• "Jesus Made the Unclean Clean"
• Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
• February 20, 2005
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

Today's gospel (Matthew 15:21) can be understood against the backdrop of the Old Testament distinction between things that are holy and things that are unclean. Israel was called by God to be a holy nation (Exodus 19:6). God gave Israel various marks of holiness, or separateness, from the Gentiles and their pagan worship.

Contact with unholy or unclean things defiled those who were holy. This explains the attitude of the disciples towards the Gentile woman who was begging Jesus for mercy. She was annoying, no doubt, but she was also unclean and, therefore, contact with her could make the pious Jew unclean also.

However, Jesus did not bind himself by the rules concerning contact with the unclean. Jesus was not afraid of contact with lepers, a bleeding woman, a dead body and the Gentiles-all things that were unclean according to the law. He was not afraid because the infection worked the other way in his ministry: contact with Jesus made the unclean clean.

Jesus objected to the way the rules of clean and unclean were observed by the religious leaders of his day. The rules emphasized an external or ritual cleanness that served to hide sin in the heart. As Jesus said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence" (Matthew, 23:25 NKJV).

Jesus explained the true sense of what is clean and what is unclean in Mark 7. After eating dinner without the ritual washing prescribed by the tradition, he responded to his critics with the following commentary on clean vs. unclean food:

"There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man...For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man" (vs. 15-22 NKJV).

Because he understood genuine holiness or cleanness to be rooted in the heart, Jesus did not treat the outwardly clean Pharisees differently than he treated the outwardly unclean tax collectors. He knew that, looking at the heart, both were unclean. In fact, the pretense to cleanness and righteousness based on outward forms actually served to make the self-righteous religious people worse off than the tax collectors and Gentiles. It caused them to deny that they had need to be cleansed.

The woman of Canaan did not deny that she or her daughter were unclean and in need of help. She did not come to Jesus asking a reward for her righteousness; she came to Jesus asking for the mercy that might be showed to the most unworthy of creatures, a dog. Jesus responded by healing an unclean Gentile-making the unclean clean.

We all make distinctions between good and bad people. This is not necessarily wrong. The problem comes when we make our distinctions based solely on external things. As Samuel said when he was in process of choosing David to be king, "The LORD sees not as man sees; man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7).

When we look at our inner motives and thoughts, we begin to understand the pervasive nature of our sin, our uncleanness. If we are honest we will see that, in the heart, we have a natural tendency to be prideful, greedy, envious, lustful, gluttonous, angry and slothful.

Often we attempt to act in such a way that we hide what is in our hearts. This is the essence of false religion. False religion consists of outwardly pious actions that serve to hide inward sin. False religion is outwardly kind and generous but inwardly envious and covetous. False religion goes through all the correct gestures, but has no love for God or man in its heart.

True religion begins with a penitent heart. True religion says, with Isaiah, "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment" (64:6). As Psalm 51 says, "The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise" (BCP p.404).

This is reflected in the prayer before Communion, which comes from today's gospel. "We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table." We come to Jesus, like the woman of Canaan, not trusting in our own righteousness but in God's great mercy. God accepts us because we believe in him, not because of our intrinsic merits. And Jesus makes the unclean clean. He makes our sinful bodies clean by his body and washes our souls with his precious blood.

One suspects that the woman of Canaan instituted some life-style changes after the healing of her daughter. The experience of deliverance moved her away from pagan worship and the environment where the demon first got hold of her daughter. No doubt she experienced a renewed sense of thankfulness and an impulse to worship because of what God had done.

Those who come to Jesus with penitent hearts to receive the gift of forgiveness and cleansing are changed. The experience of forgiveness makes us different than we were and leads us to behave in new ways. Holy behavior is the consequence of our encounter with Jesus Christ.

We experience this as a process in the life of prayer. There are initial moments of cleansing in the water of baptism and in the experience of conversion. But we must return to Jesus again and again to examine our hearts, confess our sins and purify our motives, to wash off the dirt that we have picked up on the road. The final act of cleansing will be the Day of Resurrection when our purified souls will inhabit new and glorified bodies and sin and death will be no more.

A right perspective on what is clean and what is unclean should guard us from self-righteousness and make us willing, like Jesus, to minister to those who may appear outwardly unclean but have faith in their hearts. For "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." We are all unclean until we come with repentance and faith to the One who can cleanse us.