Why do people treat each other so badly? Why do spouses break their wedding vows? Why do people act out in violence and hatred toward others? Why do racism and hate crimes still exist in our world? Why are people filled with greed? Why do we act with treachery and deception toward each other?
The question of why people do what they do is a question that’s plagued the human race since history began. When I was a student at Chaffey College, I took an ethics class where we had to read a book about different views of human nature. That book presented several different theories as to what’s at the heart of the human race’s problems.
The Christian faith has its own distinctive belief about what’s at the heart of the human problem. The Christian explanation is captured in the classic Christmas carol "O Holy Night." One of the lines of that carol goes, "Long lay the world in sin and error pining." The word "pining" is an old English way of saying, "wasting away." So the song tells us that the world was wasting away in sin and error when Christ was born.
The Bible claims that the way things are in our world isn’t the way they’re supposed to be. God created a good creation, but God’s good creation has been infected with something called sin. Sin is essential the human race’s rejection of God and God’s ways, our declaration of independence from God. Creation has fallen from it’s original good intention, and become a place of pain and darkness, a place where people murder and hate each other.
As followers of Jesus we believe that sin is the heart of the human problem. Really Christmas is our celebration of God’s plan to do something about the problem. That’s why the old Christmas carol continues on to describe the birth of Christ as "a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn." That’s what our celebration of advent and Christmas is all about, a new and glorious dawn with the birth of Christ.
However even among those who agree with the Bible’s claim that sin is the heart of the human dilemma disagree on how to best tackle this problem of sin. Today we’re going to talk about getting to the heart of the matter. We’ve been in a series through the New Testament book of Mark called Following Jesus in the Real world. Today as we continue our series we’re going to look at Jesus’ debate with a group of religious scholars about how to best root away sin. We’re going to see that although Jesus and this group agreed on the problem, they differed greatly about how to get to the heart of the matter.
1. Focusing On Surface Issues (Mark 7:1-5)
Let’s look at how this debate between Jesus and a religious group starts in vv. 1-5. Now you get the sense from Mark that this group of Pharisees is an official delegation sent from Jerusalem to investigate Jesus. They come with their scribes, who were experts in the interpretation of the Jewish law. You might think of the scribes as their attorneys.
Now the Pharisees were a subgroup within Judaism. After 2,000 years of church history, we get a negative picture in our minds when we hear the word "Pharisee" because of how we know that they responded to Jesus. But to people back then, the Pharisees were heroes, not villains. The Pharisees were all lay people, not any priests among them. They were a reform movement who’s passion was to help ordinary people in Israel learn to live our their devotion to God. They believed that every detail of the Old Testament law was to be applied to everyday life.
The Pharisees believed that every person ought to strive for the same level of godliness that God required of the Jewish priests who served in the temple in Jerusalem (Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism, p. 65). They believed that if Israel was to be a nation of priests as the Old Testament claims, then God required all people in Israel to live by the same standards he required of the Jewish priests. So the Pharisees expected a higher level of obedience and commitment among the people than the Old Testament required of people. If we say, "A person’s home is his castle," the Pharisees would say, "A person’s home is his temple." In the Old Testament law God required the temple priest to go through a special washing ritual before eating a meal that came from the temple offering. Now the temple priest only had to go through this washing ritual when in the temple and eating a temple sacrifice as a meal. But the Pharisees expanded that requirement to apply to all Jewish people during all meals. They believed that all Jewish people ought to follow the example of the temple priests by washing before each and every meal.
Now it’s very important to understand that these washings had nothing to do with hygiene. The categories of "clean" and "unclean" in Old Testament Jewish thought don’t refer to observable categories of cleanliness or dirtiness (Neusner 1). These categories of "clean" and "unclean" referred to ritual purity.
This is kind of hard for us to understand today because we don’t have anything like ritual purity in our culture. In ancient Israel, you had to be in a state of ritual purity to worship God. But if you were ritually impure, you had to go through a purification ritual to become clean again.
