Jas 1:17-27; Mk 7:1-8,14-23. Delivered at St Mark\u27s Lutheran Church, Kitchener, Ont

Remus, Harold

English

Scholars Commons

Consensus
Volume 30
Issue 1 Globalization Article 8
5-1-2005
Hearing and doing and listening
Harold Remus
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus
This Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Remus, Harold (2005) "Hearing and doing and listening ," Consensus: Vol. 30 : Iss. 1 , Article 8.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8
Hearing And Doing And Listening1
Harold Remus
Professor Emeritus of Religion and Culture
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario
Texts: James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-23
I think we’ve all had the experience of hearing one side of a
telephone conversation. Maybe it’s at home where you can’t help
overhearing what your teenager is saying to a friend … as you wait
to use the phone. Maybe it’s your spouse calling a contractor about
some work on the house. Or, more recently, it’s likely while waiting
in a store or an airport when some guy whips out his cell phone and
begins making LOUD TALK, and you wonder, Is this call really
necessary? Or is he just letting us know how important he is? In all
these cases you get only one side of the conversation, and it would be
unwise to conclude that you really knew what the person on the other
end of the line was saying.
That’s exactly what we have in the New Testament readings for
this morning: one side of two conversations. And it’s not easy to
make sense of that one side because we don’t know what the other
side of the conversation is. 
Take the reading from James. Personally, I really like the Letter
of James. It’s straightforward, no mincing of words, with beautiful
imagery. Yet it is a letter which Martin Luther praised but faintly! It’s
especially James 2:17 that gave Luther fits, where the author says that
“a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”2 But even in
our reading for today there is this strong emphasis on doing, with
only a hint or two of the grace which makes such doing possible.
What – and who – are we not hearing when we hear the author of
James saying these things? Well, at the least we’re not hearing the
Apostle Paul. Because, as Lutherans steeped in Paul, we know that
Paul said we are saved by grace through faith. We are not saved by
our works, by the keeping of God’s law. We are saved apart from that
law by what Jesus Christ has done. We Lutherans have imbibed this
message so thoroughly that we can make jokes about it, like the one
107
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005
I heard when I was studying in Germany. A good Lutheran man is
dying; his pastor comes to visit him and asks him if he is ready to
depart. Just so the pastor will know that he’s a good Lutheran ready
to die, he says to the pastor, “Pastor, you can rest assured that I never
did a good work in my life!”
Now that was the accusation that dogged Paul when he went from
place to place. Listen to Paul, his critics said, and you can do
whatever you want. As some modern wag has phrased that charge
against Paul, “I like to sin, God likes to forgive; what a happy
arrangement!”
Of course, that’s nonsense, and on two grounds. First, if you read
Paul’s letters you see that again and again and again he’s very
concerned about how people live the new lives they have in Christ.
Second, it is simply not true that God likes to forgive. “Likes” is the
wrong word. The word that applies here is “love.” And that love is not
a casual thing. It is a costly thing. “God so loved the world that God
gave his son …” (Certain fans at football games keep reminding TV
viewers of those words by the “John 3:16” signs they hold up for the
camera.)
We may take all that for granted, but for Martin Luther it was a
discovery he made only after much study of the Bible and much
anguish and self-torment. Luther came to see that God is not only
righteous and wants us to be righteous; God gives that very
righteousness. God bestows it on us, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
So we can forget about striving to make ourselves righteous. We can
forget about perverting God’s law by using it to gain status with God
and with our neighbours. And that means – that means – we are set
free to do what the law intends: to love God and to love our neighbour
as we love ourselves. In the words of the Letter of James, we will be
showing our faith through what we do, through our works.
