present evidence to God and God looks on from the outside and accepts our evidence, yes you did alright there and there but not there, so on balance that’s who you are… No God knows us from the inside out, the self we dare not admit even to ourselves, that is the place we meet God and that is the place where the commandment of God engages us. God knows us ‘in the Spirit’… and when the Spirit presents the risen Jesus as our judge (the true human) and our forgiveness, then a completely new life is possible.

So what might God be saying to us from today’s text… I think it’s something that resonates deeply with our Presbyterian heritage, even as it criticizes heritage for heritage’s sake, tradition for traditions sake, tradition as a way of avoiding God. What I hear is a profound challenge.
Unless I hear and embrace and obey the command of God, addressing me in the innermost part of my being, then I will be constantly seeking to bolster myself by putting others down, even if only in my head. To give up on the commandment of God is to surrender to the performances which constitute what Jesus calls human tradition. Tradition is not necessarily against God… But tradition on its own, tradition as a substitute for the commandment of God… that will be delusion. Living a delusion about my true self. Driven always towards subtle hypocrisies and false performances and endless struggles.
Not to abandon the commandment of God is a lifelong journey, it’s what we call life in the Spirit.

Bruce Hamill (St Clair Combined Service 30.8.09)