How many of you know what the Five Second Rule is? There’s a bit of folk wisdom, well, really, kids’ wisdom, that says it’s ok to eat a piece of food that’s fallen on the floor if it’s been there less than five seconds. I’ll confess, I’d never heard of it when I was growing up. When I was a kid, if food hit the ground, it was contaminated; it was dirty. If you were caught picking something off the floor to eat, you were ridiculed. I suppose the five-second rule entered my consciousness some time in the late 90s. The curious thing is how widespread the idea is now, and how well studied it has been by scientists. Although there continues to be debate, it’s probably the case that food that has been on the floor for more than five seconds is full of bacteria.

You all know what I’m talking about even if you’ve never heard of the “five second rule.” There are certain things we simply don’t do in our culture—things we don’t or most of us don’t eat, things we don’t touch. There’s often very little logical explanation for such don’ts, but if we transgress those rules, we run the risk of looking foolish or worse.

What’s really at stake here is not the scientific merits of a behavior or taboo, but something else—our cultural values concerning dirt and contamination. A chocolate chip cookie that’s been on the floor for four seconds is OK to pick up and eat. Anthropologists tell us that every culture has its taboos, clear lines between what is clean and what is dirty, and rules, either stated or understood, over how something that is clean becomes dirty. Such taboos help us understand many underlying cultural values.

Cultures do it, but often, usually, such taboos also have religious sanction. Most religions have elaborate rules about pure and impure, clean and unclean, and rituals to purify that which has been defiled. In our culture, instead of putting religious sanction behind our taboos, we emphasize dirt and cleanliness. Nonetheless, our cultural aversions are often more based in deeply entrenched values, rather than science or medicine.

This makes it hard for us to understand the cultural and religious values of the Bible. The elaborate purity code in the Hebrew Bible, with its rules about what to eat and what not to eat, what to do if you came in contact with something unclean, are very foreign to us. The reason for that can be found in texts like today’s Gospel, where Jesus and the Pharisees come into conflict over rules related to purity. It’s very easy for us to miss the heart of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, because we live long after the conflict was settled, and all of those who wanted to keep the Jewish purity laws but recognize Jesus as the Messiah were marginalized and ultimately forced out of Christianity. That was a long conflict that boiled over in the early decades of Christianity before Paul’s view of things won out.

The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was emphatically not a conflict between Christianity and Judaism. It was not a conflict between two different religions. Rather, it was a conflict within Judaism, a conflict that had its roots in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. By Jesus’ day, the issue was not that the law was too hard to keep. That’s a modern Protestant misinterpretation of Judaism. In fact, the movement led by the Pharisees sought to expand the law’s coverage, especially the laws about purity.

Their concern was, as the rabbis said, “to build a wall around Torah.” In other words, they sought to develop an interpretation of the law that made it possible for all Jews to keep it. Their goal was to provide ordinary people with a set of guidelines that would help them know how to keep the individual laws. In the case of the purity regulations, they sought to expand its application beyond the priests, for whom it was meant in Leviticus and Exodus, to all the people.

It’s important to understand just what the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was about—interpretation of the law, and especially interpretation of the purity laws. It was not a conflict between external religious practice and inward piety. That’s the way Christians have often understood the conflict and thus they see Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees as an attack on external practice. When Jesus tells the Pharisees that impurity does not come from the outside, but rather an impure heart leads to sins, he is redefining purity and holiness. Sin, Jesus is saying, comes from within. Evil intentions lead to evil acts.

The lesson from the Letter of James makes the same point in a slightly different way, “Be ye hearers of the word also, and not just doers.” This letter, well it’s not really a letter, more like a collection of ethical advice, emphasizes moral action. Throughout, the author of the letter emphasizes the importance of faith expressing itself by doing good toward others.

We don’t think in terms of purity much these days, we don’t even use the term holiness very much. They seem old-fashioned, irrelevant in the contemporary world, not even terribly important in our lives of faith. But to ignore such important categories is to miss something that was crucial in Jesus’ message in the first century, and should remain of central significance to those who would follow him in the twenty-first century.

Holiness has meant different things over the centuries. In the biblical tradition, of course, holiness was above all something denoted of God. But the real connotation of the term, both in the Hebrew, and later in the form we are also familiar with it—sacred, both terms mean essentially being set apart. That which is sacred, or holy is different from, that which is not. In a sense, what is holy or sacred is God’s, and that’s why when the people of Israel came to think of themselves as God’s chosen people, they use rules of purity to set themselves apart from other peoples. Over time, those purity rules became more important as they came to define the differences between the people of God and others. So in Leviticus, when the Israelites received the laws of purity, the holiness code, it found its meaning with God’s statement “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The question of course, is what all this means. We are called to be a holy people, yet if you’re like me, you probably bristle at the notion. Some of us have good reason to do so. There was a time in the Episcopal Church, maybe some of you can remember it, when if you were divorced, you couldn’t receive communion. I don’t know if that was the practice here at Grace before rules were liberalized in the 70s; I know it was true in churches in South Carolina.

For the Judaism of Jesus’ day, such purity rules were all about preserving the community over against a dominant and domineering culture. Over the centuries such rules, laws, had become more important, especially as the Jewish community had to struggle to survive as a subject of mighty empires.

But Jesus challenged that view of things. Such purity rules, as helpful as they were and are in preserving community, went against something even more important to Jesus—the full inclusion of all people among his followers. We will see this more clearly in the coming weeks, but it is no accident that Mark puts this dispute about Jesus’ disciples keeping the purity code right after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. For there was no more perilous moment for someone who kept purity laws than eating. And since they were somewhere out in the wilderness, as Mark makes clear, there would have been no way to keep the purity laws concerning the washing of hands, or, of food.

That’s precisely what Jesus was advocating and living, a move away from a notion of holiness that divides and excludes, toward one that is inclusive—a holiness of the heart, rather than a holiness of rules. What that means for us in the twenty-first century may not be exactly clear. What is clear is that we still have our purity codes that tend to divide us. In a way, the debates over sexuality in the Episcopal Church are just that–a conflict over a purity code driven by fear of contamination.
Jesus’ words challenge us to rethink our deepest cultural values and some of our deepest aversions. To be the inclusive, welcoming community that Jesus has called us to be means not only eliminating the barriers and rules that divide us but to embrace one another in a spirit of love and forgiveness and above all, to transform the love we experience in our acceptance by God, to the love of others. Or to use the words of the Letter of James, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”