In the Gospel reading we hear another one-sided conversation, not
unrelated to the one in James. We hear what the writer of the Gospel
of Mark says about the Pharisees, but we don’t hear the Pharisees
themselves speaking. The author tells us that the Pharisees and some
of the scribes noticed that Jesus’ disciples ate without washing their
hands, that is, they ate with “defiled (impure) hands.” The author of
Mark explains that the Pharisees have certain rules about purity: they
wash their hands before eating; they wash what they bring home from
the market; they also wash “cups, pots, and bronze kettles.”3
108 Consensus
http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8
Well, we do those things, too. We wash our hands before eating,
we wash our celery and carrots brought home from the market, we
wash our dishes and pots and pans. We call it “hygiene.” The
Pharisees call it “the tradition of the elders.” The author of Mark does
not explain what that is, and we have no Pharisees here to explain it.
Maybe we wouldn’t really want to hear what a Pharisee might say.
After all, “Pharisee” is not a word we use in polite company. In fact,
the word “Pharisee” was banned in the British House of Commons in
1902 along with “rat,” “jackass” and “hypocrite.”4 But in Jesus’ day
the Pharisees were the very models of faithfulness to God. The
parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector makes sense only
because Jesus could assume that the Pharisees were indeed looked up
to as models of faithfulness to God’s law.
That law as spelled out in the first books of the Bible is rooted in
a rural, village society. So you hear a lot about cattle and sheep and
oxen, about sowing and reaping. But the Pharisees lived in a much
more urban world dominated by Greek culture, similar to the way
American culture blankets the world today. What would God’s law
mean in that urban world? The Sadducees evidently replied: That’s
easy, forget those old rural rules; they’re irrelevant, they don’t apply.
But the Pharisees insisted: No, God said to us in Leviticus, “You shall
be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from
the peoples.” 5 The word “Pharisee” is related to the Hebrew word for
“separate.” The Pharisees sought holiness by separating themselves,
by setting boundaries marking themselves off from people like Jesus’
disciples who didn’t follow God’s law as the Pharisees interpreted it
(another meaning of the word “Pharisee” is “interpreter.”6. They
called people like Jesus’ disciples “unclean,” and they wouldn’t eat
with them.
We know about “clean” and “unclean,” especially since the
SARS outbreak. Wash your hands. Wear a mask and gown if you’re
a health worker or visit someone in the hospital – if you’re even
allowed into the building! If you go into a public washroom today,
you’re apt to find elaborate directions on how to wash your hands so
as not to get contaminated, or not contaminate others through contact
with them or through contact with food. We speak of cross
contamination in handling such foods as chicken. People are
wondering whether the beef in their freezer or refrigerator or in the
supermarket is clean – safe to eat. Maybe we have as many rules
Hearing And Doing And Listening 109
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005
about clean and unclean as the Pharisees did, maybe even more since
we know more about bacteria and viruses and epidemics.
And we also know about clean and unclean when it comes to
people and peoples. “The great unwashed” is the way that modern
sophisticates sometimes refer to the majority of the world’s
population that doesn’t have ready and frequent access to water.
Colour of skin has also been a huge boundary marker, and still is.
Today is August 31, 2003. One week and forty years ago, on August
24th, I was in Washington DC. I was standing on the long grassy mall
that stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln
Memorial. I was there on that hot August day with 250,000 other
people – black and white – as part of the March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King made his famous I
have a dream speech. Riding into Washington on buses that morning
we got a glimpse of what that dream might mean: African Americans
stood on the street and leaned out their windows, waving to us as we
drove by, bus after bus after bus, and we waved back.
That was the dream. But the hard reality was that lunch counters
and buses and housing were still segregated in the southern United
States. In Princeton, New Jersey, where I lived – a progressive, upscale
town for sure – there was a black ghetto, very well kept, but nonetheless
a ghetto. And so some of us went door to door campaigning for
affordable housing that would breach those ghetto walls. In many parts
of the United States the most segregated hour of the week in the 1960s
was 10:00 or 11:00 o’clock on Sunday morning when the church bells
rang and blacks and whites went to separate churches.
Clean and unclean. Some people on this side of the boundary
marker, others on the opposite side … all in the name of religion and
the Bible. Much has changed since then, much has not. Since
September 11th, for example, Muslims and people of Near Eastern
origin who are quite innocent of any wrongdoing are often marked
off and stigmatized in various ways.
