9.1.24 Mark 7:15, 21-23
15 There is nothing outside of a man that can make him unclean by going into him. But the things that come out of a man are what make a man unclean. . . . 21 In fact, from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. 23 All these evil things proceed from within and make a person unclean.”
How Bad is It, Jesus?
Years ago one of our members had a pain in the back. His doctor didn’t really check into it, had him do some exercises, and let it be. Come to find out, it was cancer. If they had found out sooner, they maybe could have stopped it. But they waited too long. The doctor didn’t take it seriously enough.
The same applies to looking at ourselves in a spiritual way, trying to figure out what is really wrong with us. If you think that sin is nothing more than breaking a bad habit, nothing but a flesh wound, well then that’s different than treating it like a disease. Think about alcoholism. How do you treat it? Just stop drinking alcohol? Hide the liquor. Stay away from bars. It sounds good in theory, but that doesn’t usually work too well, because the desire goes deeper than that.
Look at the difference in the way that Jesus looked at sin in comparison to the way the Pharisees and the teachers of the law looked at sin. It was as if they looked at sin like a grease or a grass stain that you needed to wash off from your clothes. Make sure you wash your hands before you eat in a specific way. You HAVE TO do this in order to be clean. Make sure you don’t associate with non-Jews and don’t eat their unclean foods. Stay out of the dirt and you won’t get dirty. They turned the Moral Law and the Ceremonial Law into a system on how to stay clean and how to be holy.
That’s the way we like to think, to turn God’s law into bite sized chunks, to turn our religion into ritual. I missed church for a while. The pastor or elder has been calling on me. I’ll come back for a week and we’ll be good for a few months. I’ve been watching some things I shouldn’t watch. I’ve been drinking too much. I’ll come to church and confess my sins, and I’ll be good to go. I’ll say a few extra prayers, express some extra remorse, and maybe give a little extra in the offering plate. There’s some truth in there, of course, some real remedy. But there’s a danger of turning it into a mere ritual.
There’s also the Pharisaic idea that the dirt is out there, but we’re clean in here. If I just keep my children or myself from watching TV, maybe keep them from having unbelieving friends, wear conservative clothing, send my child to a Christian school, always listen to Christian radio, then I’ll keep myself clean from the dirty world out there. Make a promise to myself. Put on a chastity ring, then I’ll be good. As a pastor I think, “Maybe I just need to lay it out in black and white.” For instance, I’ve heard that Game of Thrones has a good story line, but that there’s pornography littered throughout. So maybe we should just tell people, “Don’t watch it.” Maybe if people had a list, then they would keep themselves from looking at things they shouldn’t be looking at. Maybe if we had a list of approved clothing, that would help.
It sounds good in theory, and it may have some practical aspects to it. But in the end, it really doesn’t go deep enough. It tends to make people feel good about themselves, like they are doing better than the rest of the unbelieving world. And it builds up pride in those who are good at following the rules. But it also makes people want to rebel. If the church tells them NOT to do it, well then they want to do it all the more. They look for hypocrisy in the rules, in what they can do and can’t do. There’s not always consistency in the rules.
It’s good to have a disciplined life, don’t get me wrong. You should have rules to live by. But trying to live by a set of rules tends to ignore the fact that no matter how clean I may try to keep myself, I’ve got a deeper problem to deal with. This isn’t like the Garden of Eden. We are no longer dealing with clean and holy people on the inside, who can be corrupted by eating a piece of fruit. Just look at what happened to Adam and Eve AFTER they ate from the fruit. Adam had the gall to blame not only Eve but also GOD Himself, right to His face! “The woman YOU GAVE me.” The woman pointed the finger at Satan, with a simple point of fact. Not seemingly any remorse. “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” So the history of the Bible as Cain killing Abel, David committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering her husband, King Manasseh sacrificing his children to Molech in the fire, Judas betraying Jesus, and Peter denying Jesus. Time after time after time, even those who should have been better than that proved themselves to be worse, even though many of them were believers. Why? Because they’re born sinners through and through, corrupted from the inside out.
