Jeffrey Heine: We are continuing our study of the gospel of Mark. We are in chapter 7 tonight. Chapter 7, it's printed there in your worship guide. We're gonna be looking at, verses 1 through 13, but as we begin our time, I'd like to to read the first 5 verses for us. So verses 1 through 5 of chapter 7 marks gospel.
Let us listen carefully, for this is God's word. Now when the Pharisees gathered to Jesus with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews did not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. There are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Triune God, you alone are the maker of heaven and earth, and you alone are worthy of all honor and glory and praise. And yet you are mindful of every one of us here.
You know us better than we know ourselves, and you have set your love upon us, your steadfast and unrelenting love. As we open your word this evening, will you meet us by your spirit and lead us to your perfect truth? Oh, help us, spirit, to behold Christ and his love that will not let us go. So will you speak, Lord, for your servants are listening? We pray these things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen. This was not the first time that the disciples were causing trouble for Jesus. Earlier in Mark's gospel, in chapters 2 and 3, the scribes and the Pharisees had criticized Jesus for the behavior of his disciples. Specifically, they're not keeping the tradition of weekly fasting and breaking the rules against various activities on the Sabbath. And here, at the start of chapter 7, the disciples have gotten Jesus into trouble once again.
This time, the Pharisees and the scribes have come from Jerusalem, and these were leaders, religious leaders and self declared experts on the rules of God. They observe that the disciples of Jesus neglected the ritual of ceremonial cleansing before eating a meal. Mark helps his gentile readers by explaining what's going on here. And that's especially helpful for our modern minds because it it seems like a reasonable hygienic thing to wash your hands before you eat. But hand washing for hygiene, was not common practice.
Even in medicine, it wasn't common until the late 1800, which is shocking. The Pharisees were not implementing these rituals for hygiene. They they were taking different aspects of the law in the Old Testament, specifically in the book of Leviticus, and and reading the ceremonial rituals that the priests were supposed to do when entering into the temple and commanding everyone to do them. These traditions were not simply best practices. They had become traditionalism.
They become law that the Pharisees and the scribes held people to and and then would give punishments when they were broken. In other words, God never gave the people of Israel these daily rituals. The religious leaders did. The Greek word that's used to describe the disciples' unwashed hands, it's often translated as common. Their hands were common.
That was the accusation of the Pharisees to Jesus about his disciples. Their hands were common, and common for those Pharisees meant unholy, defiled. That's what the common things were. So because the disciples had purchased common food from the common marketplace, and likely even act interacted with common people, like unclean Gentiles, the Pharisees said that the disciples needed to wash off all that commonness in a ritual cleansing. Just like Jesus touching the unclean leper and healing him and dining with sinners, and eating handfuls of wheat on the Sabbath, and not observing the the Pharisees' expectations of weekly fasting, Jesus continues to go out of his way to break the religious leaders' rules.
All these rules and rituals and traditions that they had invented, Jesus simply and explicitly and publicly ignores them. But he isn't just picking a fight to pick a fight. More than anything, Jesus is leading his disciples away from falsehood to the truth. And when Jesus leads His followers away from falsehood and to the truth, to Himself, it often results in conflict, conflict from what culture or friends or even family might expect from them. Leaving falsehood for truth for Jesus often results in conflict.
If you saw a small child that was heading towards a busy road and you you scooped them up and took them back to their parents, you were not only helping avoid danger, you're also leading them to safety. Jesus isn't only rejecting the Pharisees' falsehoods and keeping his disciples away from error. Jesus is leading his disciples to truth, to himself. And we know that Jesus has been doing this because of a very similar scene that we find in Luke's gospel, Luke chapter 11. In Luke 11 verses 37 and 38, it says this.
While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at the table. And the Pharisee was astonished to see that Jesus did not first wash before dinner. Jesus was invited to share a meal with a Pharisee. See, the Pharisees are right, Jesus does eat with sinners.
And so he takes him up on this invitation and he reclines at the table. And Luke records that the Pharisee is astonished. He is surprised. He is aghast. Jesus did not do the ceremonial washing ritual before eating, which tells us something very important from Luke 11 that we read back into our passage tonight in Mark 7.
The disciples who were causing so much trouble for Jesus with these Jerusalem Pharisees and scribes, they were causing trouble because they were doing what they had seen Jesus do. They'd eaten many meals with Jesus, and they had seen firsthand that he did not do these rituals that the Pharisees commanded. Now, certainly, these disciples would have been raised by their parents to be good Israelites, to do the rituals. Mark even notes in verse 3 that everyone followed these traditions. It's like when you're driving on the interstate and the traffic gets heavy and and everyone is going beyond the speed limit.
