Mark 7:1-23
“What’s Edible?”
September 2, 2012 - Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         “What’s a tea towel?” I asked my daughter and new son-in-law. They were briefing me on the new protocol to govern our kitchen for their three week visit. It seems Andrew grew up with the strict injunction, “Don’t dry your hands on the tea towel!” The “tea towel” was reserved for wiping dishes. Some other more lowly cloth was used for drying hands.

         Since Susan and Andrew did much of the cooking and cleanup while they were here, I quietly suffered this incursion of Canadian household tradition. But for a while, you could find me standing in our kitchen with wet hands, wondering what I was supposed to do. When Andrew and Susan departed, Beth and I quickly reverted to our old slovenly ways.

         The tea towel versus hand towel distinction is a result of regional and family tradition and not a matter of huge importance. Andrew’s family accepts us in spite of our hygienic failures and we find them delightful people despite their fastidiousness. Yet problems and misunderstandings arise when such concerns are elevated to the level of moral principle.

         Pharisees and scribes came from Jerusalem and found the disciples eating without washing their hands. They felt their tradition to have solid basis in spiritual health. Having grown up in the modern world, with awareness of germs and sayings like “cleanliness is next to godliness,” it’s difficult to grasp why it didn’t matter to Jesus that His disciples didn’t scrub before dinner. But for both Jesus and the Pharisees, it had nothing to do with hygiene. It was about doing what made a person clean and acceptable in God’s eyes.

         Mark gives us the context of all this because he was writing for people who were not themselves Jewish. In verses 3 and 4, which you may find in parentheses, he explains how the Pharisees taught all Jewish people to observe a complex tradition of ritual washing, which often included washing more than once during a meal, and immersing eating and cooking utensils to cleanse them as well. It may have had an unrecognized health benefit for the Jews, but that wasn’t the point. For them it was an attempt to fastidiously and carefully observe spiritual cleanliness before God.

         When the Pharisees came down on the disciples for not washing, their worry was that the followers of this new rabbi Jesus were not observing basic guidelines for healthy spiritual life. They were flaunting a long-established tradition handed down from “the elders,” from previous generations who had created it as a way to maintain spiritual purity.

         The problem was not the tradition as such. It’s certainly hygienic to wash your hands before eating and even the spiritual point makes sense if you wash with a desire to honor and thank God for the blessing of food. No, the problem was as Jesus said to the Pharisees on another occasion in Matthew 23:23. They had focused on small points and “neglected the weightier matters of the law.” As we say today, they had majored on the minors.

         Jesus began His critique of this mistaken focus on minutiae by quoting Isaiah 29:13 in verses 6 and 7, to the effect that people were giving lip service to God, but were not at all devoted to Him in their hearts. To wash hands before eating was a way to appear holy without actually doing the things which make for holiness.

         This is not at all true, but suppose Andrew and Susan enforced the rule about the tea towel, but neglected even more important hygiene like washing their hands after using the bathroom or brushing their teeth. Their kitchen might appear hygienically holy, but they would be walking mounds of filth. That’s what Jesus said about the spiritual condition of the Pharisees.

         At first glance, the example Jesus begins with in verses 9 to 13 feels very much off-topic. Instead of talking about hand-washing, Jesus began with another Pharisaic tradition to show how a person could make themselves appear righteous but be in fact completely wrong in relation to God.

         We don’t know much about the practice of “Corban,” but evidently one way to make an offering to God was to pronounce a part of one’s wealth dedicated to God in the future. It was like setting up a trust committed to a charity or church, which is a good thing in itself. But the Pharisaic tradition twisted that good intention of dedicating a gift to God by letting a Corban vow make it wrong and impossible to use that money or property for any other purpose, including, notes Jesus, caring for one’s own parents.

         In verse 10 Jesus quoted the Ten Commandments, “Honor your father and mother,” and a bit a little further on in Exodus 21 that says that cursing father or mother is a capital crime. By using Corban to evade responsibility to parents, the Pharisees were setting up a tradition you can’t find in Scripture to “make void,” as Jesus says in verse 13, what’s obviously in Scripture, the Word of God.

         Corban was just an example. The accusation of verse 13 goes on, “And you do many things like that.” The Pharisees had a regular system of doing what verse 8 says, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” It’s not the tradition that was bad. It’s that they put the tradition over what was clearly more important.

         Jesus chose honoring parents as an example of what is important to God, because the Pharisee failure was putting traditional ritual over more important matters of human relationships. Jesus affirmed the Old Testament Scripture, that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love each other.  But Pharisees regularly, systematically ignored that second  great commandment by enforcing regulations not even found in the Bible.

