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In 1914, when the Bayer company began to package its aspirin tablets in bottles, they faced a challenge.
The tablets were fragile. They crumbled easily, especially when they rattled against each other during transit.
What Bayer needed was a decent shock absorber and volume filler. What they came up with was a big wad of cotton.
By the 1980s, Bayer had begun to coat the majority of its aspirin tablets. Disintegration was no longer an issue. But Bayer hesitated to remove the cotton wads from their bottles. The reason was simple: The public was alarmed by the very idea.
That big wad of cotton had come to represent freshness and security, even though it had never served either of those purposes. When customers opened a bottle of Bayer aspirin and didn’t find the cotton, they wondered if their pills were still potent. Far worse, they wondered if someone had tampered with the bottle.
So, Bayer kept the status quo. The company and its customers could truly say, “We’re doing things this way because this is the way we’ve always done it.”
After all, there really wasn’t any harm in leaving a wad of cotton in a pill bottle.
But there was.
Aside from the minor annoyance of picking little white fibers out of one’s prescriptions, cotton, far from repelling moisture, actually attracts it. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has declared that the freshness and security of pills is enhanced if the cotton is removed.
Bayer finally relented. Since 1999, their bottles of coated aspirin tablets have been Cotton-Free Zones.
Once a practice becomes a tradition, it’s hard to let it go.
That’s a challenge that Jesus faced over the course of his ministry, especially whenever he encountered religious authorities who regarded “keeping the rules” as a matter of life and death. One such encounter is reported in Matthew 15:1-6:
Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that whoever tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,’ then that person need not honor the father. So, for the sake of your tradition, you nullify the word of God.
Hand-washing prior to meals had become hugely significant for faithful Jews during the time of Jesus.
Pouring water over the fingers and wrists wasn’t merely a matter of hygiene. Spiritual cleanness had become a critical component in pleasing God.
The Pharisees and scribes who had come all the way from Jerusalem to Galilee just to keep their eyes on Jesus were obsessed with ceremonial cleanness. According to Old Testament law, a wide variety of things, both living and dead, were considered ritually unclean.
When it came to insects, for instance, only locusts (Middle Eastern grasshoppers) were given a ceremonial green light. They could be touched and eaten. All other insects, spiritually speaking, were from the dark side. If you were just about to serve a bowl of stew and a ladybug landed on the rim, the bowl was deemed unclean. So was the stew inside the bowl. And anyone who ate a bite of the stew. And anyone who later rubbed shoulders with the person who had eaten the stew.
Spiritual uncleanness, to put it mildly, was considered more contagious that this winter’s outbreak of flu.
Rabbis insisted that washing – again and again and again – was the only way to counteract ritual uncleanness and to stay within God’s favor. After all, you never knew when and where and how you might have become ritually unclean. According to tradition, Pharisees washed not only before every meal, but before every course of every meal.
This is why the religious authorities – the ones who made sure they did things the Right Way – were all over Jesus. Why did he and his disciples neglect such a crucial tradition?
Jesus ignored their question. He responded with a question of his own. “Where did you ever get the idea that your traditions are more important than God’s commandments?”
Honoring father and mother, of course, is one of the ten commandments. But rabbis, over the centuries, had a found a way to do an end run around such verses. If your father or mother were impoverished and came to you begging for bread, you could say, “Oh, I’m sorry, but I’ve already dedicated everything I own to God, and I can’t break my promise to God, now, can I?”
Certain individuals had apparently been arrogantly clinging to their perspectives on promise-keeping as a way to negate the Bible’s clear-as-day instruction to care for parents. And Jesus was having none of it.
According to Jesus, religious rule-keeping is a pathetic runner-up to the only things that really matter: loving God and loving others – all the time and in every circumstance.
For many people, in Jesus’ day and our own, that way of seeing things feels shockingly new.
But we’ve always done it this way.
We’ve always read from that Bible version. We’ve always said “trespasses” instead of “sins” in the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve always served chicken and noodles at our Lenten dinners.
True enough.
But if we take the cotton out of our ears, we can hear Jesus assuring us that his way of embracing new things can both change our lives and change the world.