Getting hung up on the rules.

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

I'm going to start this out by saying that I like me some human precepts. Don't get me wrong. I'm not negating what Jesus was pointing out when he quoted this passage. These human precepts are way less important than people. Making sure your parents are taken care of is more important than washing your hands. Or um, say, bowing when the cross goes by. Or bowing/genuflecting when you pass in front of the alter.

It's just that even with my attachment to some trappings of worship I've never noticed what he was accusing them of in this passage. I have no way to look it to see if this was actually going on. I wouldn't even know where to begin to research this. It says:

But you say that whoever tells father or mother, 'Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,' then that person need not honor the father. 6 So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm reading this right. What I'm seeing (will someone please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the religious leaders of the day had decided it was acceptable to neglect your elderly parents if the money/food/shelter you would have given them is given instead to the temple or synagogue. This was a world without Social Security, investment portfolios and nursing homes so I'm taking a wild guess that families took care of their own old people.

I'm back to square one on this. They were telling people what? How hard up would you have to be to take money meant for the care of someone's elderly parents? And then they had the nerve to point out someone didn't wash their hands?

As an aside, I'm all about hand washing. Really. Seriously. Very important. I keep soap by every sink in my house. But pointing out someone didn't wash their hands (and to their rabbi no less instead of to them---all grown men) when you're running around giving people ideas for ways to be spiritually pure and still throw their cranky elderly mother out into the street so you can get some extra nice priestly knickers?

Come on.

It actually reminds me of some modern Christians. I'm not going into specifics but some people just don't have their priorities straight. How can you say you love God when you obviously hate your neighbor? If you encourage people to neglect their families to take care of the Church, you don't get it. If you value appearances more than people you don't get it. If you spend all your time worrying about sex when people are freezing to death outside your door you don't get it. For that matter, if you tell a woman she should just die if it isn't safe to carry her baby to term, you don't get it. (If you excommunicate the poor nun who decided that saving one life was better than losing too, you're probably going to roast in hell or at least do some hard time in purgatory.)

God loves us. He occasionally asks us to do something--or not do something--and it's almost always because he loves us. It's not because he's a nitpicking evil god who makes arbitrary rules so he can squash us like bugs on the radiator of a car the second we screw up. It's because people get hurt when they don't do those things right. I could describe it all, but it would be silly. We all know sin damages the sinner. It all hurts. It hurts us. If we remember that he wants these things for us because he loves us and not so he can love us like he doesn't already we'll get it.