“The Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around Him when they had come from Jerusalem, 2 and had seen that some of His disciples were eating their bread with impure hands, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elders; 4 and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves; and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.) 5 The Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands?” 6 And He said to them, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. 7 ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’ 8 “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.” 9 He was also saying to them, “You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. 10 “For Moses said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER’; and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH’; 11 but you say, ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever I have that would help you is Corban (that is to say, given to God),’ 12 you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother; 13 thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.” 14 After He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man. 16 [“If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”] 17 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, His disciples questioned Him about the parable. 18 And He said to them, “Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, 19 because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?” (Thus He declared all foods clean.) 20 And He was saying, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. 21 “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, 22 deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. 23 “All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”
It is my belief, and I contend along with many others that it is a Biblically based belief, that for each of God’s chosen ones there is a moment in time determined by God when He regenerates each one and grants them repentance and faith to believe. Now I’m not getting into a teaching on the doctrine of predestination today; I just want you to know that I believe God in His infinite wisdom and mercy and grace predetermined the day and time when I would be born spiritually into His eternal family. I tell you that because on the human side of the equation I feel that I may have responded sooner to the call of God had I realized at a younger age what a Lionheart Jesus was, in the face of the opposition He faced from the religious men in power in Judea.
I don’t know why I didn’t recognize this side of His character when I read the Word or heard it preached in my youth, but I never picked this out of the Gospel narratives until well into adulthood, and after becoming a Christ-follower, that Jesus was tough! He spoke the truth without flinching and without backpedaling, and there was never a moment when He was not in absolute Divine control of Himself and of the situation.
Of course I wouldn’t be beginning my sermon this way today, if this rugged courage was not in evidence in my chosen text. And that is not even the main point of my sermon today, but since it took me so long to see it I just like to make sure I occasionally shed some light for others on what a Man, what a Champion my Savior is.
So let’s go to it now, asking Him to speak His Word to our minds and hearts.
WASHINGS
I should begin by explaining the meaning behind the accusation of the Pharisees that the disciples of Jesus failed to wash their hands before eating.
This was not said in the sense of a mother scolding her child for coming to the dinner table with mud on his hands. The Jews had traditional ritualistic washings, one of them being the splashing of water over their hands before eating bread and following certain ceremonies or after possible contact with Gentiles. I have something to read to you in a moment further explaining this.
First, let’s take note that these traditions were originally based on Scriptural admonition.
“The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 18 “You shall also make a laver of bronze, with its base of bronze, for washing; and you shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it. 19 “Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet from it; 20 when they enter the tent of meeting, they shall wash with water, so that they will not die; or when they approach the altar to minister, by offering up in smoke a fire sacrifice to the LORD. 21 “So they shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they will not die; and it shall be a perpetual statute for them, for Aaron and his descendants throughout their generations.” Exodus 30:17-21
Observe that this was a command given to the priesthood relating to their service at the altar in the temple.
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day had added to the people’s burdens by imposing these traditions of washings on them, as well as many other hedges of laws they had built up around the Law of God for further protection against violating them. The problem arose in that they had begun to place their traditions above God’s Word. He gave the command to the priests for their temple service and now the Jewish elite had taken it upon themselves to distort God’s edict and lay this weight upon the people. Worse, they had changed the meaning and purpose of the washing from that of a ritualistic cleansing representing going before the Lord with a clean heart for worship, to a self-righteous purging of the defilement of having been in the presence of Gentiles or Samaritans or any other commoner considered ‘unclean’.
These traditions never truly went away, and some light is shed for us on how they moved from the temple to the common home in the words of a Jewish teacher of our own day.
“This symbolic expression of washing away impurity from one’s hands dates back to Temple times, when the Priests,…devoted their lives to the Temple and its sacrificial system. Before performing any ritual, a (Priest) was required to wash his hands, making himself pure and ready to offer a sacrifice. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE,(sic) the table in a home came to represent the Temple altar. The bread placed on it symbolizes the offerings that were once brought to the Priests. The Sages, who believed that the Temple and the Priesthood would be restored, did not want the practice of washing hands before handling an offering or performing a ritual to be forgotten, and so washing the hands before a meal was strictly enforced. Today, Orthodox and traditional Jews still wash their hands before eating bread.” Kolatch, Alfred J. The Second Jewish Book of Why, Jonathan David Pub. Middle Village, NY 1985
Now he attributes the moving of the ritual into the home to the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, but as we can see in our text this movement had already taken place at the time Jesus was teaching, and probably long before He came on the scene.
So the Pharisees criticize the disciples for eating their bread without first going through this ritual, and by so doing they were actually attacking Jesus as the leader of the band.