So what does Jesus say to the Pharisees, those models of piety?
Forget about being clean or unclean? Forget about God’s call to
holiness? No, he does not say that. Instead, he redefines clean and
unclean. It’s not what goes into you that defiles you – what you eat,
with unwashed hands. It’s what comes out of you that defiles you:
theft, murder, adultery (there’s a whole list there in today’s Gospel
reading). The evangelist comments that Jesus thus “declared all foods
110 Consensus
http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8
clean.” But Jesus didn’t just declare foods clean. He declared people
clean: you could sit down and eat with anyone, washed or unwashed!
And Jesus did – with tax collectors and persons viewed as “sinners”
and people from the street. He got a reputation for doing that.
We get a glimpse of that here at our Wednesday night suppers,
where people from various walks of life and diverse backgrounds
gather at one table. It’s a piece of Martin Luther King’s dream: the
boundaries are erased.
Where do you draw your boundaries? Where do I draw mine?
Maybe if I tell you some of my stories, it will get you thinking about
your own stories and where you draw your boundaries.
Growing up during the Great Depression I was very aware of the
boundary between kids on the south side of town and kids on the
north side, that is, the boundary between the poor – like me – and
those who weren’t poor. I’m still very aware of that boundary today
and what it can mean to live on the poor side of the boundary,
whether that’s locally or in the two-thirds of the world that doesn’t
have the huge share of the world’s bounty that we do. I’m also aware
that people in North America with many possessions are establishing
gated communities – fenced-off communities – to shut the poor out;
but it’s also true that we in North America and Europe are gating our
nations and our prosperity off from the global poor. How long do you
think we can keep doing that? And where do we think we might find
Jesus sitting down to table today?
Think back to that reading from the Letter of James one more
time. Notice how the author defines religion. He speaks of “religion
pure and undefiled.” I don’t think of religion that way – as pure or
impure – but from his Jewish heritage he does. And what is “religion
pure and undefiled”? “Religion pure and undefiled,” says the letter, is
caring for “orphans and widows in their distress.”7 There were few
social safety nets in those days, so the “orphans and widows”
represent the most vulnerable in society. How a society, or a world,
cares for the weakest in its midst is a measure of the care and justice
in that society. And that’s not just a matter of individual or group
initiative or action. Governments are involved. My colleague in the
ministry way back used to say that after the Good Samaritan had
bound up the traveller’s wounds and settled him into the inn, he
should have gone back to Jerusalem and worked for a better police
force to protect the weak and vulnerable.
Hearing And Doing And Listening 111
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005
Another obvious boundary is male and female. That boundary
was one that Paul, the most famous Pharisee of all time, thought
about a lot. As a teenager, I sure did too. And I took for granted the
usual male role of male dominance. But along the way I learned to
start listening to women, instead of what men said about women. I’m
still learning to do that. My wife has helped me to do that, but it’s not
always an easy job for her. Women colleagues have also helped me
listen. I have learned so much from them, and that has made a big
difference in my scholarship and teaching.
Sexual orientation is likely the most disputed boundary issue
today. There, too, I have learned to listen, to listen for the other side
of a conversation that I wasn’t listening to, as our National Church’s
“Caring Conversations” have urged us to do – to listen to what gays
and lesbians say about themselves rather than what straights say
about them. On this issue we desperately need to listen to one
another.
Listening is an act of giving – giving of oneself, which is a very
generous gift. The reading from James says all acts of generous
giving come down from above. God gives us the gift of giving. And
God’s gift is a gift that keeps on giving. As Jesus says in the Gospel
of Matthew, “Freely you have received, freely give.”8 To that I can
only say, Amen.
Notes
1 This sermon was originally preached at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church,
Kitchener, Ontario.
2 Helmut T. Lehmann, gen. ed., Luther’s Works, vol. 35 Word and
Sacrament I (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), pp. 395-398.
3 Mark 7:3-4
4 W. D. Davies, Introduction to Pharisaism, vol. 16 of Facet Books
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), p. v.
