Thursday • 8/3/2023 
Thursday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 70; Psalm 71; 2 Samuel 4:1–12; Acts 16:25–40; Mark 7:1–23 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we consider some aspect of that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. On this Thursday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 12 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

“For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:21–23).  

Jesus’s opponents—the scribes and the Pharisees—can be too easily dismissed, I think, as fools and dullards. When it comes to their scruples about cleanliness at mealtime, well, perhaps it took the late 19th and early 20th century discovery of the germ-origin of many diseases to make us appreciative enough of the importance of hygiene. Hand washing and food preparation do help people avoid disease, and even death. 

Nonetheless, Jesus isn’t talking about physical hygiene, is he? He’s talking about a different sort of hygiene. A hygiene of the heart. Waste from food that comes into us simply exits as excrement. As Jesus notes: “…it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer” (Mark 7:19). What should concern us, he contends, is the filth that comes out of unclean hearts: “It is what comes out of a person that defiles” (Mark 7:20). Jesus finds it especially loathsome that we have the capacity to cover irreligion and unrighteousness with a veneer of religiosity and righteousness: “Sorry, Mom and Dad, we pledged so much to the church that we can’t help you make ends meet” (Mark 7:11, paraphrased, of course).  

Part of the gap between us and the contemporaries whom Jesus critiques is that they, at least, distinguish between clean and unclean, between holy and unholy. At least they recognize the categories. At least they are trying. For various reasons, we don’t get it. Some of what separates us from that world is the rank secularism and disenchantment of life that modernity has brought with it. Aided and abetted, I would contend, by a hyper-Protestant, anti-sacramental insistence that “all things, not just some things, are holy.” The result is that we’ve encouraged a mindset that says playing golf or soccer on Sunday is as good as going to church; “bagels and coffee” at Starbucks is as sacred as “wafers and wine” in the assembly. If everything is holy, eventually nothing is holy. If there’s a difference between Jesus’s world and ours, that’s it. And people in that world were closer to the truth than we are.  

Where Jesus’s contemporaries get it wrong is that the difference between holy and unholy isn’t “out there” — in food, or things, or people. The difference is within us. Our hearts manufacture excrement which we spew on everybody and everything around us. Or … our hearts produce what the apostle Paul describes as the fruit of the Holy Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22b–23a). And those are the things — and they are holy — that come out of us onto everything and everyone whose lives we touch.  

There are probably worthy observations to be made from the ignoble examples of Ishbaal’s assassins, his lieutenants Rechab and Baanah (2 Samuel 4:5–12). And worthwhile observations as well from the noble example of the Philippian jailer whose question, “What must I do to be saved?” opens up to him a world he never could have imagined.  

But this morning, I can’t get past this astounding challenge from Jesus to look within: just what is it that flows out from the depths of my being?  

Collect for Proper 12. O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+