Jesus describes the human condition to be much worse than what the Pharisees and Teachers of the Law thought. Listen to what He said again. And notice that He’s referring to “a man”, which means any human ultimately, believer or unbeliever. There is nothing outside of a man that can make him unclean by going into him. But the things that come out of a man are what make a man unclean. 21 In fact, from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. 23 All these evil things proceed from within and make a person unclean.” Even thoughts can be evil and are evil. And so are the actions. Theft is evil. Murder is evil. Adultery is evil. Greed is evil. Deceit is evil. Unrestrained immorality is evil. Envy is evil. Slander is evil. Arrogance is evil. Foolishness is evil. It’s not just a weakness. It’s not just a mistake. It’s not a mishap. It’s evil. Pure evil. When it comes from a Christian or an unbeliever, it’s still evil.
And where does it all come from? That’s the worst part. It comes from the heart. It’s one thing if you need surgery on your finger or your arm or your leg. But your heart? That’s a bigger deal. Think about it from a physical aspect. The heart affects your whole body. If your heart isn’t beating correctly it can cause fluid in your lungs and your legs. Jesus says that sin comes from the heart, where the seat of emotions and feelings come from.
So what do we do with this “you be you” movement? This “follow your heart” generation? “If it feels good, do it.” Well, when it’s filled with adultery, immorality, greed, envy, then it’s evil, no matter how it feels. You may not feel good about yourself when you’re told that your very heart produces evil left and right. But it’s the truth. This isn’t just my opinion talking. This is God talking. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He created us. He knows how many hairs we have on our head. He calls it for what it is. This means that evil comes from the inside out. It is what we are corrupted with in our inmost being. Paul said the same thing, even as a Christian, when he wrote, “I know that NOTHING GOOD lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.” (Romans 7:18)
We need this honesty. Imagine if you had cancer, and your doctor didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so he just told you that you had a cold. It would sound so much better if you only had to take some cold medicine versus getting chemo for six months. But in the end, the cold medicine wouldn’t do you any good and you’d be dead. Would you rather have a doctor be nice and lie to you or ruin your day and tell you the truth? You can’t get the right remedy if you don’t get the right diagnosis. So Jesus is honest with us so that we seek the right remedy, so that we go deeper than thinking that by washing our hands before we eat we’d be clean.
Or imagine if you were diagnosed with stage four cancer and your doctor put you on an exercise regiment. Do twenty pushups a day. Walk ten miles a day. Take some vitamins. Make sure to shower three times a day. Well, that’s not how it works.
But that’s what some do with Christianity because of its view of sin. “It’s too negative. If I can’t be anything, if all my works are just like filthy rags, then I’m done with it. I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. I want God to accept me as I am, not to tell me how sinful I am. I’d rather be accepted for being me rather than being told how awful I am. I’d rather get some good advice on how to be a good money manager or how to have a happy marriage. Why all the negativity?” But Jesus tells us this for a reason. Why? Not just so we feel lousy about ourselves, but so we seek the proper remedy.
What is it? Does God need to go nuclear on us and just send us to hell? No. Jesus didn’t come here just so we’d burn in hell. The One who is condemning us with these words, telling us how sinful our hearts are, how we can’t ritualize ourselves into heaven, He’s wanting us to throw up our hands and look for a different solution, not to try and wash our hands into heaven, like Pilate did as he was selling Jesus to death.
