missio

This week I’m teaching through Matthew 15. The chapter starts out with one of my favorite criticisms of Jesus and His disciples: they don’t wash their hands enough. The great thing is that it’s a serious accusation in their culture. The ritual of hand-washing was performed to cleanse one’s self of any contamination caused by contact with anything considered ‘unclean’. The disciples were Jewish, they would’ve done this by nature and nurture. The very fact that they didn’t wash their hands showed that Jesus, somewhere along the lines, either told them not to do so, or asked why they did. And they just stopped.

So what does that mean for us? Well, how do we try to “stay clean”? We stay away from certain areas in our cities. We stay away from certain people in our neighborhood. We avoid watching certain things, we avoid listening to other things, we avoid discussing particular topics.  Avoidance has rapidly become our ritual of hand-washing. Jesus says to stop it! By avoiding things, we are breaking God’s command to love our neighbor. Avoidance is the opposite of love; it is passive hatred.

So what are we to do? Well, it’s actually the topic of my next book, Mud In My Eye. In John 9, Jesus gets down and dirty and works in the mud, just as the blind man sits in it. Jesus gets dirty with His neighbor, and addresses the man’s need face-to-face. In the dirt and grime of his situation. Contrast this with the hand-washing uproar the Pharisees bring up. And the washing of the hands by Pontius Pilate. Pilate very well could have done something to change Jesus’ predicament, but instead he “absolved” himself of responsibility by washing his hands. How often do we wash our hands as “clean” Christians?