Different things caused a person in Israel to become ritually impure. You became unclean if you touched a dead body or came in contact with an animal carcass. You also became unclean if you came in contract with a person who had a skin disease.
The most well known part of Jewish ritual purity are the Old Testament dietary laws. According to Old Testament law, only certain kinds of foods were considered clean, and thereby appropriate for human consumption. When a Jewish person today talks about "kosher" food, he’s talking about food that’s meets this criteria of ritual purity. In fact, "kosher" is the Hebrew word for "clean." Other kinds of food were viewed as "unclean," foods like pork, catfish, and so forth.
These food laws were extremely important to the Jewish people when Jesus was alive, because it was by keeping these food laws that Jewish people maintained their uniqueness as a people and a culture (James D. G. Dunn, Studies in Mark and Galatians, p. ). The dietary laws were like visible badges that identified people as Jewish and maintained their uniqueness in a culture that was pagan and hostile to their faith. To keep the dietary laws was to be Jewish, and to fail to keep the dietary laws was to abandon your Jewish heritage.
It’s somewhat similar to how people use their clothing to identify themselves with particular groups today. If you see a person who’s dressed in faded jeans, a tie-dyed t-shirt, long hair, and granny glasses, you’ll conclude that he’s a hippie. If you see a teenage boy with short hair and a letterman’s jacket, you’ll conclude that he’s a jock. If you see someone carrying a motorcycle helmet, wearing a black leather jacket, leather chaps, and heavy boots, you’ll conclude that he’s a pastor (I mean a biker). Well if you saw someone who believed certain kinds of foods were clean and other kinds of food unclean, you’d conclude that he or she is Jewish.
But the Pharisees went beyond the food laws prescribed in the Old Testament by also prescribing these ritual washings as well. That’s where the hand washing rituals came in, as well as the washing of pots and pans.
Now the fact that Mark explains these practices for readers in vv. 3-4 suggests that most of original readers who Mark is writing for weren’t Jewish. In fact, many scholars believe Mark was writing for Romans, people who wouldn’t know enough about Old Testament law to understand these purity laws. So Mark interrupts the story to explain it for us, that the Pharisees performed all kinds of ritual washings to avoid this ceremonial uncleanness.
The Pharisees were a reform movement, an attempt to call the people of Israel to a life of godliness. Yet the way they did this was by focusing on things like washings and rituals, in addition to maintaining the dietary laws. They demand to know why Jesus’ followers don’t do the same thing.
Here we find a principle. WE OFTEN TRY TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS WITH SIN BY FOCUSING ON SURFACE ISSUES.
Sometimes we’re not much different from the Pharisees in our own attempts to deal with this sin problem. Our attempts to apply the Bible to everyday life can become the same kind of legalistic nit picking we see in the Pharisees.
You can see this when Christian groups fixate on surface issues the Bible doesn’t say anything about. For example, the college I attended had fundamentalist roots from the early twentieth century, so early on in its history students weren’t allowed to play cards, dance, or go to movies. Now does the Bible itself forbid a good round of gin rummy or line dancing? No, not at all. Yet early American fundamentalism had a tendency to fixate on these surface issues, and confuse keeping these kinds of rules with holiness and godliness.
Other Christian groups fixate on dressing in certain ways, or total abstinence from alcohol, or abstaining from certain kinds of music. Still others focus on how to educate your kids or what translation of the Bible to use. Groups fixate on these particular practices because they think that they will solve the sin problem. That’s what the Pharisees did.
2. Confusing Our Ideas for God’s Ideas (Mark 7:6-13)
Now when we focus on surface issues instead the heart of the matter, we face a major danger. Look at vv. 6-13.
