A Communion Meditation based on Mark 7: 1-23

The household I grew up in was a noisy, messy, raucous place—most of the time. There were lots of kids everywhere—some were extras we had either brought home with us from school or had brought home with us from church. In addition to my sister and brother, you know by now that many of those kids were some that my parents had just brought home from a place that was inappropriate for children—places where kids got abused or neglected or forgotten about altogether. As noisy, messy, and raucous as it was, it was for most of those foster kids the most organized and safe environment they had ever known.

There were very few mealtime rules at my house growing up. But the ones that were in place were impenetrable. Everyone had to show up. No radios or TVs on in the house at mealtime. Boys had to wear a shirt. Cheesehead was not allowed to read at the table. Grace was said. That was about it. What happened after grace was kind of like a free for all. You learn to grab, and grab fast in a big family with limited resources. It was like “The Waltons” cranked up a notch.

Looking back through adult eyes, I can remember that it didn’t take the newest members of the family very long to catch on. Except for Sam. Sam was about my age, which means he must have been about six or seven when he came to us. He was one of the first “move-ins” we had. Two things about Sam made him different from me: he didn’t get on the big yellow bus every morning and go off to Burney Elementary. He stayed home with my mother and little sister. And Sam didn’t know how to use silverware. I remember my mother patiently trying to teach him what a fork would do, how to scoop with a spoon. When he got frustrated, he would go back to eating with his hands.

I was much older when I finally understood why my mother had to teach Sam how to use utensils to eat. It was because no one else had ever bothered. Sam had grown up in a household where it was every person for themselves, and no one was able to care for him to the extent that they even taught him the basics of how to eat, or proper hygiene. I also learned why Sam didn’t go to school, even though he would have been in my grade if he had: Sam had never been toilet trained.

The world in which Jesus lived and taught had certain rules to mealtimes that were impenetrable. These rules had ritualistic importance as well as basic hygienic functions. In the ancient world, hands performed many of the functions that we have given over to machines, utensils and modern plumbing. The level of understanding of basic cleanliness and politeness determined that one hand was for what went into the body, and another hand for what came out of the body. (That’s as delicately as I can say it.) In the ancient word, one simply did not come to the table with unclean hands. It would have been as impolite and unthinkable as putting the toilet in the dining room.

So, once again, Jesus’ table manners have gotten him in trouble with the authorities. The Pharisees have noticed that he doesn’t do things according to the status quo. Nor do those who follow him. This immediately makes Jesus and those who pay any attention to him suspect in the eyes of the powers. The authorities don’t see him as a great teacher and rabbi, they see him as some uncouth punk from the country, who has come to desecrate their table and thumb his nose at their purity laws—laws which have been passed down from generation to generation by God-fearing, Torah-observing, self-respecting Jews. And isn’t he a Jew, by the way?

One of my best friends in my growing up years was also named (Cheeshead's First Name). Although we shared the same first name, middle name, and last initial, we couldn’t have grown up in more different households. Whereas my house was full of kids, messy, and noisy, hers was quiet, polite and so clean a person could eat off the kitchen floor—heck the bathroom floor!

The first few times I walked into her house it felt like walking onto a movie set. Everything matched, everything was beautifully lit, the carpet was soft, the floors and counter-tops gleamed. The first time I ate a meal there, there was this strange piece of folded up, color-coordinated cloth lying next to my plate. I had to watch her carefully to see what it was for. I had never seen a cloth napkin, you see. Staying at her house was like an adventure. I couldn’t wait to see how her mother changed the décor of the home for the seasons. They had winter curtains and summer curtains! One early December day I was over there after school, and my friend just casually mentioned that they had put up both of their Christmas trees. Both of their trees? “We have a casual tree in the family room, and a formal tree in the living room.” My friend explained. I had never been in the living room. It was a room we had never even walked into.

While my friend was in her room getting a book she was going to show me, I tiptoed quietly into the living room to see this formal tree. It was breathtaking— resplendent with white and gold glass balls, with shiny pale blue ribbons expertly placed, perfectly spaced so that the tree from every point of view was a magnificent sight. I just stood there, thinking that my friend was the luckiest person I knew.

“What do you think you are doing in there?” My friend’s mother was standing in the doorway, her face beet red with anger. “There’s a reason ______ is told to never let you in that room. Everyone knows you live in the middle of a hog lot. God only knows what pig s___ you dragged onto my carpet. Now I’ve got to have the whole room cleaned! And if you have touched that tree, your parents are replacing whatever ornaments you have broken.”

My eyes started to sting as I realized that something had indeed been forever broken. The illusion of my friend’s perfect home and perfect life had been shattered forever. I began to realize that every time my friend’s mother had refolded my cloth napkin after I had placed it on the kitchen counter after dinner, every time she had re-hung up my jacket, putting it on the hanger just a little straighter after I had put it in the closet, every time she had asked my friend to come to the doorway and straighten her shoes where she had left them (perfectly straight) on the mat, she had been acting out of her own inability to be anything other than perfect. I began to see that my friend obeyed her mother out of fear of a scene happening just like the one in the living room. I began to hear the way my friend made apologies for her mother’s way of treating other kids. “Important people come to our house—congressmen and senators—it has to be a show home.”

I began to realize that at the heart of it all my friend's home and life were very troubled and that the cleanliness and orderliness were only on the surface. I began to appreciate—as much as a teenage daughter can—the raucous, messiness and organized chaos of my own home. I began to understand on some level that what you see is not always what you get.

Jesus is asking his followers to shift their focus from what is ritualistically pure to what is pure at the very heart. What comes from within is what is genuine, what is formative, what is lasting. What we take in is temporary, and passes right out again.

This meal we share together is mysterious in that it is an amalgamation of the temporary and the permanent. The Pharisees believed that each thing that entered the body defined the body. If a food, or ritual, or dining companion was defiled, the whole meal, the whole table was defiled. Jesus teaches instead that the matter of purity is determined by something much more lasting. It is not determined by the manners one brings to the table, but the manner of the heart. Christ wants not to enter our stomachs when we partake of body and blood, but to invade our hearts, to impart lasting change. This is why we do not teach that a person must earn the place at the table through ritual obedience, but that we come joyfully to this feast in the hope that we will be changed through the act of communing with each other.

The manners that we must bring here are not politeness and cleanliness, a spotless, sinless record, but instead are thanksgiving, gratitude, and a willingness to be transformed through the encounter with Christ we will experience here. This table, this feast, shatters illusions. It reminds us: there is no place too messy, too chaotic, too frenetic that God’s grace cannot invade. There are no hands that Christ will not touch. Even ours.

Thanks be to God!