What Defiles: Food, the Body, and the Presence of God

Proper 17/15th after Pentecost, Year B; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

The lectionary moves back to Mark’s Gospel now, just where we had left it some weeks ago. This story of a controversy with the Pharisees and with scribes “from Jerusalem” hints at a further change of scene as coming events increasingly cast a shadow over what remains to be done in Galilee.

This exchange about defilement has been treated as a crux at which Jewish and Christian practices diverge, especially around issues of ritual (like washing) and diet. The passage could be understood to say (or to have Jesus saying) that it makes no difference what you eat, only what you say or do otherwise.

Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin is among those who point out that Christians may have been reading all this incorrectly, at least if we assume that here Jesus is expressing indifference to traditional Jewish dietary laws.¹ Nothing in Mark (or any other Gospel) suggests Jesus eats pork or shellfish for instance, or even that he eats with gentiles. In Mark as in the other Gospels, Jesus will shortly go on dutifully to visit the Temple and to keep the Passover. What is going on here then?

The lectionary version of the passage is somewhat edited; the full text of Mark 7 makes this issue about food a bit sharper still, since in v. 19 there is a curious phrase that the NRSV translates “Thus he declared all foods clean.”² If this is an accurate rendering, this seems to be editorializing—not what Jesus says, that is, but what Mark says—that renders even more stark the suggestion that food (and by extension the Law of Moses) really doesn't matter.

The passage starts however with a controversy about washing rather than with types of food. In vv. 3-4 Mark provides a careful rendition of a set of ancient Jewish practices. This tells us two things about the author and audience, but only one has usually been picked up on. Clearly Mark's readership is not well aware of these details and needs the background, so these are imagined as gentiles, yes. However by implication the evangelist is quite capable of giving them such an explanation, with a sort of insider ring to it.

The issue then moves to food itself. As Boyarin points out, the well-known Jewish dietary laws that exclude certain foods at all times are actually not the same as laws about impurity or defilement, which might (also) affect diet, but for quite different reasons. On the one hand pork, shellfish, milk and meat together, and certain other items are just always off the menu for observant Jews, not because they are “defiled” but simply as forbidden. Defilement or impurity however—the English terms are rather loaded and perhaps unhelpful—is different; it refers to often very normal and necessary issues such as menstruation, sores on the skin, touching corpses—an important thing and good thing, given the importance of care for the dead, then as now—which affected all sorts of people, involuntarily, daily or weekly, and unavoidably.

“Purity” in this sense was thus relatively rare, given how life works, and not necessarily related to morality or obedience to the law. It was strictly important only for priests and others going to the Temple, such as for festivals, since ritual purity was necessary for sacrifice. Since most Jewish people were “defiled” in the strict sense most of the time, even otherwise allowed foods (i.e., those not from the forbidden categories) were also technically impure or defiled, but nevertheless viewed as entirely normal readily eaten without qualms.

The Pharisees however, still a rather new school of Jewish thought in Jesus’ time, formulated the remarkable suggestion that priestly purity could be obtainable by all Jews all the time, and that this was a means of coming closer to God. It is an appealing, impressive idea, and the basis of most of what we know today as Jewish theology and practice—a democratizing, egalitarian, and serious approach to religion, that de-centered the rituals of the Temple and took the spirit of worship into any place, time, and person.

So when Jesus encounters the Pharisees and their ideas here, we have arguably the two most serious and interesting versions of Judaism at the time, and certainly the two versions that would survive, prosper, and then compete. The undeniable tension we sense in how these meetings are rendered in the Gospel tradition owes something to the circumstances of the authors, and to later settings where Christians (as Jesus’ followers became) and Pharisees continued to contest the law of Moses and the heritage of the Temple, even after it had been destroyed.

With that in mind, note that Mark’s expert description focuses not on the Jewish law as such, but on Pharisaic teaching and tradition in particular. The expectation of a particular kind of hand-washing was an expression of their claim that Temple purity could and should be practiced universally. They claimed this as “tradition of the elders,” but it is not claimed to be the law of Moses itself. If this new teacher Jesus was serious, why did his disciples—no accusation is made against Jesus himself—not wash in the way they advocated?

Jesus asserts however that this punctiliousness of hand washing and pure food was being worked out without the necessary and equivalent attention to the questions of justice and righteousness to which the law itself pointed. His observation that food does not defile but other things do was not a radical position, but a somewhat new “take” on traditional teaching. He criticizes not the law itself but “tradition” which some of the Pharisees had given the same status as Moses’ declarations.

Recall that defilement seems to have been closely related to physical situations where substances emerge from the body, rather than entering it, as in skin diseases or menstruation. By extending the idea that defilement had to do with what emerged from the body to ideas, words and actions, which also come from within us, Jesus here interprets—but does not dismiss—the traditional concern for the body and its functions in terms of wider questions of human behavior and ethics in general.

While the evil acts and intentions that are listed are obviously also forbidden actions to Jews, by relating them to the idea of defilement Jesus emphasizes the connection between faith and worship, and the Temple. Defilement keeps people away from divine presence, so these things also separate us from God. Like the Pharisees then, he seeks to bring this question of worship into everyday life and not just leave it in the exalted framework of priests and sacrifices.

What we have here then is not an encounter between Christian and Jewish world views, but between two Jewish ones, the Rabbi Jesus and a set of competitors. Doubtless, as Boyarin says, there were hypocritical Pharisees, and others too—and the New Testament itself also implies there were sincere and consistent people among them.³ The continuing conflict that will swirl around Jesus as this story continues was a Jewish contest over the claims of the God of Israel in the present moment—and of course especially over the remarkable claim that Jesus himself uniquely represented the reign of God, that had now appeared in a new way in human history.

1. For a brief version of this interpretation see Daniel Boyarin, “Jesus Kept Kosher: The Jewish Christ of the Gospel of Mark.” Tikkun 27, no. 2 (2012): 43–67. That article is an extract from The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: New Press, 2012.

2. See V. Taylor, The Gospel According to St.Mark: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes. London: Macmillan, 1959, 344-5.

3. See John 3 for Nicodemus, and Acts 5 for Gamaliel. Saul/Paul was also a pharisee.