Jesus’ response here seems harsh to us. After all, the Pharisees were just asking a question. But we need to realize that the Pharisees publicly challenged Jesus on this issue. They were probably trying to publicly shame Jesus. It would be like a bureaucrat from some major Christian group coming into our worship service, and during my sermon interrupting me by saying, "Tim, why don’t the members of your church use the King James Version of the Bible? You must be a pretty bad pastor." I couldn’t just ignore that if it happened, and Jesus can’t just ignore this.
Jesus says that the Pharisees’ obsession with surface issues has led them to miss the heart of the matter. He quotes a verse from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah that speaks to their hypocrisy. Their worship of God has become mere lip service, as they go through all the right motions but have no real inner devotion.
Jesus gives us an example of this kind of their hypocrisy. He cites the fifth commandment from the Old Testament law, the command to honor your mom and dad. Then he cites a tradition among the Pharisees called "Corban." Apparently the practice of "Corban" was like our concept of deferred giving, where we might give a piece of property to a charity but retain possession of that property until after we die. Technically it belongs to the charity, but the charity doesn’t actually assume possession of the property until after the person dies. The practice of Corban was where an asset--a bank account, a piece of property, or whatever--was promised to the temple but the person retained possession of it for a while. According to the traditions of the elders, as soon as you declared something "Corban" you couldn’t use it for anything else. If you declared a sum of money "Corban" but then your mom got really sick and needed money to pay for the doctors, you couldn’t touch that money because it was "Corban." Some people actually declared their assets Corban, not because they wanted to give it to God, but because they didn’t want to use it to help their parents. So the practice of Corban provided a loophole to a clear command of God. Jesus says that this is hypocritical, because it nullifies God’s command with a human tradition.
You see one of the distinctives of the Pharisees is that they put their traditions on equal footing to the Old Testament law. They claimed that God gave Moses two laws: The law contained in the Old Testament and the traditions of the elders. Eventually the Jewish people would write down all these traditions in the Talmud and the Mishnah, which contain volumes and volumes of these traditions. The Pharisees claimed that the Bible only told us what God wanted us to do, but it didn’t always tell us how to do it. So the Bible itself was inadequate to live a holy life, because although we know what God wants us to do, we’re not sure how to do it. So the traditions of the elders were given to show us how to do what God wants us to do.
Jesus’ attitude toward this perspective is scathing. He calls it hypocrisy, worship that’s empty. He accuses anyone who walks this path of mere lip service to God.
Here we find out what happens when we focus on surface issues. WHEN WE FOCUS ON SURFACE ISSUES WE CONFUSE OUR IDEAS FOR GOD’S.
This is what happened when the Pharisees put the traditions of the elders on equal footing to the Bible. We do the same thing whenever we put anything else on equal footing with the Bible.
Now it’s important to mention that there’s nothing inherently wrong with traditions. Every family and every culture has traditions. And many of these traditions are rich and meaningful. Celebrating Christmas is a tradition. Nowhere does the Bible command us to celebrate Christ’s birth, but we do it out of tradition. Hanging lights, decorating trees, exchanging gifts, family meals are all traditions associated with Christmas. There’s nothing wrong with these things. They’re rich, meaningful traditions.
Our "non-traditional" church has its own traditions. The fact that we don’t pass an offering plate is a tradition that’s deeply imbedded in our church’s culture. The fact that we dress casually instead of formally for worship is one of our church’s traditions.
The danger comes when we put our traditions on equal footing to the Bible. Take our tradition of not passing an offering plate. That tradition comes from our attempt to honor the biblical principle about secrecy in giving. Jesus said to give in secret (Matt 6:4), to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing. Having offering boxes in the back of the worship center is our attempt to apply that principle to our setting. But if we were to put our tradition on equal footing to the Bible, we’d be in trouble. If we were to claim that giving in secret always means not passing an offering plate, and that churches who do pass an offering plate are violating this biblical teaching, we’ve done the same things the Pharisees did. Our tradition is merely one way to apply that biblical teaching, but it’s certainly not the only way to apply it. In fact occasionally we pass an offering plate to remind ourselves that giving is also an act of worship.