The real purpose behind the various occasions we find in the gospels where the Jews are accusing and criticizing Jesus is that they wanted to discredit Him. He was being received widely by the people of Judea and Galilee as a Rabbi and a Prophet, and we know that some were beginning to believe on Him as the promised Messiah.
So when the jealous Jews followed Jesus around, scrutinizing every word and action, their true motive was never to uphold the Law of Moses or to guard their traditions – although they did consider those things important for the preservation of their reputation of being extremely upright and good – but their true motive was to find a way to discredit Him before the people and eventually find justification for putting Jesus to death.
TABLES TURNED
Let’s take a careful look at the response of Jesus to these accusations and the insulting challenge of the Pharisees to His authority and the disciples’ religious piety.
First, think about the nature of His response.
How would you or I react to an accusation from people in the church that we were violating some important church tradition; some long accepted and long practiced ritual that many have come to hold as essential doctrine? For example, asking the Lord’s blessing on a meal before eating.
That’s a simple one that probably won’t offend folks too much, as would talking about whether a church should be governed by Deacons or Elders, or both or none, or whether we should hold to a pre- post- or a-millennialist view of end-times prophecy, or whether a baptism by sprinkling can ever be valid, or some other non-essential that so many Christians fight over and so many churches split over, so let’s use praying at the table as our example.
You and a few friends have sat down to eat at a local restaurant. You’re joking and laughing and having a good time, and the waitress/waiter brings the food to the table and as the conversation continues you all dig in and start eating. (By the way, if it’s a sin for women to teach men, is it a sin for a man to wait tables where women are eating? Just wondering…but that is one of the non-essentials people fight and split over.)
Suddenly Deaconess Dora and Elder Ernest are standing by your table with looks of scorn and deep disappointment on their faces. You look up and around a big mouthful of cheeseburger you muffle out, “May I help you?” Deaconess Dora, with ice in her tone, asks, “Why did you just start eating without even asking the blessing? There are people in this place who know you are Christians, you know…”
I imagine that the reactions around the table would be mixed according to personality, don’t you? One or two might flush red with embarrassment and stare awkwardly at their plate.
Another might begin to offer excuses as to why as a group we simply forgot ourselves in the course of energetic conversation. The most outspoken in the group – the Peter, if you will – might swallow his bite and say something like ‘Why do you still wear a beehive hairdo?’ or ‘What makes you think we didn’t each say our own blessing silently?’ or ‘If God always answered prayer in the positive, you’d be transported to Siberia right now.’, or some other equally unspiritual response.
The point is, we would respond on some level, as human to human, apologizing, or excusing, or defending.
But what we have before us in Mark 7 is the very reason people said of Jesus, “He speaks as one having authority, not as the scribes” Mark 1:22, It is the reason the temple guard when sent out to arrest Him, came back empty handed, excusing their dereliction of duty with, ‘Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks’ John 7:46.
The Pharisees attack Jesus with this pathetic, nitpicking accusation that He allows His followers to ignore tradition, and does He get embarrassed? Of course not. Does He get defensive or begin to list excuses? Of course not!
The Lion of Judah turns the tables on them, first by ignoring their question, next by exposing them as the true heretics on the site. And by the way, they will get an answer to their question, albeit not the one they want, but He has some things to say about them first.
Next let’s look at the substance of His response.
First, He upholds the words of His prophet. “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites” What is He saying there? That Isaiah, some 800 years before they were born, was talking about them! Who could make that claim? The living Word of God, that’s who! The One who gave the prophet his words. The One who, while the prophet knew he was speaking to his own generation, knew that the prophet was also speaking to a future generation that He, the Word, would confront face to face.
Now as a preacher of God’s Word I might have many occasions to take an exhortation of scripture, one of the accusations of the prophets toward the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel, something out of the Proverbs decrying laziness or gluttony or lust or lying or whatever, and then apply what is said to present day circumstance; present day behaviors and so on.
But I could never say, “This Old Testament prophet was talking about you people” and point to the congregation before me. I might say that symbolically, if I never wanted to preach to that particular congregation again, but I could never presume to have some special knowledge that God was speaking to that particular group of folks 2800 years ago and that I was there to fulfill it in their hearing.
Jesus could and did.
He reveals that the Spirit through the prophet, was pointing a finger down the corridor of 800 years directly at them. He upholds and reveals the prophet. Next, He publicly exposes the evil of their own defilement; their defiled religion.
His first indictment against them is the pool from which the following indictments emerge. (vs 8) The neglect of God’s Word and exaltation of worldly wisdom above it is nothing less than idol worship. The first of the Ten Commandments given to Moses is “You shall have no other gods before Me” Exodus 20:3, and placing any tradition of man or any creed or man-made doctrinal statement in a place of priority demanding that men swear allegiance to it, is idolatry.
