Series

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and [2] saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. [3] (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. [4] When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)

[5] 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 'unclean' hands?"

[6] He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

[8] You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."

[9] And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! [10] For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' [11] But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), [12] then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. [13] Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that."

[14] Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. [15] Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.' "

[17] After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. [18] "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? [19] For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.")

[20] He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' [21] For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, [22] greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. [23] All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' "

What are you having for lunch or dinner today? I’m willing to bet that while you may give lots of thought and consideration to things like how much it will cost, how many calories it has, how many grams of saturated fat, or carbohydrates are in it, I’ll bet that none of you will think about whether the animal it came from split the hoof or chewed the cud. It would never occur to you to ask if it was prepared in a kosher kitchen that keeps the meat and the dairy in completely separate areas. The reason we, as the people of God, don’t think about those things is because of this teaching by Jesus.

There are two issues in this section: one that the Pharisees raise with Jesus, and one He raises with them.

First, their beef with Him: Jesus’ disciples[1] didn’t wash their hands in the manner prescribed by the oral tradition of the elders. Here’s how that tradition got started. After the Babylonian captivity,[2] the Jewish rabbis began to make meticulous rules and regulations governing the daily life of the people. These were interpretations and applications of the law of Moses, handed down from generation to generation. In Jesus’ day, this “tradition of the elders” was still in oral form. It was not written down until about A.D. 200, in what was called the Mishnah.[3] The Mishnah was described as a “fence” around the Law, that protected it from being broken by defining very carefully exactly what the Law meant. These were the traditions that specified, among many other things, how hands and pots etc. were to be washed so as to be ceremonially clean; and these were the rules that Jesus’ disciples were not following. Since the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were so concerned about keeping every little rule in order to be acceptable to God, they naturally asked Jesus why His men didn’t follow that tradition.

In reply, Jesus first brought up another point, which I will come back to later. Then He addressed the crowd who had heard the criticism, and answered the Pharisees’ question directly. Mark 7:18, “‘Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him “unclean”? [19] For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.’ (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods ‘clean.’)”

So it doesn’t matter whether you wash your hands or your pans in a certain way, because nothing that goes into you can make you “dirty” in God’s sight. With one comment, Jesus wiped out not only the whole oral tradition of the elders regarding food preparation, but the dietary laws of the Old Testament as well. When the Israelites had come out of Egypt, God gave them a whole set of dietary laws that were intended to set Israel apart as God’s chosen people.[4] Some foods were considered “unclean” and were not to be eaten. The tradition of the elders that the disciples were not following was based on that original set of dietary laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The idea was that you had to be holy, because God was holy, and if you did certain things, they would make you unholy, or ceremonially unclean.

Jesus basically wipes all that out with one stroke. He points out the obvious fact—that nothing you eat stays in you. It certainly does not affect your morality, your spirituality, your standing with God—it’s just a physical matter, not a spiritual one.

This is an excellent example of what is called progressive revelation. What that means is that God has progressively revealed more and more of His truth to mankind over the centuries, and the later revelations supersede the previous ones.[5] To the Jews in the wilderness, He said, Don’t eat certain foods or they’ll make you unclean in God’s sight. But fourteen hundred years later, He said through His final revelation[6], the living Word, Jesus, Eat whatever you want, because it’s what comes out of a man’s heart that makes him unclean in God’s sight, not what goes into his stomach. Mark makes sure we don’t miss the point: “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods ‘clean.’” So now, we eat anything we want; there are no dietary restrictions for the people of God. The definition of “holy” or “clean” has moved from the externals to the internals. It doesn’t matter what’s on your plate; what matters is what’s in your heart.

Under the Old Testament laws, there were all sorts of things that made a person “unclean”, i.e. unholy in a ceremonial sense. Eating prohibited foods, touching a dead body, or someone else’s blood, skin diseases, mildew, childbirth—all kinds of things made a person unclean, and the law prescribed rituals they had to do to remove that uncleanness. Jesus basically says, none of that makes any difference. What really matters, what really makes you unclean in the sight of God is your heart and the things that come out of it. Mark 7:20, "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' [21] For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, [22] greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. [23] All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' "

It was a whole different paradigm for the Jews. They were accustomed to being concerned about external things like food and rituals and what you touched, and Jesus said God was concerned about the internal things of their lives—their hearts.

Let’s just examine that list Jesus gave for a minute: What strikes you about that list? Some are things we think of as serious sins, but others are things we readily tolerate, such as envy and slander. We are so conditioned by the Cat Trainers on Madison Avenue[7] to want what others have, that we don’t even think twice about how wrong that is. As Christians, we don’t call it slander, of course; we call it sharing prayer requests, but it often amounts to about the same thing—we wind up sharing negative things about someone else that damage their reputation with others. We would never commit adultery or murder, but remember that Jesus said those sins are often committed in our minds, and that God takes that just as seriously. And then there is greed. Folks, I have to tell you, I think that many of us, in our particular slice of the American population, are guilty of greed, if by greed you mean wanting and hoarding more than we need. We are the great accumulators, the acquisitive society. How much is enough? We don’t seem to have any way to answer that question, other than, “Just a little more than I have now.” That’s greed. We Americans tend to applaud those who amass the greatest fortunes, as though they were heroes of some sort. Jesus says that attitude pollutes the soul and makes a person unclean, unacceptable, in the sight of God.

