Wash The Right Thing

Some men come up from Jerusalem to ask Jesus about hands. Whether his disciples rinse them the way the elders taught. The question has a real practice behind it and real reasons for that practice, so it isn’t stupid, exactly. But look at what it costs them. They have traveled roughly eighty miles to stand in front of the Son of God and open with hygiene. Jeremiah names the same disease from six centuries out: a wound so deep there is no medicine for it, and a people who keep crying about the pain without ever turning toward the one who could heal it. That is what religion does when it drifts loose from God. It gets fastidious about the surface and goes numb at the center. Today the Church remembers Saint John Vianney, a country priest who spent up to sixteen hours a day sitting in a box listening to what actually comes out of the human mouth.

The Readings

First Reading: Jeremiah 30:1-2, 12-15, 18-22

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Write in a book all the words that I have spoken to you.

“For thus says the Lord: Your hurt is incurable, and your wound is grievous. There is none to uphold your cause, no medicine for your wound, no healing for you. All your lovers have forgotten you; they care nothing for you; for I have dealt you the blow of an enemy, the punishment of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great, because your sins are flagrant. Why do you cry out over your hurt? Your pain is incurable. Because your guilt is great, because your sins are flagrant, I have done these things to you.

“Thus says the Lord: Behold, I will restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob, and have compassion on his dwellings; the city shall be rebuilt upon its mound, and the palace shall stand where it used to be. Out of them shall come songs of thanksgiving, and the voices of those who make merry. I will multiply them, and they shall not be few; I will make them honored, and they shall not be small. Their children shall be as they were of old, and their congregation shall be established before me; and I will punish all who oppress them. Their prince shall be one of themselves, their ruler shall come forth from their midst; I will make him draw near, and he shall approach me, for who would dare of himself to approach me? says the Lord. And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

Gospel: Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.”

And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” He answered, “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Book Of Consolation

Chapter 30 opens what the tradition has long called the Book of Consolation, the block of oracles running from Jeremiah 30 through 33 that carried a message of comfort to the people during the exile.[1] The command is odd and worth noticing: write it in a book. Jeremiah has been preaching for decades and most of it has been spoken. Now God wants it fixed on a scroll, because the people who need these particular words are not standing in front of him. They are going to be in Babylon, and their grandchildren after them, and a word you can carry survives a deportation in a way a sermon does not.

Then comes the diagnosis, and it is brutal. Your hurt is incurable. Your wound is grievous. There is none to uphold your cause, no medicine, no healing. All your lovers have forgotten you. That last line is a deliberate jab, because Jeremiah has used the word “lovers” throughout for the foreign powers Judah kept courting instead of trusting God, and every one of those alliances has now evaporated. Egypt is gone. The treaties are worthless. And the reason is stated twice, flatly, without softening: because your guilt is great, because your sins are flagrant.

Notice the strange rebuke in verse 15. “Why do you cry out over your hurt?” God is not annoyed that they are in pain. He is pointing out that the crying is aimed at nothing. They are wailing about the wound the way a man swears at a broken leg, addressing the injury rather than a physician. And Jeremiah has already told them the wound has no human remedy, so the crying is hopeless in the direction they are aiming it.

Then everything turns. The oracles in this section move in a hard rhythm, alternating between the anguish that looks unfixable and the Lord’s promise that he will not let his people be destroyed even while they take the punishment their sins earned.[2] Behold, I will restore. The tents rebuilt, the city standing on its mound again, the palace where it used to be, and out of that ruin, songs. Nothing in Judah has changed. God has changed nothing in the diagnosis. He has simply announced that he intends to do himself what nobody on earth could do for them.

And then verse 21, which is the hinge of the whole passage. “Their prince shall be one of themselves, their ruler shall come forth from their midst; I will make him draw near, and he shall approach me, for who would dare of himself to approach me?” Read that as the ancients read it. Saint Jerome saw the whole restoration prophecy completed in Christ and his apostles, and he took “their ruler was produced from their midst” as a plain reference to the Lord and Savior, who came from Israel according to the flesh, and whom the Father united to himself and drew near, as the Son says, “I in the Father and the Father in me.”[3] Theodoret of Cyrus read the same movement in the surrounding verses and said Christ brought the prophecy to fulfillment, springing from David according to the flesh and shepherding no longer only Israel but all the nations.[4] The wound has no medicine because no one can approach God on Israel’s behalf. So God raises up one who can.