5 Leviticus 20:26.
6 Anchor Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Pharisees.”
7 James 1:27.
8 Matthew 10:18.
112 Consensus
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Hearing and doing and listening

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 30Issue 1 Globalization Article 85-1-2005Hearing and doing and listeningHarold RemusFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationRemus, Harold (2005) "Hearing and doing and listening ," Consensus: Vol. 30 : Iss. 1 , Article 8.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8Hearing And Doing And Listening1Harold RemusProfessor Emeritus of Religion and CultureWilfrid Laurier UniversityWaterloo, OntarioTexts: James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-23I think we’ve all had the experience of hearing one side of atelephone conversation. Maybe it’s at home where you can’t helpoverhearing what your teenager is saying to a friend … as you waitto use the phone. Maybe it’s your spouse calling a contractor aboutsome work on the house. Or, more recently, it’s likely while waitingin a store or an airport when some guy whips out his cell phone andbegins making LOUD TALK, and you wonder, Is this call reallynecessary? Or is he just letting us know how important he is? In allthese cases you get only one side of the conversation, and it would beunwise to conclude that you really knew what the person on the otherend of the line was saying.That’s exactly what we have in the New Testament readings forthis morning: one side of two conversations. And it’s not easy tomake sense of that one side because we don’t know what the otherside of the conversation is. Take the reading from James. Personally, I really like the Letterof James. It’s straightforward, no mincing of words, with beautifulimagery. Yet it is a letter which Martin Luther praised but faintly! It’sespecially James 2:17 that gave Luther fits, where the author says that“a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”2 But even inour reading for today there is this strong emphasis on doing, withonly a hint or two of the grace which makes such doing possible.What – and who – are we not hearing when we hear the author ofJames saying these things? Well, at the least we’re not hearing theApostle Paul. Because, as Lutherans steeped in Paul, we know thatPaul said we are saved by grace through faith. We are not saved byour works, by the keeping of God’s law. We are saved apart from thatlaw by what Jesus Christ has done. We Lutherans have imbibed thismessage so thoroughly that we can make jokes about it, like the one107Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005I heard when I was studying in Germany. A good Lutheran man isdying; his pastor comes to visit him and asks him if he is ready todepart. Just so the pastor will know that he’s a good Lutheran readyto die, he says to the pastor, “Pastor, you can rest assured that I neverdid a good work in my life!”Now that was the accusation that dogged Paul when he went fromplace to place. Listen to Paul, his critics said, and you can dowhatever you want. As some modern wag has phrased that chargeagainst Paul, “I like to sin, God likes to forgive; what a happyarrangement!”Of course, that’s nonsense, and on two grounds. First, if you readPaul’s letters you see that again and again and again he’s veryconcerned about how people live the new lives they have in Christ.Second, it is simply not true that God likes to forgive. “Likes” is thewrong word. The word that applies here is “love.” And that love is nota casual thing. It is a costly thing. “God so loved the world that Godgave his son …” (Certain fans at football games keep reminding TVviewers of those words by the “John 3:16” signs they hold up for thecamera.)We may take all that for granted, but for Martin Luther it was adiscovery he made only after much study of the Bible and muchanguish and self-torment. Luther came to see that God is not onlyrighteous and wants us to be righteous; God gives that veryrighteousness. God bestows it on us, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.So we can forget about striving to make ourselves righteous. We canforget about perverting God’s law by using it to gain status with Godand with our neighbours. And that means – that means – we are setfree to do what the law intends: to love God and to love our neighbouras we love ourselves. In the words of the Letter of James, we will beshowing our faith through what we do, through our works.In the Gospel reading we hear another one-sided conversation, notunrelated to the one in James. We hear what the writer of the Gospelof Mark says about the Pharisees, but we don’t hear the Phariseesthemselves speaking. The author tells us that the Pharisees and someof the scribes noticed that Jesus’ disciples ate without washing theirhands, that is, they ate with “defiled (impure) hands.” The author ofMark explains that the Pharisees