So Jesus deals with the initial issue the Pharisees raise by pushing them to examine the spirit of the law, not the letter of it. He was always trying to get people to look past the surface to the deeper, spiritual meanings of things.

When we do that, then we are forced to admit our need for cleansing---not just washing our hands and our pots and pans, but the need to be purified inside. When we honestly examine our hearts, we see how truly dirty we are before God. The way to deal with inner pollution is not through some outward ritual, but through faith in the death of Christ. When Jesus died on the cross, He was being punished for every one of our sins. Yours, mine, the whole world’s (1 John 2:2). Now, if we confess our sins, God can forgive us without compromising His justice, because those sins have been punished, paid for in full. So the Apostle John assures us, 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Our sin pollutes us; it makes us unclean, dirty in God’s sight. But if we confess those sins, bring them out into the light, admit where we have gone wrong, then God will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness.

This is the ultimate solution to moral uncleanness, not washing our hands in a certain way. A little later in our service, we are going to take communion, and before we do, we’ll have an opportunity to confess our sins and to claim the blood of Christ as the purifying agent that makes us holy and righteous in God’s sight.

In this instance, the Pharisees have touched a hot button for Jesus. So not only does He answer their initial question about why His disciples don’t wash their hands a certain way; He also picks up on the whole issue of traditions. He has a beef with them.

What He says, in a nutshell, is that traditions can be traitors in the sense that they lead us to disobey the Lord. The Pharisees ask, Why don’t you and your men follow the traditions of the elders? and Jesus pounces: Traditions, you say? I’ll tell you about traditions!

Mark 7:9, "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! [10] For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' … [11] But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), [12] then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. [13] Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that."

What is this “Corban” business? The fourth commandment said to honor your father and mother, and the Jews acknowledged that meant caring for parents in their old age; but they found a way around that. They said that if a person went through a ritual in which he formally “gave” all he had to God, then it was like a tax shelter: it could not be used to help his parents in their old age. Of course, the individual was still living on it, himself; it’s not like he actually gave the money away, gave it to the Temple, or anything. He had just formally declared that all he owned was “Corban”, i.e. devoted to God. So—the Social Security check isn’t stretching far enough? Sorry Dad, I can’t help you; I give so much to the church that I don’t have anything left to give you. Mom can’t live on her own any more? Sorry, Mom, we can’t help you; we’re too busy helping at church to have you come live with us.

The command to honor our parents is not just in the Old Testament, of course. The New Testament puts it this way: 1 Tim. 5:8, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” You can’t use God as an excuse for not caring for your family, especially your parents. In this day of extreme individualism, and independence, when most older people are put into nursing homes rather than living with their children, we need to listen carefully to what Jesus is saying here.

But the larger issue here is the role of tradition. The tricky thing about traditions is that we become so accustomed to doing things that way, that we never even notice when they diverge from God’s word. Traditions are part of the culture; they are like the water the fish swims in and doesn’t even know it is wet. Jesus said, Mark 7:9, "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” We have to examine our lives very carefully to see if any human traditions have crept in and nullified the commands of God.

For example, in our denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Book of Order, which basically spells out how to “do church” in the EPC, says that only ordained pastors can serve communion. The purpose of that regulation is to protect the dignity of the sacrament, so that it doesn’t get treated trivially by, say, an immature youth group leader or somebody like that. But you will search the Scriptures in vain for any passage that teaches what the qualifications are for the person serving communion. That rule is a human tradition, not the command of God.

Here’s another example of how traditions can nullify the commands of God. A brief glance at our bulletin each week shows lots of things happening around here. This is a busy place, with lots of programs for lots of different people. We have two worship services every Sunday, Christian education classes for all age groups in both hours of the morning. We have greeters, ushers, youth refreshment people; youth groups, pre-teen youth group, lots of different programs and activities for the college/career age with Mars Hill Community, several different fund raisers for the youth group going on all the time, Children’s Christmas play rehearsals starting, Agape groups for adults to get to know one another, Interfaith Hospitality Network for homeless people, a special group for Young and Not So Young Singles, another group for younger singles, Women in the Word, Moms in Touch who pray for their children’s schools, prayer meeting each Sunday afternoon at 5:00, House of Neighborly Service food drive, the Pathlight seminar starting last Tuesday, various committee meetings, training for the Stephen Ministers who care for people in the church who are going through hard times, choir and praise team practices, Home Fellowship Groups, and other small groups, a quilting group, the KnitWits, we just had the Men’s Retreat this weekend, the Punkin Party on Halloween, and the Talent Show and the all church Turkey Dinner are coming up in November.

