Arise my love, and come away ( Lectionary for Sunday, August 30, 2009)

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

By hanging out with people who had been declared off limits or of low value (lepers, menstruating women, children, tax collectors, victims of sexual abuse), Jesus and his friends defied the social and ritual purity laws of their time. Some of the religious challenged him, ‘Why do your disciples not live^* according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’   Jesus retorted, calling them hypocrites following all the human-made religious rules but staying unchanged inside.  The consequence of their unclean insides resulted in unjust actions that all the ritual purity in the world could not wash away.  External religious conformity is not the answer.  What matters is on the inside and how it changes our relationships to other people and to ourselves.  Jesus tells us not to waste energy being socially or ritually correct, but to focus on the state of our hearts.  He invites us to seek transformation of the self-seeking, manipulative, scarcity driven, fear-based ego.  He asks us to die to the part of ourselves that seeks to take without concern for others, to build ourselves up at others' expense, to persuade us that we know better than God.

The reading from the Epistle of James reminds us of what happens when that healing begins.  "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."²³


Jesus invites us to come away from all the striving to keep ourselves pure, to convince ourselves and others that we are worthy.  Christ ends the waiting and depression of our long winter of separation and sadness.  It is Easter morning and he calls us to get up, to come away, to get beyond the walls that separate and protect.  In the words of the Song of Solomon:

‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
   and come away;
¹¹for now the winter is past,
   the rain is over and gone."