Look at the heart of Jesus. Why is He saying this to us? Out of LOVE, so that we see His heart. He comes on behalf of humanity, as God in the flesh. He is the One who is going to be burned by God, put through hell on the cross. He is going to reveal His merciful heart as He prays for our forgiveness from the cross, and becomes the reason for our forgiveness. Here’s the One human who has a pure heart, a heart that never generated sin. He had a heart that burned full of love for our salvation. It was his heart, broken by our rejection, burned by the Father, that would be punished on behalf of humanity. Rejected by His fellow humans, rejected by His Father, yet loving throughout. It is this heart that reaches out to us and says, “This is how much I love you. This is how much I want you. I was willing to go to the cross for you. I was willing to have my Father abandon me for you. I was willing to go through hell FOR you, instead of you. I wanted you to be forgiven. I wanted you to be saved. I wanted you to love me. I didn’t do this so that you would live your life in guilt. I did this so you would live your life in faith and in love.”
Jesus takes away the need for me to be burned. And it’s all so simple, so easy, so painless, how God washes my soul. Yes, in a simple ritual full of promise, in the waters of baptism. Here God takes all of what Jesus did for me and washes my body and soul. In God’s eyes, when He baptized me, it was as if He put me on the cross with Jesus and damned me with Him. It was as if He raised me from the dead with Jesus too. I don’t have to do anything. Just sit here and be bathed with Jesus and His righteousness, flowing over me and onto me. The Holy Spirit points me to the cross and says, “That’s all for you. There is God’s heart, living and dying for you. Believe it and be saved!” When I come for the Supper, here He comes again with His righteousness and holiness, mercy and forgiveness. Flowing into me with His body and blood, shed for me. I do nothing but eat and drink, in faith for what HE did for me on the cross.
And that’s what kills me too in a sense. Faith in Jesus takes away any room for pride. It takes away any reason for comparison. It makes me look like Jesus and you look like Jesus - all of us! Instead of looking at what’s inside of me, He sees who died outside of me, for me, on the cross. How do I stand before God on Judgment Day? I don’t say, “Well here, look at how I raised my kids. Look at how I was a pastor. Look at the many sermons I preached.” Jesus would say, “That’s the best you’ve got? What about all those members you LOST?!? What about the terrible example you set for your children? To hell with you!” No. It’s a cover up I tell you. I say to Jesus, “Don’t look at me. Look at you. Look at what you did for me. Look at your cross. Look at your resurrection. Listen to your promise for me. Whoever believes and is baptized WILL be saved.” And so I stand before God without me, but only him. I have to die if I want to live. It’s not about me. It’s about Him.
This filthy view of the self then explains something to me as a Christian too. I want to be a better person. I want to have better thoughts, better words, better actions. I want to be like Jesus. Yet I still have a sinful heart. It still generates this garbage, this adultery, this slander, this greed, this deceit. My baptism doesn’t stop me from being a sinner. But my faith makes me denounce who I am. My faith makes me reject what I do and fight against what still comes so naturally. It makes me put those sinful thoughts and actions to death, by repenting of them, and clinging to Jesus again and again and again. When I still sin I don’t think to myself, “I must not be a Christian.” No, I say to myself, “I still need Jesus to cover me from head to toe, from beginning to end, in grace.” And it’s that faith that makes me who I am, a forgiven sinner, a believer in Jesus.
How bad is it, Jesus? There was once a man who went to the doctor for a follow up from an appointment he had six months earlier. The doctor said, “Do you want the good news, or the bad news?” He said, “The good news.” The doctor said, “You have six months to live.” The man replied, “Well, what’s the bad news then?” The doctor replied, “I should have told you five months ago.”
We’ve been given a bad diagnosis by Jesus. We’re filthy sinners, deserving hell. The Pharisees said, “Just make sure you wash your hands!” Jesus said, “That’s not deep enough. You’re too filthy for that. Your heart, your very core of being, is nothing but a sin factory.” It’s more than bad. It’s deadly, full of fire. That’s bad news, the worst. What’s the good news? We have a remedy that came 2,000 years ago, died on the cross for us, paid for our sins. We have gracious and complete cleansing in the waters of baptism, through faith in Jesus Christ. A full and complete remedy, free of charge. That’s better than good news. It’s the best. Amen.
