This summer I encountered the “hand towel” versus “tea towel” distinction. Our new son-in-law is Canadian, a fairly English Canadian. When he came with our daughter Susan to spend a couple weeks in our home, Susan asked us for his sake to observe a new kitchen etiquette. Towels on which one wipes one’s hands are to be sharply distinguished from towels with which one wipes dishes. Andrew’s Canadian family calls the latter “tea towels.”
Evidently in Canada, “tea towels” are generally linen cloths of the sort we might call a “dish towel,” while hand towels are generally terry cloth. So it’s easy to tell them apart. But in our family kitchen those types are interchangeable and Beth and I think nothing of drying our hands on a cloth which we’ve just used to dry dishes. And a linen towel might be used to dry hands or a terry cloth towel to wipe dishes. But for Andrew there was a rigid rule, “Don’t dry your hands on the tea towel!”
So for a couple of weeks I had to stand with wet hands in the center of our kitchen and wonder which was which. Fortunately Susan and her hubby did a lot of the cooking and cleaning up and I was not faced with the dilemma too often.
The strength which even small family traditions (like which towel to use for what) can achieve shows us some of what Jesus contended with as He responds in this week’s text, Mark 7:1-23, to complaints about His disciples not observing religious traditions about washing their hands. The concern was not hygiene, of which ancient people knew little, but a ritual purity which was defiled if one ate with unwashed hands.
Jesus used the occasion of the Jerusalem Pharisees and scribes complaining about His disciple’s lack of handwashing to offer a seemingly unrelated example of tradition gone awry and to make the points that tradition ought not to derail larger matters of obedience to God and that one ought to be more concerned with avoiding genuine moral vices than with avoiding ritual impurity.
Here in the North Pacific one might think of all the energy and moral indignation devoted to concern over whether food is oganic, fair market, local, etc., etc. While there are certainly genuine issues of justice regarding how some of our food is produced and where it comes from, Jesus would almost certainly offer our regional “food police” a similar injunction to be more concerned about what comes out of our mouths and ultimately out of hearts than with what goes in.
There’s more to be said about how to distinguish healthy tradition from disordered tradition. The Gospel itself was understood to be a tradition, “handed down” (which is the same word root as “tradition” in Greek) from the apostles. So it’s not tradition as such which is the problem, but a tradition which emphasizes the wrong concerns and sets aside more important matters of relationship with God and others.