You weren't looking to speed. It's just keeping up with the flow of traffic, you tell the police officer. But it's just the flow of traffic. And so for these disciples, they probably never even gave it a second thought. It's just what they were raised to do.
You wash your hands before you eat the meal. It'd be like for many of you, sitting down to dinner as a child, maybe with your grandparents, and starting to eat before your grandmother or grandfather said the blessing, and you would have been immediately corrected. Maybe with a slight tap on the back of the head, It's not time to eat yet, we haven't said grace. Some of you still, if you're at a business lunch or something like that, and everyone starts eating without praying, on the inside, you feel like you just led a bank heist, and you're getting away with it this one time. These disciples, they would have been raised to follow these expectations, and now they're they're traveling around with this rabbi, and they notice he doesn't do them.
And when they ask him why, why he doesn't do these expected rituals, He tells them something that they have never considered, that what matters most isn't how we achieve cleanliness on the outside, but the cleanliness that we need is on the inside, in our hearts, our minds, our souls. And as the disciples grow in trusting Jesus, trusting him and trusting his teaching, they stop with the old rituals. They start acting like Jesus. And that's why now Jesus is being called out by these religious leaders, because his disciples are starting to act like him. The Pharisees say in verse 5, let's look together.
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands. And Jesus replies to them, well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. As it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. In a type of response that maybe we've grown to expect from Jesus as we've been studying the gospel of Mark, Jesus is asked a question, and he does not answer it.
Instead, he addresses the much bigger issue at hand. And this time, the bigger issue is not the disciples and their common hands, but the Pharisees and their false traditions. Jesus says that the the prophet Isaiah got it right about them when he prophesied so many centuries earlier, when he spoke of hypocrites. Jesus, he quotes Isaiah chapter 29, and in this quote, Jesus is parsing out for us what a hypocrite is, and why the Pharisees fit this description so well. These are people who honor God with their lips, who worship Yahweh with their words, but whose hearts are far from God.
And they are the ones who call the traditions of humans the commandments of God. That is hypocrisy. It's washing your hands in a cleanliness ritual before a meal, yet your heart is unclean with indifference to God. That is the definition of hypocrisy, and it's also the concept of works based righteousness. It's the lie that what makes God pleased with me and what makes me acceptable to God is my outward good behavior, my religiosity, my outward acceptability.
And while we might not explicitly say things like that, functionally, this is how we are so often tempted to live. It might be helpful here to to make, the distinction again between tradition and traditionalism. Jesus is not talking about the tradition that is the faith handed down from generation to generation in the church. Jesus is talking about traditionalism. So traditionalism would be when we trust that our traditions are what makes us right with God.
When the tradition is not just a helpful thing, like a means of grace or a means of strengthening us and strengthening our faith, no, it The tradition becomes the way in which we are made right with God. That's traditionalism. And that's a belief that is rooted not in Jesus, but in our ability to make ourselves acceptable. It's following what humans have commanded, but not what God has. There are certainly many helpful traditions within the church, but we have to view them rightly so they don't become traditionalism, like the commandment from Jesus for his followers to be baptized.
It looks a lot like a cleansing ritual because it is. What we witnessed together just a little while ago is an ancient cleansing ritual carried out by Christians for 1000 of years. But it is not grounded in the belief that this water is somehow making us right with God, or even that our obedience in being baptized is what makes God love us. Baptism is an ordinance, a commandment, a sacrament established and commanded by Jesus. And it demonstrates what Christ has done in making us right, making us clean before God.
The central focus of baptism is what Christ has done and our response back to him. It's not the water. It's not the going under the water. It's not saying the right phrases. It's not even how much the person means it.
It is Jesus alone who rescues and redeems. Answer this for yourself. How many of you or who among us, you trust Jesus more deeply today than the day that you were baptized. Think about that. So do you need to be baptized again because now you could really mean it?
No. You're supposed to trust him more. That's how it's supposed to work. Sometimes leaps and bounds, sometimes very small, almost indiscernible bits of progress, but it's falling in love with him more and more deeply, trusting him more, obeying him more wholeheartedly. We aren't baptized for traditionalism, to check a box of a ritual.
It's a response to God for what Jesus has accomplished. And it's this initiation into life within the family of followers of followers of Jesus. So what makes following Jesus different than religion or from traditionalism? It is that Christ alone is at the center, not us, not our behaviour, not our rituals, not our progress, not our achievements. All obedience is a response to our acceptance, a response to Jesus' righteousness being applied to us.
