False Cleanliness
Jesus was not always gentle and easy-going with people. Here and there in the gospels, Jesus gets pretty tough on people - usually the religious elites who wore the name of religion, but didn’t really prove it by their lifestyles.
One such passage is in Luke 11, where Jesus pronounces a series of 'woes' on the Pharisees and Scribes. Listen to His words in verses 37-41: "When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited Him to eat with him; so He went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal. Then the Lord said to him, 'Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is inside you – be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.'"
The Danger of External Religion
So the Pharisees were guilty of a false cleanliness. This particular man invited Jesus to his home – which sounds like a good start, opening your home to Jesus – but the man was surprised when Jesus didn't go through the usual Jewish cleanliness rituals, and Jesus took the opportunity to show how the cleanliness this man thought he had was really a false cleanliness.
Some people in our time are also deeply concerned with hygiene and outer cleanliness. This is important. Do you remember in COVID how we were washing our hands everywhere we went, and washing our clothes immediately when we got home, because we were afraid of being infected? The Law of Moses included similar protective health measures. But the Pharisees had twisted these practical guidelines into spiritual benchmarks, mistaking ritual cleanliness for righteousness.
Finding True Purity Through Christ
Jesus here claims that it is what is inside us – in a spiritual sense - which makes us truly clean or defiled. The Pharisees may have appeared spotless, but Jesus says their souls were stained with greed and wickedness.
Just the other day a friend told me that he doesn't really like church, because people there seem to wear masks. They seem insincere and false in the way they present themselves. And I wondered, as he said that, if our churches have become places that focus on false cleanliness like the Pharisees. Never mind washing hands, but do we dress up, stand still, speak superficially, and pretend that we are living godly lives, while we are in church? Are we perhaps still full of wickedness within, like the Pharisees?
Jesus offered cleansing, and by that I don't believe He meant a superficial washing of your guilt so that you can go on doing all the same stuff again. I believe He offers a deeper cleansing, a cleansing of the wickedness and sin that used to dominate our lives.
Would you come to Him today humbly, and confess any false cleanliness you have been presenting? Will you offer Him the wickedness within you, and ask Him to not just forgive you for it, but to remove its power over you, so that you don't live a Pharisee-like faith of apparent cleanliness only?
May God do a deep work of cleansing in us today, so that it's not only the outside actions of ours that are holy, but that we are truly sanctified and holy within.