         The first lesson here is for you and I to ask ourselves when we do what Pharisees did. How often do we put minor matters of correctness and the usual way of doing things over our relationship to the people around us. What if Beth and I had decided to argue about tea towels with Andrew and let that come between us and him and even between us and our daughter? We didn’t do it, but how often do we do things like that?

         Even if you are right about etiquette or grammar or hygiene or worship or spiritual life, ask yourself if it’s worth it to press your point in a way that alienates or hurts someone in your family, someone in your church or someone who doesn’t yet know Jesus?

         Long ago I learned from some Christians around me to use inclusive language when talking about human beings, to avoid making all my pronouns male and to say “brothers and sisters” rather than just “brothers” in Christ. I try to do that when I speak through the Bible versions I choose to read. I think it’s the right thing to do. But inclusive language is a human idea of what’s good. It’s not a specific commandment of God.

         I once listened to a paper being read by an older scholar who hadn’t made the change. His lecture was full of “he” and “him.” About a third of the way through, a woman in the audience stood up, interrupted him and told him she was offended by his language. He apologized and said he would try to change it as he read. But a little further on he slipped and read “him” instead of “him or her.” The woman stood and corrected him. He went on, a little anxious now. It wasn’t long before he did it again. The woman corrected him again, loudly. He became so flustered that he lost his place and found himself unable to continue reading. The woman’s zeal for a good practice took priority over what was more important. Seeking dignity for female human beings, she bulldozed the dignity of a male human being.

         In church, especially, let us ask ourselves if we are being Pharisees. Whether it’s music or a Bible version or the way the offering is collected, when and how are we guilty of putting human tradition over God’s command to love each other?

         And with the election drawing near, let us also to remember that you or I may be absolutely right about our particular political view. But if expressing it or insisting on it wounds another person or damages our relationship with them, then we are guilty of letting human tradition push aside God’s law of love.

         Jesus got directly back on topic starting in verse 15. In verse 14 he called the whole crowd to hear what He had to say about washing before eating, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” It’s not the food going in your mouth that makes you unclean, it’s what comes out of your mouth.

         It’s what we heard James 1:26 tell us this morning, “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.” James got that idea from Jesus Himself, from what Jesus was about to explain.

         Verse 17 tells us the disciples needed further explanation. Verse 18 shows this is just one of many things they didn’t comprehend until later. Verse 19 explains that food goes in and then proceeds on out by digestion and elimination. As Jesus says, it enters the stomach, but not the heart. Mark realized in a parenthetical comment that Jesus was breaking with Jewish law and declaring all foods clean. In Acts 10 we find Peter still learning this lesson years later. But it was all there in what Jesus said.

         The primary point, though, is not what’s edible. It’s what kind of person you are in relationship to God and others. I kid my daughters that bacon is a Christian privilege, because we don’t have to keep Jewish law against eating pork. But what Jesus taught, what Peter learned in Caesarea, was that what you eat or don’t eat should not separate us from others. In Acts 10, the whole reason for Peter to eat unclean foods was so that he could sit down to dinner with a man who needed to hear about salvation in Jesus.

         Instead of worrying about traditions that keep us clean and holy on the outside, Jesus calls us in verses 21 and 22 to consider all the things that come out of us that hurt and destroy others. It’s a long ugly list beginning with sexual activity outside marriage and ending with plain old foolishness. It includes both active sins like theft and murder and quiet sins of the spirit like greed and envy. It wouldn’t be bad to read this list before going to bed and ask ourselves which we’ve done that very day.

         In verse 23 Jesus says all these things come from inside. We can’t blame outside circumstances or other people. It’s there within. A New York priest apologized this week for saying that people accused of child sex abuse were often seduced by the children they abused. No! That wickedness, says Jesus, and every other wrong that we do comes out of us. It’s not forced into us. We can’t blame it on others.

         The Lord and the Bible say it over and over. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Remember that the next time you hear a television or movie character say, “Trust your heart.” Jesus says you can scrub your hands, take a shower, and throw your clothes in the washer, but it’s not so easy to clean up your heart. You can eat carefully washed organic food, but what comes out of your mouth may still be diseased and poisonous.

         Remember what we’ve heard the past few weeks. There is one thing and one thing only that can go into us and clean up our hearts. Take the holy and pure life of Jesus Christ into yourself and it won’t just clean your heart, but give you a new one as Ezekiel 36:26 says. It’s by the cleansing grace of Christ that anyone is able to do what Psalm 15 asks and “speak the truth from their heart.”

         Come to the Lord’s Table today to take into yourself the one food that makes a real difference. Accept the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ as food for your soul, as forgiveness for your sins, as cleansing and renewal for your heart. Come welcoming Jesus into you and then what comes out of you will also be Him, holy and true. You will be filled and overflowing with His life and goodness and joy. Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj