Jesus, our Ultimate Action Hero came to planet Earth to do battle against a host of enemies in order to set us free. He battled Satan and his hordes of demons, he battled the religious system that had kidnapped people from being able to find God, and today we see him battling even the human mind, which in this broken world has become broken too.
Everything you believe to be true you have made a decision to believe. That decision was based on what your mind told you. But your mind lies! Jeremiah described the mind (calling it the “heart”) as “deceitfully wicked, who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The deceiving quality of the mind is called “self-rationalization”. Our minds basically justify everything we believe and do. The problem is our minds are broken and so they lie to us. We may think we are doing something out of a pure motivation but in fact we have been deceived. Such was the case for the Pharisees. In their zeal to serve God they ended up serving themselves because they lacked an objective source of truth.
53 – 56
Gennesaret is on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. We visited near that spot at a kibbutz we stayed at while in Israel. I’m sure Jesus’ men were glad just to put their feet on solid ground and rest their weary arms after all that rowing. They were probably even more confused about just who Jesus was—this man who walks on the water as easily as having an evening stroll.
But the people have no such questions. All they know is that Jesus heals, and so word spread quickly. At least at this point, the people recognized and wanted Jesus. Similarly to the woman with the bleeding disorder, word has gotten out that just touching the tassel of his robe would heal them. What is the significance of this? God ordered the Israelites to wear tassels in Deuteronomy 22:12, then explained it in Numbers 15:38. It was to be a reminder to follow the Law. By Jesus’ day it had become a sign of holiness. There was nothing special about Jesus’ tassels; it was Jesus Himself that was special. It is the act of reaching out in trust and reliance on Jesus that heals not some piece of cloth or ritual.
Next, Jesus encounters one of the enemies He has come to conquer—the religious system that had co-opted Judaism.
7:1 – 4
Notice the contrast here. When they reach the shore the people reach out to Jesus, crowd around Him, seeking healing. Then a group of Pharisees and scribes push in to see Jesus, not to seek healing but to find fault. What they don’t realize, of course, is that Jesus will use their very argument against them.
So far the religious leaders had attacked Jesus through His disciples saying they were wrong for not fasting (Mark 2:18), for plucking heads of grain (Mark 2:24), and had concluded Jesus was casting out demons by Lucifer (Mark 3:22). Now they attack the disciples for their lack of ceremonial hand washing. Over the years after the Babylonian captivity, the religious leaders had added hundreds of oral traditions that they considered as binding as the Law. They looked down on anyone who did not follow them. If Jesus really wanted to be somebody, surely he would follow all of their traditions. Not so much.
The genesis for their practice came from Exodus 30:17-21 where the Law called for the priests to wash before performing sacred duties in the laver of the tabernacle. This was extrapolated to the general population as a way to cleanse them of anything that might have made them unclean before eating. This was not washing off dirt—they didn’t understand germs anyway—but was purely ceremonial. But the idea was that something physical could make you spiritually unclean unless you “washed” it off.
The idea had morphed into keeping up an appearance of holiness. It extended well beyond just the hands—to wash off any contact with Gentiles or unclean Jews—but also involved the way they even washed the dishes and the furniture. It’s amazing the lengths we will go to in order to appear like we’ve got our act together on the outside—while inside our character is no in line with God’s—and that is Jesus’ main point.
5 – 7
There is a lot in the accusations the Pharisees and scribes level. First, they are not attacking Jesus personally, but by accusing His disciples it is like they are saying “If you were really a holy man and a rabbi, wouldn’t you have taught your disciples to obey the traditions?”
Jesus pulls no punches—calling them hypocrites. The word comes from Greek theater when actors would wear a mask—making them look one way when underneath the mask they were someone else. “Two-faced” is another way to put it. By the way, this is the only place in Mark Jesus uses this word. The religious leaders appeared “oh so” clean on the outside but they were “oh so” unclean on the inside. He quotes Isaiah 29:13 by saying “Isaiah got it perfectly!”
Paying “lip service” to God while your character is far from Him is the heart of hypocrisy. The passage from Isaiah goes on to say: “their worship consists of man-made rules learned by rote.” Far from bowing to the authority of the Pharisees, or the authority of their “traditions”, Jesus knocks the whole system down by supplying two examples.
8 – 13
The problem the Pharisees had was they had replaced God’s Word with their own words as the authority over their lives and conduct. They had pledged their lives to protecting God’s Law but had actually walked away from it in the process. They would rather keep their own tradition than God’s Law. He uses the example of “corban” (which means “offering”). If a person dedicated something to God for God’s use then it was excluded from “ordinary” use. So a person could, according to the tradition, dedicate all of his money to God—thus exclude from having to give any to his needy parents—but all the while staying in complete control of the money and using it however he wished.
Greed and selfishness in the character had trumped the authority of God’s Word. It happened because the religious leaders placed their interpretation and additions to the Law on the same level as God’s Law itself. They misunderstood that it is character, and not appearances, that matters.
14 – 23
The Jews were fixated with the food laws and being “clean.” They didn’t realize that the two were not connected. It was not the diet that goes in, but the character that already lives in a person and comes out that matters. The Pharisees thought that by eating with ceremonially unclean hands they became defiled. But in reality the defilement comes from the character, not contact.
The Jewish food laws had been given for three primary reasons: 1) to protect their health. Many of the unclean animals were scavengers who ate dead things. 2) to set them apart from other nations and 3) to avoid objectionable associations (serpents, for instance, are associated with sin). Life Application Commentary
The problem was the Jews thought that by following the dietary laws they became clean before God.
Jesus points out that it has always been about the condition of the heart, not the contents of the diet. It’s interesting to me that the list of things that show a defiled character contains many things the Pharisees were actually doing themselves. The first 7 items are plurals, suggesting repeated acts; the second 6 are singular, representing our attitudes. These are the things that live inside each of us and will pull on us continually to put our desires and attitudes—the ones that come from a deceptive mind—above God’s desires and character.
Conclusions
The danger of trusting your own mind:
Your relationship with God becomes surface (6a)
You keep God at arm’s length (6b)
You try to earn favor with God by your efforts
You end up trying to win favor by men because you can’t see God’s approval
Your relationship with God atrophies (8)
You pull further from God to maintain your deal (9)
You pull others away from God by your actions/attitudes (13)
Here’s our problem as humans. We start wanting to be good, which means following the character of God whether we acknowledge it as that or not. Even as Jesus said “There is none good but God” (Matthew 19:17). But the moment we place our own mind on the same or greater plain as God’s over what is good—we begin to layer over the top of God’s character like varnish on a piece of wood. At first you can see through it pretty clearly—like the Pharisees not wanting to violate the Sabbath rule about not working. But the more we layer on our ideas superimposed on God’s the less clear the underlying wood becomes. Eventually the mind wants something—say: more money. Because our minds are incredibly self-rationalizing, we use the same layering technique to think we are being good when we are really covering up for evil.
This is very difficult to intercept as Jeremiah says: (Jeremiah 17:9) The heart is more deceitful than anything else and desperately sick—who can understand it?
The only answer is to let the revealed character of God—His Word—have more authority than what you think about it. Yes, some of it needs to be interpreted—mostly just that everything prior to Matthew looks forward to what the Messiah would do and everything from Matthew forward looks back at what the Messiah has done.
When you find yourself searching the Word to justify something you want to do—that should be a warning sign that you may have taken out the varnish! Instead pray: God, help me think like You!
