Grace and Space

Lk 11:37-41
Wash up: The setting is the house of a Pharisee who invited Jesus to dine at his home. The reader should automatically recall an earlier and similar situation where another Pharisee invited Jesus to dine with him (7:36-50); in that narrative Luke dealt with Jesus’ relationship with sinners. Now, he will deal with Jesus’ own behavior at table. While eating was supposed to be a sign of a unitive relationship between people, any meal with the Pharisees in Luke’s Gospel becomes an occasion for Jesus to point out the division that exists.
Jesus immediately dismisses the issue of his own behavior and concentrates on the social actions of the Pharisees, who are careful about external practices but pay no attention to their inner attitudes, without which the external practices lose their authenticity.
The Pharisees are compared to cups and dishes, that are washed on the outside but remain dirty on the inside. From the outside the cups and dishes look clean, but upon closer examination a person can see that they are not fit for food or drink. Such pretension leads Jesus to declare the Pharisees to be fools. “Did not the maker of the outside also make the inside?” (11:40). In other words, the Pharisees, who supposedly hear the word of God and observe it scrupulously, are only pretending to observe it. Their inner attitude does not harmonize with their external expression.
Jesus can dispense with ritual washing before meals because he demonstrates in his ministry the harmony between an inner attitude of hearing God’s word and an external practice of observing it. Of course, for Luke the social issue is wider than that of ritual washing before meals; it involves greed and evil. A follower of Jesus cannot be like the Pharisees, who look good on the outside but are a complete contradiction on the inside.