have certain rules about purity: theywash their hands before eating; they wash what they bring home fromthe market; they also wash “cups, pots, and bronze kettles.”3108 Consensushttp://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8Well, we do those things, too. We wash our hands before eating,we wash our celery and carrots brought home from the market, wewash our dishes and pots and pans. We call it “hygiene.” ThePharisees call it “the tradition of the elders.” The author of Mark doesnot explain what that is, and we have no Pharisees here to explain it.Maybe we wouldn’t really want to hear what a Pharisee might say.After all, “Pharisee” is not a word we use in polite company. In fact,the word “Pharisee” was banned in the British House of Commons in1902 along with “rat,” “jackass” and “hypocrite.”4 But in Jesus’ daythe Pharisees were the very models of faithfulness to God. Theparable of the Pharisee and the tax collector makes sense onlybecause Jesus could assume that the Pharisees were indeed looked upto as models of faithfulness to God’s law.That law as spelled out in the first books of the Bible is rooted ina rural, village society. So you hear a lot about cattle and sheep andoxen, about sowing and reaping. But the Pharisees lived in a muchmore urban world dominated by Greek culture, similar to the wayAmerican culture blankets the world today. What would God’s lawmean in that urban world? The Sadducees evidently replied: That’seasy, forget those old rural rules; they’re irrelevant, they don’t apply.But the Pharisees insisted: No, God said to us in Leviticus, “You shallbe holy to me; for I the Lord am holy and have separated you fromthe peoples.” 5 The word “Pharisee” is related to the Hebrew word for“separate.” The Pharisees sought holiness by separating themselves,by setting boundaries marking themselves off from people like Jesus’disciples who didn’t follow God’s law as the Pharisees interpreted it(another meaning of the word “Pharisee” is “interpreter.”6. Theycalled people like Jesus’ disciples “unclean,” and they wouldn’t eatwith them.We know about “clean” and “unclean,” especially since theSARS outbreak. Wash your hands. Wear a mask and gown if you’rea health worker or visit someone in the hospital – if you’re evenallowed into the building! If you go into a public washroom today,you’re apt to find elaborate directions on how to wash your hands soas not to get contaminated, or not contaminate others through contactwith them or through contact with food. We speak of crosscontamination in handling such foods as chicken. People arewondering whether the beef in their freezer or refrigerator or in thesupermarket is clean – safe to eat. Maybe we have as many rulesHearing And Doing And Listening 109Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005about clean and unclean as the Pharisees did, maybe even more sincewe know more about bacteria and viruses and epidemics.And we also know about clean and unclean when it comes topeople and peoples. “The great unwashed” is the way that modernsophisticates sometimes refer to the majority of the world’spopulation that doesn’t have ready and frequent access to water.Colour of skin has also been a huge boundary marker, and still is.Today is August 31, 2003. One week and forty years ago, on August24th, I was in Washington DC. I was standing on the long grassy mallthat stretches between the Washington Monument and the LincolnMemorial. I was there on that hot August day with 250,000 otherpeople – black and white – as part of the March on Washington forJobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King made his famous Ihave a dream speech. Riding into Washington on buses that morningwe got a glimpse of what that dream might mean: African Americansstood on the street and leaned out their windows, waving to us as wedrove by, bus after bus after bus, and we waved back.That was the dream. But the hard reality was that lunch countersand buses and housing were still segregated in the southern UnitedStates. In Princeton, New Jersey, where I lived – a progressive, upscaletown for sure – there was a black ghetto, very well kept, but nonethelessa ghetto. And so some of us went door to door campaigning foraffordable housing that would breach those ghetto walls. In many partsof the United States the most segregated hour of the week in the 1960swas 10:00 or 11:00 o’clock on Sunday morning when the church bellsrang and blacks and whites went to separate churches.Clean and unclean. Some people on this side of the boundarymarker, others on the opposite side … all in the name of religion andthe Bible. Much has changed since then, much has not. SinceSeptember 11th, for example, Muslims and people of Near Easternorigin who are quite innocent of any wrongdoing are often markedoff and stigmatized in various ways.So what does Jesus say to the Pharisees, those models of piety?Forget about being clean or unclean? Forget about