Day: August 17, 2017

Mark 7:15

There is nothing external to a person, which by going into them can defile them; but the things that come out of a person are the things that defile them.”

it takes a village
to digest break-fast

Hooray for biotics
helping themselves
helping our self

rawness enters shredded
to be further broken
set upon by ravenous hordes
symbiosis at its best

we are fueled
by bacterial waste
our thanks for chewing

such is physical life
matter become energy

now to choose its spending

This aphorism is born out of sustained testing in the wilderness and retreating to find a larger formation. The purity regulations of Jesus’ day, or any day including today, are always a small approach to an over-abundance of life. The fear is that if we transgress particular habits, no matter how well grounded or how sticky they make a community, whatever little amount of control we have over life dissolves like mist and we are again consciously vulnerable.

This understanding holds its holder in good, if risky, stead with everything from eating, here, to death, later.

Anderson/Moore171 cast it: “In Mark’s view, any Judean or Gentile may be on God’s side or against God—based on faith in Jesus’ proclamation of the rule of God and on moral behavior rather than on ritual purity.” In being on G*D’s side we begin to travel down today’s mortal sin of the church, concretizing morals. It is difficult to know where a purity perspective ends and where it simply morphs into the next code that promotes a common identity through particular habits or shames deviant behavior simply because it is not sanctioned. Today we are more likely to call someone “incompatible with Christian teaching” rather than understand the gift their life brings.

Funk69 sees Jesus as a faithful follower of his mentor, Baptizer John, by understanding the import of this insight, “If Jesus taught that there is nothing taken into the mouth that can define, he was undermining a whole way of life.”

This small truism will show up in these ways in the Acts of the Apostles with Peter’s dream of the tablecloth (10:9–16).