Jesus and his disciples clearly lived before the age of swine flu. For the Gospels record how the disciples ate bread with unwashed hands - to the disgust of the Pharisees (Mark 7:2). And they report that "all the Jews" do not eat unless they have washed their hands. Sensible Jews and foolish disciples, anyone with a basic knowledge of hygiene would say!
But the point of the story lies in one word that translators struggle to interpret correctly. The Pharisees wash "with the fist". Whatever this means, they wash in a special way, and they wash this way not simply out of habit, but because it would be wrong to do otherwise.
For the Pharisees, this hand-washing was a ritual. Ritual is a word with a wide range of meanings. For example, some people count sheep while trying to sleep. Children arrange their toys in a special way. "Good manners" mean following the correct ritual. We marvel at the courtship rituals of birds, and recoil at the thought of the Aztecs practising ritual sacrifice. In its origin, ritual is connected to the word rite - a religious ceremony. It is the way the ceremony is performed.
Ritual is not an essential part of the action it signifies. We cannot say that it is impossible for a couple to marry unless the bridegroom puts a ring on the finger of the bride. We cannot say that someone is unburied unless "earth shall be cast on the body by some standing by".
When the Pharisees asked Jesus why his disciples did not wash in the "correct" ritual way, Jesus' met them with the complaint that they had placed "the traditions of the elders" above the commandments of God, and gave other examples of ways "tradition" had allowed God's will to be disregarded. By pronouncing a ritual formula, a son could ignore his duty to take care of his parents. By concentrating on the ritual rather than the substance, the Pharisees were forgetting that real purity did not come from ritual cleanliness, but from the heart.
Jesus was not opposed to ritual as such, nor to tradition as such. It was ritual which had become empty, which actively obscured the meaning behind it. It was tradition that led away from the truth, and not towards it. We find Jesus adopting rituals - spitting on one blind man's eyes (Mark 8:22-25), sending another to wash in the Pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7). And we find him calling on his disciples to go and baptize, to eat bread and wine in remembrance of him. We find the apostles anointing the sick in his name.
Unless we see the connection between the "outward and visible sign" and the "inward and spiritual grace", even the most basic sacraments can degenerate into mere empty ritual. For washing with water does not by itself make us die to sin and rise to new life. Eating bread and drinking wine together does not by itself bind us into Christ's death and resurrection. Ritual too loses its point if we are not in touch with the meaning behind it, with the reason for it.
Three of our Gospels describe Jesus performing miracles. The Gospel of John describes such events as "signs". Turning water into wine was indeed miraculous. But it was not just miraculous. It was not a conjuring trick, or a bit of magic. It was a sign of the change God was working through the incarnation, just as feeding the five thousand or giving sight to the blind were signs of the new age foreseen by Isaiah (61:1, 35:5). If ritual loses its meaning, it becomes magic mumbo-jumbo, and, like the Pharisees' hand-washing, dangerously misguided.
One person's ritual may differ from another's. Not everyone lifts up their arms in prayer or adoration. Not everyone makes the sign of the cross in recollection of our Lord's saving death, or of the height and depth and width and breadth of God's love for the world. Some groups of Christians process into their meetings and lay a Bible at the front at the beginning of a service, as a sign that God is present through Christ, the living word. Others burn incense to recall how the prayers of God's holy people rise up to heaven. Some ritual can be distracting, and it is sometimes difficult to convince people that an innovation can make our worship more sincere (there are still those who recoil at greeting each other at the Peace, or bringing the Gospel physically into the midst of the congregation!)
Like the "signs" in John's Gospel, like the sacraments of the New Testament, ritual is not just an outward ceremony. It is not just a way to ensure our worship is orderly and runs smoothly and without distraction. Ritual is an expression of a deeper truth, and of our reaction to it. Ritual is our way of focussing and expressing our relationship with God. If it does not fulfil this function, it is human mumbo-jumbo, and not, as it can be, a gateway to Heaven!
HD