The passage lands on the covenant formula: “And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” That sentence runs like a spine through Jeremiah and shows up again at the heart of the new covenant oracle a chapter later.[5]

Hands, Mouths, And Roots

The Pharisees and scribes who show up in Matthew 15 have come from Jerusalem, which matters. This is not the local synagogue objecting. This is an inquiry from the capital, and their charge is that the disciples transgress the tradition of the elders. Hand washing before meals was not a commandment of Moses. It was a rabbinic development, originally tied to the ritual purity required of priests handling holy things, gradually extended to ordinary Jews at ordinary tables. A pious practice, and not a bad one. But it was theirs, not God’s, and they were prosecuting it as though it were God’s.

Jesus does not answer the hand question by discussing hands. He calls the crowd over, which is itself a rebuke, since the delegation clearly wanted a private theological consultation, and he says: hear and understand. Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out. Saint Augustine, arguing against the Manichees who wanted to make certain foods evil in themselves, insisted this saying does not contradict the Old Testament at all. The ritual law called certain animals unclean not in their nature but typically, as signs needed for a season. By nature every creature of God is good.[6] Saint Jerome pushes the same point and then adds a caution worth keeping: food offered to idols does become defiling for the man who eats it knowing what it is, because his weak conscience is what gets polluted.[7] The defilement lives in the man, and it always did.

The disciples then come to Jesus with what has to be the most nervous line in the chapter. Do you know that the Pharisees were offended? They are managing him. They want him to understand that important people are upset. And his answer refuses the management entirely: every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

Chromatius of Aquileia read this exactly as the context demands. The scribes and Pharisees planted their own precepts and then insisted those precepts be kept as divine law, and so the planting they had done deserved to be uprooted by the Lord. That plant, he says, was not of God but of men.[8] Saint John Chrysostom saw the same thing and used it to shut down the Manichaean misreading, since if Jesus meant the law itself was the unplanted thing, he would not have spent the preceding verses defending the law and quoting Isaiah against these men. “Honor your father and your mother” is a plant of God. What Jesus is uprooting is the human addition that had grown up over it and choked it.[9]

Saint Jerome, reading the same verse, raises the obvious worry. If plants the Father did not plant get uprooted, what about Paul saying “I planted, Apollos watered”? He answers from the next clause: “but God gave the growth.” When Paul plants and Apollos waters, God is the one planting through his coworkers.[10] So human labor in the Church is God’s own planting, right up until the moment a man starts presenting his own work as divine authority. That is the plant that gets pulled.

Then: let them alone, they are blind guides, and if a blind man leads a blind man both will fall into a pit. Chromatius took the blindness as the blindness of unbelief, and noticed the worse half of it: these men were dragging others down into the pit behind them.[11] Read “let them alone” carefully, because the tradition never took it as indifference toward their souls. Saint Gregory the Great applied it to preaching: when telling the truth causes scandal, we should let the scandal happen rather than desert the truth.[12] Jesus is refusing to soften a true word because powerful people found it offensive. That is a very different act from giving up on them.

Now hold both readings together. Jeremiah’s people have a wound with no medicine and they are crying out over it instead of to God. The Pharisees have a wound they have not even diagnosed, and they are washing their hands over it. The common failure is a religion that stays outside the person. And the common cure is the same in both: someone must come forth from their midst who can approach God, because they cannot do it themselves. The plant God did not plant gets pulled. The people God claims get rebuilt.

