It’s easy to be fooled. Mr and Mrs Devout are always in church, always to be seen praying, always lighting  votives, always to be found kneeling in their favourite pew. Are Mr and Mrs Devout good people? Well very possibly, but outward appearances can be deceptive. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Devout are the salt of the earth, but not necessarily.   Despite their Sunday best, perhaps Mr and Mrs Devout spend the rest of the week, complaining about the refugees next door, gossiping about other parishioners and ignoring the plight of the beggar sitting on the church doorstop. Outward appearances are no indication of what lies beneath.

Today the Pharisees complain to Jesus, that his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. Their complaint does not stem from food hygiene. The Pharisees had very many rituals intended to keep themselves pure and     undefiled, and one of these rituals was washing before eating. The ritual in itself is not so very wrong. We ourselves have a ritual of saying ‘grace before meals’, but where Jesus finds fault is in their flawed grasp of what is important. Jesus uses their complaint to teach a lesson, and the lesson isn’t really anything to do with washing.

What do we think pleases God? The Pharisees were not bad people, but they had strayed a long way from pleasing God. To the Pharisees, religion was all about abiding by hundreds of rules and regulations. Many of these rules were about keeping themselves segregated from anything in the world that would make them unclean. They had become so obsessed by this that they no longer engaged well with the world and all its      suffering. They lived by lofty and judgmental ideals that Jesus totally rejected. Jesus didn’t deliberately set out to disregard tradition, but at the same time, he had come to engage with the world and its needs. Jesus’ main concern was for the poor the sick and the marginalised, and he went out of his way to associate himself with them. He saw the Pharisees placing barriers between man and God, and he wasn’t having it!

We do not become unacceptable to God by failing to  follow a set of outward rules. We become unacceptable to God when our hearts become cold. God is not impressed when we turn up for Mass in our Sunday best. God is best pleased when we show the world a loving and sincere heart.