James 1.17-27, Mark 7.1-8, 14, 15, 17-23
The Fourteenth Sunday of Trinity, 1 September 2024
Jesus is talking about scoffing. Scoffing: meaning eating. And also scoffing: meaning what we do when we ridicule or mock others.
Jesus says that often, the two kinds of scoffing go together. He was arguing with the scribes and Pharisees for criticising his disciples for eating without washing their hands, something which broke the religious purity law and ‘defiled’ them. How can we take Jesus’ disciples seriously as religious people, the Pharisees scoffed, when they don’t even respect our tradition of cleanliness?
Now, you might see why the Pharisees were tempted to scoff at those eating without first washing. We know that people handling food with dirty hands are risking all sorts of infections and so on… But what the Pharisees overlooked was that these disciples, like many other people, had no opportunity to cleanse before eating: those who were travelling, those who worked outdoors, or anyone without access to clean running water, wouldn’t have the means to do so. The cleanliness laws unfairly disadvantaged those who were physically unable to obey them.
You may remember, during our Covid lockdowns, how it became the fashion among those professionals spending their days at home on furlough to learn home baking, and the news was suddenly full of features on how to make the best sourdough: whilst, by contrast, delivery couriers, out and about chasing their next scrap of paid work, at high risk to their health, were making do with snacking on chocolate bars inbetween parcel drops. Do you see some parallels here, with the Pharisees and those they condemned?
Our society has its own kinds of conventions around food – behaviours we’ve learned which we instinctively feel and know – which can incite us to cold-shoulder those who are unable to obey them. There’s a whole language around food and class, for instance. In the past, Nancy Mitford was condescending about people who say “serviette” instead of “napkin”, and John Betjeman relegated the fish knife to the lower middle class. [1]
Fashions change, but scoffing doesn’t. In her book called ‘Scoff’, food historian Pen Vogler describes how brown bread and white bread have swapped social profile over the centuries: in the Industrial Revolution she notes, “White bread had become an obsessional mark of identity for families who felt their kind had been denied it for centuries. Disapproval of it became an opposing obsession for the gentry whose forebears had considered it their birthright”. [2]
Vogler describes how “Factory farming may have brought poultry within everyone’s reach but, consciously or not, the generic middle-class response has been to buy a rare-breed chicken or choose Christmas goose over turkey. If you must get a ready-made pasta sauce, ensure it sports a premium label. Make your proletarian hamburger with grass-fed beef. Never mind environmental justification or flavour; in this game, it is also a question of status.”
She says that food snobbery has created the topsy-turvy situation where words such as “fresh”, “local”, “home-made” and “healthy” now signify the diet of the wealthy few, who can, if they’re so inclined, scoff at those who have to make do with “own-brand” and “processed”.
And there’s the whole health debate around food: and it can be difficult working out which is the best advice to take. For instance, have you noticed how blue-labelled milk is nicknamed “FULL FAT” and that people think avoiding it is healthier? It’s actually called WHOLE MILK, it’s only 4% fat, and as such is healthy and nutritious. [3]
One big food debate these days is around veganism: the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. This is a live and somewhat raw issue in an area like ours, for an increase in non-meat diets is felt as a threat to farmers’ livelihoods. When the discussion around food so often takes place in the urban centres of power, our upland farmers find it a struggle to get their voices heard.
Whilst vegans remain a tiny minority (somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of our population) and most vegans just get on with being vegan without troubling anyone else about it, just like most meat-eaters do, the media – and especially social media – fuels the loud extremists on all sides of the food debate, from ‘preachy vegans’ to ‘those who like to make fun of vegans’ or to bash them.
When it came to rules and attitudes around food, you’ll notice, Jesus did take sides. He sided with those who were harmed by those rules, and who were scorned by the powerful ones who benefitted from the rules and whose voices were always the loudest. He was pretty neutral about the health and hygiene part of the debate, and far more focussed on the way that that debate should be held: his concern was with the way that people treated each other.
‘Listen to me,’ he challenged the rule-makers, ‘there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’ By ‘the things that go into a person’ he meant food – whether or not it was handled with clean hands, or eaten on a sabbath. And, by ‘the things that come out’, well, yes, he must have meant waste matter, excrement. But more than that he was meaning those ‘evil things that come from within the human heart’: like deceit, envy, slander, pride, folly: which sounds like a list of the kinds of attitudes you’ll quickly find if you’re daft or bold enough to dive down into the comments of an online discussion about, let’s say, Veganuary, or Jeremy Clarkson.
Jesus was concerned with the way that people treated each other. It’s a concern we may share as we reflect on how poor are the quality of our public conversations these days. How easily polarised we become over subjects that needn’t really be that divisive. James, the writer of a very plain and practical epistle on Christian behaviour, agrees, saying, ‘Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.’
Be generous, James teaches. Be generous towards others – however you may differ from them in, for example, the way you eat, or talk about eating. Be generous in understanding the reasons why they do what they do, and even where you just cannot agree, still be generous in your difference.
And why ought we treat each other this way? Because, James says, ‘every generous act of giving, every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’
Fashions change – in food as much as in everything else – but the generosity of God towards all of creation is constant and everlasting. It is a great gift to anyone who accepts it, and is the power of life for anyone who shares it with others, through his Spirit.
Notes
[1] Clarissa Hyman, Is trifle sufficient for sweet? Food snobbery and social acceptability: a review of Pen Vogler, Scoff: A history of food and class in Britain. TLS, 18 / 25 December 2020
[2] Pen Vogler, Scoff: A history of food and class in Britain, as quoted in Clarissa Hyman, above.
[3] Farming UK: Facebook post, 23 August 2024.