Or take our tradition of dressing casual for worship. This tradition comes from our desire to be real and authentic in our worship, to avoid being fake or hypocritical. Casual dress is our way of applying that value. But if we were to claim that dressing formally is always hypocritical, then we’ve put our tradition on equal footing to the Bible. When we do that we’re no different than the Pharisees were.
During the Reformation, the Protestant reformers emphasized a principle called sola scriptura. Sola Scriptura is Latin for the Scripture alone. This principle says that for the follower of Jesus Christ, the Bible is the supreme authority in life. Following Jesus Christ means affirming the supreme authority of the Bible over things like traditions, opinions, scientific theories, interpretations, applications, experiences, and so forth. This doesn’t mean we reject these things. Many traditions are wonderful, even as we enjoy many holiday traditions during the Christmas season. Many opinions make sense, many scientific theories are revolutionary, many interpretations and applications are good, many experiences are joyful, and so forth. What this principle of sola scriptura means is that whenever a tradition or an opinion or anything else contradicts a clear claim of the Bible, then for the Christian the Bible always wins out. Either we’ve misunderstood the Bible on that issue, or we need to reject that tradition, opinion, theory, interpretation, or whatever as untrue. For the follower of Jesus Christ, the Bible is the supreme authority over all other authorities, even though we value these other authorities as having a legitimate role in our lives.
This is where the Pharisees went wrong, when the exalted their interpretations and applications of the Bible to the same level as the Bible itself. To avoid being like the Pharisees we need to be very cautious and humble in our convictions. We should always be open to correction and clarification as we read the Bible more and understand it better. We should always make a distinction between our convictions that we infer from biblical principles and what the Bible itself clearly says.
If we don’t make this distinction, we’ll find ourselves confusing God’s ideas for our ideas.
3. Dealing With The Heart (Mark 7:14-23)
Now this leads Jesus to broaden the discussion about what’s truly clean and unclean. Look at vv. 14-23.
Notice how this debate has changed now. In the beginning of the chapter, the debate was about a tradition of the Pharisees, the tradition of hand washing. The Bible nowhere commanded ordinary Jewish people to do this, but the Pharisees added it. But here Jesus gets even more radical, because here he addresses something that the Bible did clearly command. The Old Testament law clearly commanded God’s people to abstain from unclean food and only eat kosher food. This wasn’t just a tradition, but it was a clear command of God. Eating carnitas tacos or fried catfish violated the clear command of God in the Jewish Old Testament law.
But Jesus says now that he’s brought God’s Kingdom to our world, things have changed radically. A dead body, an animal carcass, pork, catfish, none of these things render a person unclean anymore. Jesus is here declaring that all the purity laws associated with the Old Testament law are no longer binding on God’s people. He’s not saying that they were wrong. These purity laws played an important role among God’s people for a long time. But now that God’s Son has come to the world, now that the Kingdom of God has opened for all people, those purity laws are obsolete.
Mark tells us that this is how Jesus declared all foods clean. Now not all Christians agree with this, because some Christians still feel compelled to observe the Old Testament distinction between kosher and unclean food. In fact, some of these people claim that this part of v. 19 was added later and was not an original part of Mark’s gospel. However, there is absolutely no manuscript evidence to suggest that this part of v. 19 was a later addition. All the earliest Greek manuscripts of Mark have this part of v. 19. Other people claim that since Jewish people didn’t consider "unclean" things to be food, that all Jesus is saying here is, "Jesus declared all clean food to be clean." Since things like pork and catfish aren’t really "food" to the Jewish person, they’re not included in the word "food." This explanation doesn’t make any sense. Moreover, as we saw earlier, Mark wasn’t written to Jewish readers but to Romans, which is why he explains Jewish practices to the reader (like he did in vv. 3-4). To a Roman, the word "food" would include anything consumable. A Roman reader would not make the distinction these people want to make.