Having placed tradition above God’s Word, they are now free to treat God’s Word with negligence. This works with people also. The Nazi party in the 1930’s publicly ridiculed the Jewish people as slightly sub-human. They spread vicious rumors about their private worship rituals and falsely accused them of crooked business practices. By the time the Nazis were ready to move against the Jews as a people, the citizens of Germany as a nation were seeing the Jewish people as something to despise and disdain; something to purge themselves of like a plague. Hence, they were able to turn deaf ears and stopped nostrils to the noise and stench of the camps.
Once you or I take the position of putting undue emphasis on something contrary to the Word of God, then the Word becomes minimized in our thinking and when that happens it becomes a simple matter to reason away sin, to make wrong right, to stop fearing the consequences, either temporal or eternal.
So Jesus cites this example of their violation of the fifth commandment in order to feed their greed. By way of brief explanation – this strange word ‘Corban’ refers to something dedicated to God which can therefore not be taken back.
The Pharisees were encouraging young men to say of the means they should have used to take care of their parents in their old age that it was “Corban” – dedicated to God and it therefore could not be used for their support. They made this all sound very spiritual and Godly, after all, it was going to God’s work. In truth, the Pharisees could continue to make personal use of it, and it never bothered their conscience that these elderly men and women were suffering and going without.
I wonder if they thought Jesus didn’t know about this practice. I wonder if they thought their actions were behind the scenes, so to speak, and that no one would ever make the connection that they were deliberately depriving the poor of a means of support. I wonder if their faces reddened and their stomachs churned as He brought this out in a very public forum.
How often, I wonder, do we forget that in Him we live and move and exist, and that He is perfectly aware of the thoughts and intentions of our hearts? How often, I wonder, is our religion defiled by what comes from within us to practice it?
Oh, we’re not guilty of this Corban ‘thing’? That’s ok; we’re covered, I’m sure, in the phrase, “…and you do many things such as that”.
ANSWERS
Well, Jesus finally comes around to answering their initial challenge, but as I said earlier, probably not in a way they would have wanted. Most definitely not in a way they would have wanted. They wanted Him to explain Himself. What was really meant by their challenge was,
“You cannot possibly be the Messiah; you can’t even be a prophet or even a teacher of Israel. Otherwise, your disciples would adhere to tradition. They would be more observant of the rituals that make us righteous. They would be more like us.”
So they weren’t really seeking an answer; they were seeking capitulation; surrender. “Oops, you got me. Ok, I’m not a good Rabbi. I’ll just go back to Nazareth now and resign myself to obscurity, making tables and verandas and such”.
What they got was a lesson about the disparity between outward fleshly acts of righteousness and the true condition of the radically depraved heart of mankind.
Before we talk more about that I think we should get a bit of a chuckle at the way Jesus handles this situation. I am reminded of the original motion picture of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. One of the children in the group touring Mr. Wonka’s factory was very arrogant, very loud, very rude. Each time he spoke up to say something he thought made him appear very clever and knowing, rather than responding directly to the statement he made Wonka would say something like, “You should open your mouth more when you speak” and then go on with the tour with an air of dismissal toward the boy.
Notice how the scene comes together in our text. Jesus and His disciples are apparently eating, or have been eating, when the Pharisees approach and make this potentially humiliating accusation.
As His response, Jesus ignores the insult and points out the defilement of their religion and their religious practices and traditions that invalidate the Word of God.
Then, as Wonka with the arrogant boy, Jesus turns from them to address the multitude and pulls the teeth out of this pet tradition of their religious rulers.
You may remember from the Sermon on the Mount the several times that Jesus said, “You have heard said, but I say to you”. In that, He was making reference to the accepted teachings of Rabbis who came before Him, teaching traditions and stiff applications of the Mosaic Law.
That is what He has done here. The multitudes are gathered, they watch and listen as the Pharisees expound a very familiar tradition that in their estimate must be adhered to with diligence in order to be ritualistically clean and acceptable and Jesus basically refutes them and their teaching with His explanation. But He doesn’t even say it directly to them. He is sending them the message that He doesn’t owe them an explanation. His disciples have just been publicly insulted and this is how He vindicates them. The Pharisees don’t get the response they want; He dismisses them like the arrogant children they are, and turns instead to teach the crowds.
Think about this, people! God is concerned with your heart, not your stomach! God is concerned with your spirit, not your flesh! What good does it do you to exercise your body and perform proper hygiene, and abstain from unhealthy foods, and only eat organically grown stuff from an upscale, renovated grocery store with a Starbuck’s coffee vendor inside the front door, when your throat is an open grave, with your tongues you keep deceiving, the poison of asps is under your lips, and your mouth is full of cursing and bitterness? (see Romans 3:13-14)
God’s concern has always been with that which proceeds from the inside, because it is that which expresses the heart – reveals the condition of the heart.