That‘s a lot of programs. If you examine that list of programs with the question, Does this activity serve the church or the community?, you will see that the vast majority of them serve the church. There are exceptions, of course, because unchurched people are certainly welcome and even invited to some of those events, but by and large, we are saying, “Come.” Come to church. Come to our event, or our activity. We’ll welcome you, but you have to come.

But Jesus said to the Church, “Go!” “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” “Go, make disciples of all nations.” “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” The whole thrust of Scripture is, Don’t wait for them to come to you; go to where they are.

So the traditions of the church that have been built up over the 23 years we have been in existence (by the way, praise God! Faith Church is 23 this month!)—those traditions have mostly nullified the clear command of Jesus for us to go into our culture with the love and truth of Christ. Instead, we spend most of our time and effort just building up the Body here at home.

What traditions in your life—in your private, personal life, or in your family life, may have evolved to the place where they are contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture? These things are hard to see, because they are just part of the background of our lives. But ask God to show you where your standard way of doing things puts you in conflict with His Word.

Is there something in your normal schedule that prevents you from getting time alone with God, for example? Or is there something about the way you manage your money that prevents you from giving God His rightful due of 10%? Have you scheduled yourself so tightly that you don’t have time to spend with your neighbors? These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking.

The most serious problem Jesus points to in this passage is that in the process of following our own traditions rather than the commands of God, we might well become hypocrites.

Mark 7:6, "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.” When the traditions lead us astray, we usually still profess to love and obey God. We say one thing, and do another, and that is the very definition of a hypocrite. We say we love God, but we are not obeying His commands. Jesus said, John 14:23, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.” Our actions speak louder than our words. We may say we love God, but if we do not obey what He has told us to do, we are simply hypocrites.

I find this especially convicting when it comes to “going” into our community. My job, and my personality and gifts, seem to be most suited to equipping the Body. But surely, I am under orders, just like every Christian is, to “be active in sharing my faith” as it says in Philemon 1:6. So I have to find ways to do that which are consistent with who God has made me. I discovered last winter that teaching a class at CCU led to some wonderful opportunities to share the gospel with students who did not know Christ, and I’m looking forward to that again this fall. If I do not find a way to do this, I am, in Jesus’ words, a hypocrite.

Where does your life, your obedience, fall short of your profession? You say you love God, and you mean it; but does your life show it in your obedience? Ask God to show you where your walk does not match your talk.

We are coming to the Lord’s Table this morning, and this is a perfect place to get honest with Jesus. Lay down your defenses, let Him examine your life and point out anything that is displeasing to Him. Then confess that, apologize for it, and claim the cleansing that only He can provide.

[1] Since they did not accuse Jesus of this failing, the implication is that He did wash according to the tradition of the elders. Which is interesting, in light of His response to them and His disregard for their interpretation of the law of the Sabbath.

[2] Nehemiah led the final wave of refugees back to Jerusalem in 432 B.C.

[3] NIV Study Bible, footnote on Matt 15:2. This very careful attention to the Law no doubt grew out of the collective Jewish consciousness that the destruction of Judah/Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity had all been the result of their disobedience to the Law. (See the prophets.) So the way to avoid a similar problem in the future was to pay strict attention to every little detail in the Law.

[4] See Leviticus 11, Deut 14. Some suggest there were health reasons for the dietary restrictions, but that seems farfetched. Uncleanness signified sin and moral defilement, not poor health. The primary reason for the kosher code, as with so much else in Leviticus, was to give the Israelites concrete ways to relate to a holy God. Even if the restrictions seem somewhat arbitrary to us, the point was to emphasize that God is holy, and if we want to relate to Him, we have to be holy.

[5] The most obvious example is progressive revelation regards the sacrifice that takes away sin. In the Old Testament, it was the blood of animals; Hebrews comments in light of the death of Christ that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, but Jesus is our Passover Lamb, who was foreshadowed in the O.T. sacrificial system. Another example is the progressive revelation of the fate of the dead. The Old Testament refers to Sheol as the place of the dead, whether righteous or sinners. The New Testament makes a clear distinction between the final destiny of those who are right with God, and those who are not. Another example is Jesus’ teaching in Matt 24:14 that the gospel will have to be preached to all ethne before He returns; this detail is never mentioned in the Old Testament. Another example is the revelation in the New Testament that there will be two “comings” of the Messiah, and that His role in each will be vastly different. The Old Testament condensed them into one advent, typically focusing on His role as King and Judge.

[6] It is important to emphasize that Jesus and the New Testament that was written under the authority of His Spirit (see John 14:26) is God’s final revelation to man. Claims by later religious figures like Mohammed and Joseph Smith to be true prophets of God are false. Furthermore, the claims of self-styled “New Light” churches that they now have new insight into the will of God regarding homosexuality, are also misled. The canon, the standard for determining God’s will, is now closed.

[7] See sermon, Dogs and Cats in Church, preached 9/30/07, at www.faithepc.org.