One of the truisms of life is that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Things are not always what they seem. I read a delightful story, allegedly true, about a zoo in Spain that decided to conduct an emergency drill. The drill simulated how to handle it if a gorilla escaped from its enclosure. To make the drill more realistic, a zookeeper dressed up as a gorilla and took off loping through the zoo.
Unfortunately, not everyone on staff was notified about the drill. Upon seeing a “gorilla” fleeing from its cage, one of the zoo veterinarians grabbed a tranquilizer gun and shot the employee in the leg.
“Well,” he said, “it looked like a gorilla was escaping!” (1)
You can’t always judge a book by its cover. Some things are not as they might appear.
There is an intriguing legend known as “The White Witch of Rosehall.” It is a tale of a beautiful woman named Annie Palmer who used her unparalleled beauty to lure wealthy men to marry her. Nothing unusual about that. However, each time Annie married someone, she found a way to convince him to add her to his will and then she would poison him. She continued to poison him even as she pretended to be nursing him back to health. The men would die, leaving her their estate. As a consequence she became quite wealthy. She was known as the “white witch” because of her alluring appearance of virtue on the outside, but her thoroughly evil nature on the inside. Perhaps you have known someone like that.
In our lesson for the day, the Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law had come from Jerusalem to “investigate” Jesus. On the outside these Pharisees were the epitome of respectability. On the inside, however, they were full of fear and envy, and they were growing in their hatred for Jesus. They looked for any excuse to cast aspersion on him and his followers.
On this particular day, they observed some of Jesus’ disciples eating food without first washing their hands. This, of course, offended them. Understand . . . this wasn’t about sanitation. There was no sign around saying employees MUST wash their hands. It wasn’t about preventing germs. They knew nothing about germs in those days. Instead, this was about maintaining a religious tradition. In fact, Mark pauses for a moment and explains to his Gentile audience living outside of Palestine, the Jewish practice of ceremonial washing.
“Unclean,” the Greek word is koinais, as Mark explained it, meant “ceremonially unwashed.” It was a technical term among Jews denoting whatever was contaminated according to their religious rituals and thus was unfit to be called holy or devoted to God. Unclean could refer to practices or to people.
The most common ritual cleansing was the washing of one’s hands before eating food. For a loyal Jew to disregard this regulation was a sin. You and I might say that these disciples were engaging in unsanitary behavior when they did not wash their hands before eating. In the Pharisees’ minds, though, Jesus’ disciples were indulging in sinful behavior when they did not wash their hands.
Let’s pause for a moment and acknowledge that this tradition of ritual cleansing probably had a positive effect on the health of the Jews that observed it. It is fascinating, isn’t it, how some of the Jewish ceremonial laws protected them from disease? This was one of those cases. But protecting their health was not why they washed their hands before eating. It was because they were keeping the tradition of their fathers. And Jesus’ disciples were not observing those traditions.
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
Jesus knew what this was all about. He knew the Pharisees were not nearly as concerned about whether his disciples washed their hands as they were determined to find fault with his ministry. He makes no reference to his disciples’ apparent ungodly conduct. Instead, he replies, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
Jesus, of course, was correct in his assessment of the Pharisees. The ceremonial laws regarding ritual cleansing were not biblical. They were part of later traditions which the rabbis used to comment on scripture. In truth they were holding fast to human traditions rather than to God’s commands. But Jesus was not interested in the Pharisees’ theology, but in their hypocrisy.
It is clear that Jesus was not concerned about outward appearance but inner integrity. “These people honor me with their lips,” he said, citing Isaiah, “but their hearts are far from me.”
Pastor David Yarbrough says that when he was in Bible College he met an interesting young man by the name of Shannon. What made Shannon interesting was his looks. His hair was a different color each week, his ears were loaded with earrings, and he wore big, loose grunge-style clothing. But the most interesting point of his appearance was his shorts . . . and he always wore shorts regardless of the weather. What made his shorts so odd was the way he wore them. You see, he always wore his shorts backwards. That’s right he wore his shorts backwards. As you can imagine, anyone who dressed like that at a Bible College stuck out like a sore thumb.
One day, says Yarbrough, he couldn’t stand it any longer and his judgmental sarcasm got the best of him. He had to make a crack about Shannon’s shorts. To his surprise Shannon was ready for his criticism. Shannon turned to him and said politely, “I’ll tell you . . . just like I tell everyone else who asks me why I wear my shorts backwards. I tell them that God turned my life around so fast that my shorts couldn’t keep up.” Did you catch that? “God turned my life around so fast that my shorts couldn’t keep up.” Quite an interesting response.
Yarbrough says that something interesting happened as that semester progressed. In spite of his odd appearance Yarbrough began to see through Shannon’s actions, class participation, research papers and prayers that he was a very spiritual man. His initial reaction to Shannon was one of rejection, but when he saw past his bias to Shannon’s heart, his rejection soon turned to respect. (2)
Have you ever been guilty of judging a person by their outward appearance? Do some of you remember thirty or forty years ago when the easiest way to give certain middle age men a near stroke was to introduce them to a young male with long hair?
Anybody remember Archie Bunker and his son-in-law whom he called “Meathead”? One of the reasons Archie despised his son-in-law was his appearance long hair and hippie dress. Nowadays if you watch a Gaither’s concert on television, a veritable bastion of southern white conservative culture, some of the singers look very much like “Meathead.” How stupid we were 40 years ago when we got so upset about how young people looked.