Now we are all tempted towards traditionalism, towards religion, however you want to call it. And often, it it isn't from other people. It's us. We are tempted in various ways to develop standards and methods for ourselves, standards that are achievable, that convince us that we are accepted by God by meeting these benchmarks we've made up on our own, that somehow this is how we crack the code for acceptance. And then, once we're accepted, then we can get whatever we want from God.
If I do enough of this checklist that I wrote myself, God will have no option but to bless me and give me the things that I want. Why do we do this? Why are we so tempted to this? Well, I can speak for myself. I believe it's because it's easier to trust in myself than to trust in Jesus.
Surrender just seems too risky. So if I can just devise a way in which I can make myself acceptable to God, I can control that. Believe it or not, this is what Jesus is calling out in these Pharisees. And believe it or not, no matter how little or how long you've been a follower of Jesus, you too are tempted to do the same. You're tempted to praise God with your lips and to be far off in your heart, to set attainable checklists of so called right behavior, and convince yourself that you are now good enough on your own merit for God's love and mercy and blessings.
The Pharisees trusted in all that they could do to be accepted by God. They hijacked the rituals of priests and said, if it's good enough for them, they're the ones that go into these holy, holy places, and if it's good enough for them, then we should all be doing it. They took it upon themselves this role of holding everyone else to the standard of holiness, and Jesus doesn't call them holy. He calls them hypocrites. And then Jesus goes further to describe just how far off the Pharisees and the scribes are and how their obsession with outward cleanliness exposes the uncleanliness of their hearts.
So look with me at verses 8 through 13. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he, meaning Jesus, said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Korban, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the words of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do.
Jesus calls them hypocrites. He accuses them of of leaving the commandments of God for the tradition of men. And then he offers evidence to support this charge. In a biding line from Jesus, he says, you have a fine way. You have a really clever way of ignoring the commands of God and establishing your own rules and requirements for righteousness.
Yahweh had instructed through Moses the law, and in the law, given through Moses, one of the commandments to the people was to honor your father and your mother. It's from the classic hits, The 10 Commandments, just in case you were wondering. If you want to hear more on this particular commandment, a few years ago, our pastors and elders preached through the Ten Commandments, and Collin Hansen preached on honoring your father and your mother. And I'd recommend listening to it, because one of the points that Collin made was that in this commandment, to honor father and mother, a primary intention of that commandment is for adult children to care for their parents in their old age. And I know.
You're just like, I gotta do what? It'll it'll give it some time. And in Jesus's words, the Pharisees and the scribes had had cleverly devised this way to leave that commandment behind, to make their own tradition. And it worked like this. A Pharisee could take the savings or the finances that they had to care for their aging parent and give a portion as a donation to these religious leaders, to the to the temple, and calling that donation a korban, a gift to God.
And in doing so, it released the person from having to care for their parent. This symbolic gift to the leaders exempted the person from caring for their parent. The leader's got some money. The the Pharisee is relieved of this burden, and everyone gets to call it righteous obedience to God. They just put a a nice little name to it, Korban, gift to God.
That's their clever way. Jesus calls it hypocrisy. These are the same people who are telling Jesus' disciples to wash their hands if they wanna be right with God. Jesus is furious here. He hears these leaders criticizing and falsely instructing his disciples, these followers whom he loves.
And they're being told, you better wash your hands and cups and bowls and utensils and wash all these things, and then you can be right with God. They worship with their lips, but their hearts are far from God. And Jesus knows that there is one thing and one thing only that will ever make any of these people right with God, and it will never be washing rituals. It will never be traditions. It won't even be law keeping.
It will only ever be his blood. So of course Jesus is furious. Not only are these Pharisees deceiving themselves and everyone else with their traditions, they are denying the one thing that will actually make anyone right with God the father, Jesus himself. When we encounter passages like this, it's vital that we examine our own hearts before the lord. You may have heard someone say that our hearts are idle factories seeking to make gods to worship, and I think that there's truth to that.
I also think that we are law factories. Whether we realize it or not, every person is desperate to know that they are accepted by God. And because we long to know that we are accepted, we look for external things that we can point to to know for sure, to find that assurance. Even being here today, It's the right thing to do to gather with brothers and sisters and worship the Lord. And you came in the afternoon when when, you could be doing so many other things with this beautiful weather.