Clearly Mark is saying that now that Jesus has come, the purity laws that declared certain foods to be unclean are now obsolete. So the kind of food you eat doesn’t matter nearly as much as the kind of person you are. It’s not what you come in contact with that renders you unclean, but it’s what comes out of you.
Here Jesus focuses in on the heart. Now in the Bible the heart is the center of the person, the control center of life. The heart isn’t just your emotions in the Bible, but it’s your whole inner person, who you are on the inside. Jesus identifies the human heart as the location of true uncleanness, because it’s from the human heart that human evil flows.
Jesus lists the kinds of evil intentions that flow from the human heart. It’s quite a catalog of evil: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, slander, arrogance and folly. Jesus is saying that every human heart is a fertile breeding ground for these kinds of things. He’s saying that these things are not caused by anything outside of us, but that the come from within. Even if pornography weren’t a $10 billion a year industry in our culture there would be sexual immorality. Pornography doesn’t cause sexual immorality, but it’s a symptom of what’s inside the human heart. Even without violent video games like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, people would still be drawn to acts of hatred and violence. Even without the Jerry Springer show there’d be lewdness.
What Jesus is saying here is truly radical, so radical that some Christians don’t believe it. He’s saying that our problems with sin aren’t caused by our environment but that they’re caused what’s already residing within each human heart. It’s not the way we were raised, or the culture we’re in, or anything else outside of us. No wonder the prophet Jeremiah said, "The heart is deceitful and sick beyond cure; who can understand it?"
Here we find our final principle. WE ONLY GET TO THE HEART OF OUR PROBLEM WITH SIN WHEN WE DEAL WITH THE CONDITION OF OUR HEARTS.
The problem with the Pharisees is that they were trying an outside-in approach to solve the sin problem. They thought sin could be rooted out by doing outward actions, things like religious rituals, watching what you eat, and so forth. Many, many Christians believe this as well. If we just pass the right legislation, or elect the right politicians, or control the media, or get Jerry Springer off the air, then that will root out the sin that’s destroying our culture. What we fail to realize is that the human heart’s condition remains the same even if we do those things. These things are the symptoms, not the cause of human evil.
The Christian faith has always taken an inside-out approach to solving the sin problem. Until the human heart undergoes a radical transformation, all the outward efforts and legislation you can imagine won’t be enough. The human heart is where the change needs to begin.
This means that the Christian church has a resource that no one else has. The Church has the good news of Jesus Christ, which according to the Bible is the only power that can transform the human heart. We may not have the visibility of the media, the clout of a politician, the academic resources of the university, or the budget of a fortune 500 company, but we have something that’s infinitely more valuable: the gospel. This is why the Bible calls the gospel of Jesus Christ the power of God that accomplishes salvation in people. Nothing else can do that: legislation can’t, education can’t, money can’t, science can’t. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for better legislation, better education, spending money wisely, and scientific advancement. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that these things can do what only the good news of Jesus Christ can do.
We only get to the heart of the matter when we deal with the heart.
Conclusion
I’m afraid a lot of Christians today would have fit in quite well with the Pharisees. Both Jesus and the Pharisees agreed that the problem with the human race was sin. Yet they differed radically on how to get to the heart of this problem. Often we make the same mistake they did by focusing on surface issues which leads us to inadvertently exchange our own ideas for God’s ideas. We’ve got to deal with the heart, our own hearts and the hearts of others to get to the heart of the matter.
Christmas is a wonderful time of year, because so many people in our culture are talking about the birth of Jesus. Yet so many don’t realize that the birth of that baby can transform their hearts. And they won’t know unless we tell them.
If our greatest need had been more information, God would have sent us a teacher. If our greatest need had been technology, God would’ve sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been more money, God would’ve sent us an economist. If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer. But our greatest need was freedom from sin, so God sent us what we needed: A Savior.