Daily Application

Start with the honest part. Most of us have a version of hand washing, and it is usually something genuinely good. Getting to Mass on time. Never eating meat on Friday. Saying the Rosary daily, or keeping a holy hour, or knowing the rubrics better than the guy in the next pew. None of that is the problem, and Jesus does not suggest for a second that the Pharisees should stop washing. The problem is what those practices start doing to us when they become the whole of our religion. They give us something measurable to be right about. And a man who has something measurable to be right about will almost always start measuring other people with it.

The interior movement today asks for is large and costly: the willingness to let God look past the practices to the mouth. What comes out of yours in a normal week? Take the honest sample, in the car, in the group chat, at the dinner table when somebody brings up a family member you have opinions about. That is the diagnostic Jesus offers, and it is far more uncomfortable than any rule about food, because you cannot satisfy it by adding another observance. You can only repent.

And here is where Jeremiah keeps this from turning into despair. God tells his people the wound is incurable before he tells them he will heal it. He gives the whole diagnosis, unsoftened, and announces the restoration anyway. Saint John Paul II, writing about exactly this pattern in the prophets, said that in the central revelation of God as merciful and gracious, the chosen people find, every time they have sinned, both the strength and the motive to turn back to the Lord and beg his forgiveness.[13] The reason you can afford to look honestly at what comes out of your mouth is that the verdict is not the last word. The prince who comes forth from their midst is the last word, and he has already drawn near on your behalf.

Which brings us to today’s saint. John Vianney was not a gifted man. He failed at Latin, he struggled through seminary, the bishop doubted he could handle the studies, and he nearly ended up farming instead of preaching. He got the parish at Ars, a village of a couple hundred people who were, by every account, comfortable and indifferent about their faith. What he did with them was sit in the confessional. Eleven or twelve hours a day in the winter, up to sixteen in the summer, for decades, until people were traveling across France to stand in that line. He gave his life to the exact thing today’s Gospel puts in front of us, which is what comes out of a man.

He also lived the hard half of the Gospel, the part about being a guide. Jesus warns about blind men leading blind men into a pit, and the remedy he implies is sight. Shepherds have to be able to see. Vianney could see, and the reason he could see was that he had first done the seeing on himself, through fasting, through short nights, through relentless prayer. That is why he is the patron of parish priests, and it is why a village nobody had heard of became a destination.

So go do the thing he spent his life waiting for people to do. Go to confession this week. Treat it as the one act in Catholic life where you say out loud the thing that came out of your mouth and cannot be scrubbed off the outside. Bring the wound you have been crying over and stop crying over it. Bring it to the only physician there is. He has been telling us since Jeremiah that he intends to rebuild the ruin, and he is not waiting for you to be less ruined first.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Dublin: Four Courts Press; Princeton, NJ: Scepter Publishers), commentary on Jeremiah 30:1-33:26.
2. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 30:1-24.
3. Jerome, Six Books on Jeremiah 6.9.3-6, quoted in Dean O. Wenthe, ed., Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 204.
4. Theodoret of Cyr, On Jeremiah 7.30, quoted in Wenthe, Jeremiah, Lamentations, 203.
5. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 30:1-24, noting the covenant formula at Jeremiah 7:23; 11:4; 24:7; 31:33; 32:38.
6. Augustine, Contra Faustum 6.6, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Gospel of Matthew, on Matthew 15:11.
7. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Gospel of Matthew, on Matthew 15:11.
8. Chromatius of Aquileia, Tractate on Matthew, on Matthew 15:13, quoted in Manlio Simonetti, ed., Matthew 14-28, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).
9. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, on Matthew 15:13, quoted in Simonetti, Matthew 14-28.
10. Jerome, on Matthew 15:13, quoted in Simonetti, Matthew 14-28, citing 1 Corinthians 3:6-9.
11. Chromatius of Aquileia, Tractate on Matthew, on Matthew 15:14, quoted in Simonetti, Matthew 14-28.
12. Gregory the Great, cited in George Leo Haydock, Haydock’s Catholic Bible Commentary, on Matthew 15:14.
13. Saint John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia (November 30, 1980), no. 4.

Books Cited

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• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)
• Manlio Simonetti, ed., Matthew 14-28, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture NT 1b (InterVarsity, 2002)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005