I love a piece of fruit after going to the beach! It’s a healthy, easy way to replenish sugars and nutrients after sweating in the hot sun and burning energy in the water, and since the sugar is fructose, my body can break it down and absorb it quickly. (A bonus when I’m having to do the driving.) Usually, I grab a banana for the higher sugar amount and potassium. On this day, however, we were out of bananas but had a bag of beautiful peaches in the refrigerator, so I grabbed one for each of us.
The peach skins felt a little thin under my fingertips, and I made a joke about that. Then they went into our lunch sack for later in the day. It was after 5:00 when we left the beach. As we were early in our drive home, I anticipated biting into this sweet, juicy, delicious peach. And it was sweet and delicious and just juicy enough that it didn’t make a mess all over me. You know what I’m talking about–when the juice drips down your chin and onto your chest, and when it drips all over your hand and starts to run down your arm.
I’m going down the road and eating this peach. I get to the pit and notice it’s split so I can see the kernel. The kernel was covered in a layer of fuzzy mold. Nothing on the outside of the peach or even the yummy meat of the peach itself could’ve prepared me for the decay inside of it.
Seeing this moldy peach kernel reminded me of how people can be sometimes. They can look absolutely desirable on the outside, whatever “desirable” we want to see and they want to show. Maybe they’re physically attractive. Maybe they say the right things or act the right ways. Perhaps they make a big show of their faith and spew God-talk to everyone within earshot, but inside, they harbor this nugget of rot and decay that eventually will consume their entire being, showing the world how they’re rotten from the core.
In Mark 7:14-23, Jesus tells his disciples how it is what is inside a person that will make them clean or unclean. What we eat goes in one end and out the other. What our bodies don’t need, they expel. What comes out is what makes us filthy, for what comes out of our mouths or comes out in our attitudes originates from our hearts. When we are rotten from the core, that shows.
Jesus was using the Pharisees as a thinly veiled object lesson, and in fact, he had confronted the Pharisees on their hypocrisy. They made a huge show of praying out in public and everyone knew when they fasted. They were flamboyant in their tithes of cooking herbs, but not in their help for the widows and orphans–or even their own aging parents. These Pharisees were public in their religiosity but not at all in their kindness or compassion. They looked just peachy on the outside, but their insides were molding.
You know what’s better than a sweet, juicy peach with a busted pit and a molding kernel? A sweet, juicy peach with a perfectly intact pit and a healthy kernel. We’re called to be that. That’s the peach that’ll only go bad from the outside, not from a bad core. That’s the peach that’s desirable. How do we be that peach? We are that peach through quiet relationship with God. Our desirability comes from showing love and compassion to others. It also comes from advocating for vulnerable people who can’t do a thing for us except maybe reflect God’s love back to us. And how do we keep our pits from rotting? It’s so simple: We do this by walking humbly with God. We go through life in this beautiful relationship, and that will keep us from being rotten from the core.
I heard someone say today that someone else doesn’t have time to do something that’s important. I just looked at her and asked, “Why not? She has the same twenty-four hours in the day as the rest of us.” Once one of my students came to me with the excuse of “I didn’t have time to get my work done.” I asked her if she’d had time to play with a friend, to which she answered in the affirmative. I told her, “If you had time to play, you had time to get your work done.”
