The Essential Cat

 

Texts: Deuteronomy 4:12, 6-9; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

One of the great spiritual teachers and writers of the 20^th century was a man called Anthony de Mello; and I've long treasured his story about a priest and his cat.  The priest's cat had developed a love of human attention, and had discovered that if he turned up when a service was going on in the chapel the congregation would soon pay him more attention than they were paying to the priest.  (The same thing happens today if a baby is present, or a bird flies in.  Any welcome distraction will do, as long-suffering priests will tell you.)

Anyway, the time came when the priest decided he had had enough of this cat disturbing the service, so he had a cage put up the front of the chapel; and every time the cat entered the chapel during a service, the priest would catch the cat and lock it in the cage until the service had finished.  Both the priest and the cat were long-lived and between them kept this practice up for years; but eventually the priest died.  After that the senior lay person became responsible for catching the cat and putting it in the cage, until the day came when the cat also died.  Even if you haven't heard the story before, you can probably guess what happened next.  Yes, the congregation got another cat, because in that congregation everyone knew that it was a necessary part of a service of worship to have a cat in a cage!

That story for me exactly captures the temptation we are all capable of falling into of thinking that what we have done for many years must be essential to worship.  I was once roundly criticised by a colleague for extinguishing the candles on the Holy Table in the wrong order.  He wasn't being helpful, trying to guide a new, inexperienced priest to do things in the proper manner; he was furious with me for spoiling our service!  I remember, too, the outrage inadvertently caused by the organist at All Saints, Palmerston North, who decided on one occasion, for very good musical reasons, to play one of the hymns on the piano instead of the organ.  This prompted the justly famous line from one of the senior women of the parish, "If the pipe organ was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it should be good enough for All Saints, Palmerston North"!!!  And, of course, in fairly recent times, there was a period when the Church seemed more interested in ensuring that the readers and preachers used gender-inclusive language than that they read the right passage and did not preach heresy!

In today's gospel passage we find a classic example of this tendency to give too much importance to the trivial details, and forget the essence of what we are supposed to be about.  Some Pharisees have arrived from Jerusalem, which tells us that they are probably a sort of audit team, sent by officialdom to check out what Jesus is doing and saying.  Jesus, of course, has been saying and doing a lot by this time, all over Galilee, drawing huge crowds and amazing the populace with his miracles and his extraordinary teaching.  But this official audit team pays all that no attention.  It's not his teaching or miracles that they find upsetting.  Rather it's the failure of his disciples to carry out ritual hand-washing before having a meal that has called down their wrath.

Which is strange, for all sorts of reasons.  First, this has got nothing to do with personal hygiene: this is not a public health issue.  It is about a requirement to render yourself ritualistically clean before eating, because eating was a sacred act – it began with thanksgiving and a prayer for blessing, and you couldn't do that with unclean hands.  The second thing that is strange about that is that this requirement is not to be found in the Law: it is found in what we today would call "case law", or, perhaps, "legal commentary".  Sometime in the past some learned scholar of the Law had said that it was necessary to be ritualistically clean before eating, even in the privacy of one's own home, and that ruling had become accepted by the Pharisees as part of the Law.

We've had a wonderful example of this sort of process in recent times in this country over the physical disciplining of children.  The basic rule in this area was an obvious one: no one must assault anyone else.  But what is an assault?  Well, said the Law, it is the application of force by one person to another.  Had we left things there we might have saved ourselves a lot of angst.  In principle, we all agree that we shouldn't go around assaulting people.  But it happens all the time.  If I tap someone in the street to attract their attention so I can ask them if they can tell me the time, that tap is an assault.  I am guilty of an offence.  So is every player who comes into contact with any other player during a game of rugby, soccer, hockey or netball.  So is a surgeon who operates on me.

But none of us would expect a prosecution to be brought in any such case.  We would expect everyone to rely on commonsense.  We know what we mean by assault, and we don't mean tapping someone on the shoulder, or tackling them in the course of a game, and we don't mean anything properly done by a surgeon in the course of removing someone's inflamed appendix.  BUT...somewhere in the past someone raised the specific case of a parent applying force to a child, and of a surgeon applying force to a patient, with the result that specific defences were written into the law for those cases – but not, be it noted, for the tap on the shoulder or the rugby tackle.  Once we decided that the general principle, backed up in practice by commonsense, was not enough, we opened the floodgate for the sort of rampant Pharisaism that we are now experiencing.  Less than two years ago, our leaders changed the wording of the law, and now they are intending to issue guidelines to explain further how the law is to be administered.  and so it grows and grows.

We've been going through a similar practice around the administration of Communion.  Throughout, the intent has been good; our Bishops have sought to modify our practice in a way that minimises the risk of spreading swine flu among participants.  But we have now found ourselves paying more attention to the act of receiving Communion, rather than to the meaning and effect of receiving it.  I found it particularly weird (to use a mild term) to be receiving missives about how to wash my hands before the service and sanitise them before touching the wafer, and how to wash the chalice after the service, while we were reading our way through chapter 6 of St John's Gospel, which includes his teaching on Holy Communion itself.  And having finished that, I return to St Mark to find this argument about washing our hands before receiving food!

Perhaps the fundamental error the Pharisees of all generations make is to forget that the Law is given for our good; it is given so that we may live long and well in our own land.  It is to guide us along the way, not trip us up every time we stray.  God gave the people the Law out of love for the people; and Jesus gives us his teaching for the same reason.  Parents love your children and care for them to the best of your ability.  That's what our Law should be understood to mean, surely.  Leave it to the Pharisees among us to split hairs over what that means in each and every particular case.

And when we come to Communion, let us remember that it is given for our spiritual health and well-being, and stop obsessing over whether we dip the wafer, drink from the cup, or receive only the wafer.  It's the gift that matters; everything else is wrapping.

On a par with the cat in the cage.