It’s What’s Inside Us
A Reflection by Trevor Bechtel on September 1st 2024
Good morning,
I’ve always loved this poem from the Song of Songs. It’s a beautiful image of desire. It was a favorite of a college girlfriend of mine and we worked together to set in an illuminated calligraphy for the wedding of some of her friends. That was one of my first experiences of feeling like there was some art that I could do. It’s amazing how much of a curse messy handwriting could be in the 80’s.
I don’t think I’d encountered the Song of Songs until then. I can’t recall it or anything like it being a part of any worship service at the church I grew up in. And since that church didn’t encourage its young people to read through the Bible from start to finish I didn’t encounter it personally. But that girlfriend grew up differently than me, with parents a decade younger than my parents and a very different sense of what counted as art. She was also a couple years older than me, and that makes a big difference when you are 19 and 21.
The Song of Songs is a strange part of our canon. It is a love poem, and a very beautiful one at that, but it’s unclear especially to the modern reader, what it might have to do with God. God isn’t mentioned, and while it could be analogy of how much the person of faith loves God, it is much more believable as love poetry between two humans. It has been very differently received by modern Christians. It should be a reminder that human love is a beautiful thing, but modern Christians have not always had that idea especially when that human love is not same race cisgendered heterosexual love. It should
Thinking about who loves who is probably the best contemporary analogy for what is going on in the other scripture passage we heard this morning. In Mark 7 Jesus engages the scholars about the nature of a very good rule. The rule is that you should wash your hands. How many of you believe you should wash your hands? I mean this is a rule that has only gotten more timely. You’ll note that the rule in the bible is that you wash your hands all the way up to the elbow. They probably did this because Sundials didn’t have second hands and Happy Birthday hadn’t been composed yet. I think Fauci would be fine with either. Anyways, it is certainly not the rule that is the problem here.
I think that Jesus is frustrated with a few different things here. One is the invocation of tradition here. The rule was traditional for the scholars, but it’s not really in the Torah. The other, and probably more important reason, is that the scholars bring it up with desire to impose it on others and bring up what should be a statement as a question. Jesus wastes no time or civility in his response, choosing a scripture from their common tradition that shows just how uninterested he is in taking the scholars approach.
And with the lectionary handling the editing, he gets to the punchline quickly, “Listen to me, all of you, and try to understand. Nothing that enters from the outside makes us impure; it is what comes out of us that makes us impure.”
I realize, especially when Susan suggested it when we got home last week, that I probably went on a little bit too long last week. And so feel free to stop listening now. I’ve said what I came here to say; that when Jesus says it is what is inside us, not what is coming at us from other people, that makes us impure, he means it. What is coming from inside other people may be making them impure, but it is not making us impure. Other people may be wrong, they may in fact not be washing their hands, but it is not an appropriate subject for our attention. What is in our hearts is where we should focus.
I went on too long last week because I wanted to include Rem Koolhaas’ idea of Junkspace. You’ll remember that Junkspace is the collection of modern spaces which proliferate at a furious pace, but fail to amount to anything. When we are thinking about our external spaces Junkspace gives us one perspective. But when we turn to interior spaces Junkspace suggests another perspective.
When we look at our cities we see that they are full of new things, but also that they are all the same. I talked about the Panera on Washtenaw last week, but there is very little difference from one Panera to another. There are Panera’s everywhere, and they are all the same. The consistency of the modern world is not a benefit for the person who wants meaning. When everything is the same meaning can evaporate It’s harder to see what is distinct and harder to see what is therefore significant when everything is the same.
When we take this insight into our hearts and interrogate how it shapes our own meaning making we realize, entirely consistent with Jesus response to the scholars, that we probably pay attention to too many things. Koolhaas locates this in our development as humans.
“Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting….
Through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepressible attention span, we helplessly register, provide insight, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless..”
The scholars instinct to make handwashing into a way to challenge Jesus is one example of this. I was certainly guilty of this last week focusing on all my complaints with Panera, which for those of you who missed last week, and both many and meaningless.
We can see another example of this when people with minority identities need to do extra work to justify their competence. Kamala Harris refused to answer a question about her identity in her first interview as a presidential candidate this week. The question is like the scholars question, not germane to what is really important.
Picking out what is meaningful is in fact much harder than analyzing everything. Knowing what kind of laws, or actions, or thoughts, or emotions are going to yield meaning is even more difficult. However, attending to what is coming from inside us rather than what is coming at us is one way we can discipline ourselves to hope for a future that becomes what we might actually like to see. Another is to receive what is coming at us with grace, humility, and openness.
One of the reasons that this might be worth the effort is that a more focused set of concerns and attention will probably make us happier.
Betrand Russell offers a good description of happiness in this vein, “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
Again, this work is not easy. But Jesus doesn’t defend people who don’t wash their hands because he wants to take the easy way forward. Amen.