Do you suspect that 40 years from now, people like us, church people, will realize how ridiculous our generation was to ostracize young people for such things as tattoos and piercings? I say this not to upset anyone here, but to ask you, who do you think is most in need of the Gospel, the prodigal who has wandered far from the family farm or the older son who has stayed at home and lived just like mama and daddy desired. We may treasure that older boy more, and he needs the Gospel just as much as his younger brother, but we should not write off the prodigal just because he or she looks or thinks differently.
We’ve got a problem in the church today. I love something that theologian and church prophet Leonard Sweet said years ago: “The church loves blue hair . . . until it walks through its doors on a 16-year-old kid.” (3)
I’m sure that you’ve noticed that most churches today are graying. Where are the young adults who so badly need Jesus? Could it be that we have driven them away because they feel they will be judged by how they look on the outside and not what’s in their heart? Of course, we can make that same mistake with older people.
Rev. Benjamin Shambaugh tells about a woman he once knew who got engaged later in life. Her son, a successful businessman, flew in from the West Coast to have lunch with his mother’s fiancé in order to “check him out” and tell her what he thought. Her son’s feedback of his soon to be step-father amounted to one sentence: “He is a nice man but he needs new shoes.”
Rev. Shambaugh says the observation about needing new shoes was insightful. The man was going through a grief process following the death of his first wife. He wasn’t taking care of himself very well and at the time had very low self-esteem. The shape of his shoes showed that something painful was going on in his life. However, what his critics missed, says Rev. Shambaugh was the incredible heart the man had inside. Despite the shoes, this couple still got married and was very happy together. The man even got a new wardrobe in the process! (4)
Be very careful about judging people, young or old, by their appearance. Jesus was not concerned about outward appearance but inner integrity. “These people honor me with their lips,” he said, “but their hearts are far from me.”
Our tendency to judge people by their appearance is a symptom of our estrangement from them. It is by getting to know people person-to-person that we are able to get beyond appearances.
In her book The Shelter of Each Other, Dr. Mary Pipher suggests that our obsession with appearance stems from our lack of relationships with those in our community. When people lived in smaller communities, they often had deep relationships with those around them. They knew about their neighbors’ families, health conditions, religion and values, habits and needs. Because people knew each other on a deeper and broader level, they didn’t need to judge one another on appearances.
But today, we are less likely to know our neighbors, our sales clerks, pharmacists, bus drivers, colleagues, and so on. When that happens we begin to judge each other by external appearances. We know nothing about the people we interact with on a daily basis beyond what they show us on the outside. In a disconnected society, we place less emphasis on internal values, like character, and more emphasis on external values, like looks. (5)
One man tells about working at a club on the weekend of the biggest motorcycle gathering of the year in his town. When the roaring machines pulled up outside, the patrons of the club turned their eyes toward the door and conversation turned into uneasy whispering. A group of the tough looking bikers came into the club. He says one of them walked up to him and asked him where the phone was. He pointed it out, and the silence in the room let everybody overhear what the biker said into the receiver. “Hi, Mom,” the biker said. “Just want to let you know I’ll be home late tonight.” (6)
If we could look beyond the outer appearances and see every stranger as someone’s son, someone’s daughter, what a difference it would make.
The Pharisees were concerned about whether the disciples washed their hands before eating. They weren’t concerned with the blind persons who could now see, the lame people who could now walk, the lepers who were now clean, Jairus’ daughter who was back from the dead. How could they be so blind to the work of God in their midst? How could they be so blind to the worth of the people they put down? Even more importantly, could we be just as blind?
Can you look beyond people’s outward appearance to their inner needs?
Some years ago, there was a story on the news about a bizarre tragedy involving a private jet. Aboard the jet were the pilot and one passenger. During its flight, air traffic controllers noticed that the plane was off its flight plan, and the pilot was not responding to radio calls. The plane followed a straight, high-altitude path across several states and finally out over the ocean. It was tracked by radar until it spent its fuel and fell into the sea.
Though the exact cause of the crash remains a mystery to this day, air safety investigators concluded that the plane must have lost cabin pressure during the flight. Deprived of oxygen, both pilot and passenger either died or fell unconscious. Meanwhile, the plane’s autopilot kept the plane on a straight-line course, kept the wings trimmed, just as if it were being consciously piloted, until the fuel ran out and the inevitable crash occurred. Anyone happening to look up and see that jet passing high overhead would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. But even though everything about the plane seemed normal on the outside, something was seriously wrong on the inside. (7)
Some of the people you and I meet every day are like that plane. Everything looks great on the outside, but inside they’re hurting, they’re needy, they’re lonely, they’re afraid. Like Annie Palmer, “The White Witch of Rosehall,” they need to reconcile their inner nature and to bring it into alignment with their outer nature. Maybe that’s true of you and me as well. Maybe on the outside you look like you’ve got it altogether, but on the inside you are a mess. Maybe it’s time you made a new start. You can, you know. With God’s help, you can begin living out the values you truly feel on the inside.
“These people honor me with their lips,” said Jesus, “but their hearts are far from me.” How is your heart? Does it reflect the heart of Jesus? And be careful of judging on the basis of outward appearances. Get to know people and you may discover that the person who looks like they don’t belong is actually a child of God.
1. thedodo.com. Cited in Reader’s Digest (Reader’s Digest USA).
2. http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/look-before-you-label-david-yarbrough-sermon-on-jesus-teachings-38024.asp.
3. Carpe Mañana: Is Your Church Ready to Seize Tomorrow? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).
4. http://www.stjohnsolney.org/sermons/20020310.html.
5. Mary Pipher, Ph.D., The Shelter of Each Other (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996), p. 85.
6. The Funnies, andychaps_the funnies subscribe@egroups.com.
7. Ron Lee Davis with James D. Denney, Mistreated (Portland: Multnomah, 1989).