God’s call toholiness? No, he does not say that. Instead, he redefines clean andunclean. It’s not what goes into you that defiles you – what you eat,with unwashed hands. It’s what comes out of you that defiles you:theft, murder, adultery (there’s a whole list there in today’s Gospelreading). The evangelist comments that Jesus thus “declared all foods110 Consensushttp://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8clean.” But Jesus didn’t just declare foods clean. He declared peopleclean: you could sit down and eat with anyone, washed or unwashed!And Jesus did – with tax collectors and persons viewed as “sinners”and people from the street. He got a reputation for doing that.We get a glimpse of that here at our Wednesday night suppers,where people from various walks of life and diverse backgroundsgather at one table. It’s a piece of Martin Luther King’s dream: theboundaries are erased.Where do you draw your boundaries? Where do I draw mine?Maybe if I tell you some of my stories, it will get you thinking aboutyour own stories and where you draw your boundaries.Growing up during the Great Depression I was very aware of theboundary between kids on the south side of town and kids on thenorth side, that is, the boundary between the poor – like me – andthose who weren’t poor. I’m still very aware of that boundary todayand what it can mean to live on the poor side of the boundary,whether that’s locally or in the two-thirds of the world that doesn’thave the huge share of the world’s bounty that we do. I’m also awarethat people in North America with many possessions are establishinggated communities – fenced-off communities – to shut the poor out;but it’s also true that we in North America and Europe are gating ournations and our prosperity off from the global poor. How long do youthink we can keep doing that? And where do we think we might findJesus sitting down to table today?Think back to that reading from the Letter of James one moretime. Notice how the author defines religion. He speaks of “religionpure and undefiled.” I don’t think of religion that way – as pure orimpure – but from his Jewish heritage he does. And what is “religionpure and undefiled”? “Religion pure and undefiled,” says the letter, iscaring for “orphans and widows in their distress.”7 There were fewsocial safety nets in those days, so the “orphans and widows”represent the most vulnerable in society. How a society, or a world,cares for the weakest in its midst is a measure of the care and justicein that society. And that’s not just a matter of individual or groupinitiative or action. Governments are involved. My colleague in theministry way back used to say that after the Good Samaritan hadbound up the traveller’s wounds and settled him into the inn, heshould have gone back to Jerusalem and worked for a better policeforce to protect the weak and vulnerable.Hearing And Doing And Listening 111Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2005Another obvious boundary is male and female. That boundarywas one that Paul, the most famous Pharisee of all time, thoughtabout a lot. As a teenager, I sure did too. And I took for granted theusual male role of male dominance. But along the way I learned tostart listening to women, instead of what men said about women. I’mstill learning to do that. My wife has helped me to do that, but it’s notalways an easy job for her. Women colleagues have also helped melisten. I have learned so much from them, and that has made a bigdifference in my scholarship and teaching.Sexual orientation is likely the most disputed boundary issuetoday. There, too, I have learned to listen, to listen for the other sideof a conversation that I wasn’t listening to, as our National Church’s“Caring Conversations” have urged us to do – to listen to what gaysand lesbians say about themselves rather than what straights sayabout them. On this issue we desperately need to listen to oneanother.Listening is an act of giving – giving of oneself, which is a verygenerous gift. The reading from James says all acts of generousgiving come down from above. God gives us the gift of giving. AndGod’s gift is a gift that keeps on giving. As Jesus says in the Gospelof Matthew, “Freely you have received, freely give.”8 To that I canonly say, Amen.Notes1 This sermon was originally preached at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church,Kitchener, Ontario.2 Helmut T. Lehmann, gen. ed., Luther’s Works, vol. 35 Word andSacrament I (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), pp. 395-398.3 Mark 7:3-44 W. D. Davies, Introduction to Pharisaism, vol. 16 of Facet Books(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), p. v.5 Leviticus 20:26.6 Anchor Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Pharisees.”7 James 1:27.8 Matthew 10:18.112 Consensushttp://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss1/8

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