Matthew 12:34 “…for the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart”
Proverb 23:7 “For as he thinks within himself so is he”
Jesus Himself makes this point early in our text when He quotes Isaiah.
“This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me”
If one man is eating McDonald’s fries and another is eating celery sticks are we to determine by that who is closer to God? Or do we make that assessment based upon what they talk about on a regular basis and what their behavior is as a matter of course?
It’s what in modern cultural vernacular we call a ‘no-brainer’, isn’t it?
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LONG RANGE RESULTS
Before we close we need to step back from the picture and observe the long range results of practicing defiled religion out of defiled hearts.
This particular moment in time and this particular misunderstanding of the Jewish leaders and their misplaced priorities wasn’t a problem in a vacuum. It wasn’t an error that affected nothing beyond them and their daily meaningless routine. In this entire passage we’ve looked at today the key problem, the bottom line, is in the declaration, “Their heart is far away from Me”.
Christ-follower, the thing that you and I must be diligent in, over any religious ritual or tradition, is guarding our hearts against the natural drift of the fallen nature to be inched away from fellowship with God by the quiet, seductive lure of the world and its thinking and its temptations.
By the time Jesus came on the scene the Jewish religion had morphed into something that didn’t even resemble what God had handed down through Moses. It was so fortified with tradition and peripheral regulations and worldly focus that it had become a farce presided over by evil, greedy, clueless men. And where did it take them? To the top of Golgotha where with murderous intent they hammered the Prince of Glory to a tree. It took them to destruction and dispersion and rejection as a nation.
By way of application I make reference to a portion of a book by Dallas Willard, titled, “Renovation of the Heart”. He tells a story there of a church, and he very wisely and deliberately leaves it to the reader to decide if this is an imaginary church or a real one. He says this church was founded ‘out of conflict with another church’. Now pay attention, because that was the first, fatal step right there. Even though many grievous errors were made later in the history of the church, the first wrong step set the pace for all that was to come.
He goes on to list the problems of the various pastors that went through over a period of thirty six years and how they affected the church over all. The list was not an unfamiliar one. It consisted of adultery, greed, theft, unresolved strife, deceit, all the things we see in the world around us that become more glaringly despicable because they occur in the church.
Then Willard says, “I use this story because, in the language of Peter, ‘Judgment must begin at the house of God’. It is there we see soul ruin at its greatest. If we can’t simply do what is right there, where can we?” Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart, NavPress, 2002, chpt 3, ‘Radical Evil in the Ruined Soul’
The point is that in the ancient nation of Israel and in many churches of the New Testament we have seen the same decline, because of one or more of these symptoms; because of the neglect and minimizing of God’s Word, because of misplaced priorities, because of the evil harbored in hearts that manifested itself in behavior and in relationships. How many churches have suffered and labored without fruit for years because of the defiled religion being practiced there, out of unrepentant, defiled hearts? The claim that judgment must begin at the house of God is true for His chosen house, Israel, and His purchased house, His church, and also for the individual who has the Holy Spirit within, but has long harbored defilement of heart that has corrupted his religion without.
I ran across a very simple illustration, the source of which I don’t know, about a large tree that came down in a park during a violent nighttime storm. Upon inspection it was discovered that the tree had been rotten at the core because of thousands of tiny insects that had eaten away at its heart.
Christians it is good for us to understand the doctrines of our faith that give us confident assurance that we are God’s and He forever holds us in His hand. It is comforting to be assured that nothing can prevent us now from spending eternity with Him in glory. But we absolutely must be constantly on guard for our hearts, reaffirming the preeminence of Christ and His Word in our lives, remembering that it is not the outward demonstration of religious piety that purifies us and keeps us pure, but the constant yielding of ourselves to His scrutiny and His purifying, sanctifying work in our heart of hearts. If you were to read on in Mark 7 following our text verses, you would see that Jesus went from there to Tyre, where He responded to the pleas of a Gentile woman to deliver her daughter of an unclean spirit. The pious Jews were careful to wash their hands on just the outside chance that they may have come in accidental contact with a Gentile in the marketplace, but Jesus was willing to bless the faith of a Gentile woman and then move on from there to the Decapolis, a region of ten Gentile cities, to minister in Divine mercy there. What is in your heart will be demonstrated in your words and in your life.
The Dallas Willard book I quoted from earlier is subtitled, “Putting on the Character of Christ”. What sort of character is that? The kind of character whose religion is pure and undefiled, and out of the heart, expresses the heart of God.
Let us pray.
Lord, help us to understand today, that it is that which is not seen that is eternal. Not our pious adherence to tradition, not our cold, heartless practice of empty and defiled religion, but it is that which is not seen; your Spirit in us, our spirit in you, our hearts made and kept pure by You so that out of them will flow the very character of Your Beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