So we can begin to think God must be pretty pleased with me, at least for today. I've done the right thing, and he is pleased. I'm accepted, at least for today. And I'm loved, at least for today. Maybe he will bless me, at least for today.
It's the do good, get good principle. I do good things, I get good things. And if I do good things and get bad things, God is to blame. He isn't keeping his end of the deal, which he never agreed to. We are hardwired to seek assurance and acceptance and approval, and it's often easier to trust ourselves than it is to trust in Jesus.
So to turn back to these disciples, they were raised to do these ceremonial rituals. They were raised to think that they could be right with God if they followed all the right steps. And then Jesus comes along, and he meets them. He meets them where they are. On the shoreline, on fishing boats, in tax offices, sitting under trees, and he begins leading them to the truth, to himself.
And they begin to let go of all these ways that they thought they could be accepted by God. And their understanding of being right with God narrows and narrows and narrows and narrows until it is just one thing. Absolutely singular, absolutely sufficient, Jesus alone. The washing of hands, the the rituals of cleanliness, the sacrifices of bulls, these are not the things that God wants. King David knew this when the horrors of his sin against Bathsheba and Uriah were put before him, and he cries out in repentance in Psalm 51.
For you, oh God, will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. Every one of us comes to God with common hands and common hearts.
We come empty and broken and defiled by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have no traditions that are sufficient, no rituals that can justify us. We have no argument or plea that could possibly be enough. We have nothing but the blood of Jesus. Christians, that is all you have, and the glorious wonder of the gospel is that is all you need.
Singular and sufficient Christ alone. Obedience to the commandments of God. What God truly and rightly asks of us in obedience is no longer the basis of trying to be made right with God through obedience. It's our lived response of being made right with God through Christ. That's why the apostle Paul refers to this obedience in his letter to the Romans by say by calling it obedience from the heart.
In other words, we do not obey to be accepted. We obey because we have been accepted through Christ. That is why obedience to God still is a vital part of the life of the disciple. Part of the great commission, Jesus sending out his disciples, as he tells them to go and to proclaim the gospel and to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he also says teaching them to come, to obey all that I have commanded. His commands still matter.
But we do not devise our own commandments. We yield to the Spirit who leads us in unchanging truth and righteousness. When Jesus quotes Isaiah chapter 29, he is emphasizing the stark contrast between the commandments of God and the tradition of men. And we need to take seriously the great pull of our hearts towards traditionalism, towards religion. It doesn't present itself as some big deviation from faithfulness at first.
It is slight, and it is subtle, but it digs its claws into us, and we end up prideful when we have fulfilled the tradition, and we end up full of despair when we fail to meet these man made standards. Self righteousness and self hatred are the hallmarks of religion and traditionalism. Acceptance through faith in the perfect work of Christ, that is the gospel entrusted to the church to hand down generation to generation to generation. The Pharisees did all the cleansing rituals. The disciples of Jesus refused.
The Pharisees felt quite good about themselves, and they wanted the disciples of Jesus to feel quite bad. And there at the center stands Jesus, Jesus who is perfect righteousness. Jesus who not only models for us righteousness, but secures our righteousness in his righteousness. That's not traditionalism or religion. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is the good news of his righteousness for each one of us today. The Pharisees were so concerned about the outward appearances of cleanliness that they missed their greatest and most desperate need to be washed on the inside. More than plates and cups or feet or hands, they needed and we need our hearts washed clean. These Pharisees, they if they had had some time with these disciples, they probably could have whipped them into shape, made them good little soldiers, maybe even prevented some of the foolish arguments and sins that we're gonna see unfold in Mark's gospel. But the mission of Jesus was not to simply improve the behavior of the disciples.
It wasn't simply to make them better on the outside. It was to make them and us, the children of God, washed clean by his blood and presented blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy. Let's go to him in prayer. Oh, lord, would you help us by your spirit to behold Jesus? To be honest with ourselves and with you, of all the ways that we somehow try to make ourselves acceptable, to somehow earn your love and your grace, help us to let those things go, to repent, to turn with great joy and repenting as we go to the only one who can make us right.
Lord, I pray for the joy within this church family, the joy of repentance to flee from the things that are so poisonous and worthless in this world, and to cling to Jesus alone, and to find you, Jesus, all satisfying, all sufficient. Oh, Lord, would you do that work in our hearts and our minds, whether we've been following Jesus for a short time or for many decades, Lord, would you restore to us the joy of our salvation, that this Lenten season, we would marvel and delight in the good news of Jesus and the blood that washes us clean. We pray these things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.