Mark 7 1-13

One of the differences between Presbyterian Churches and other ones is tradition. We obviously have our own traditions at this church…the Easter Lilly Cross springs to mind immediately. We have the tradition of moving the service earlier in the summer to avoid the heat of midday. But on the whole, we don’t have a ton of traditions that are set in stone. We like to have a lit candle up here, but the wheels won’t come off the wagon of there isn’t one. In fact, one of the main differences between the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations is the role of tradition. We have said traditions are nice, but if they conflict with Scripture, they are unimportant and need to be tossed out. On the other hand, the Catholic Church, among other churches, raise tradition to the same level as Scripture. For instance, I’ll tell you about purgatory. Purgatory is the Catholic belief in a place between Heaven and Hell where people go to work off, by waiting, the penalty for their sins.

Do you know where purgatory comes from? It isn’t in the Bible at all. There are extra books in the Catholic Bible, but there is only some very obscure verse that has to be twisted all around to open up the possibility of there being purgatory. Purgatory is an example of tradition in the church. In the early church, after persecution started against the Christians in about 60-70 AD, there were times when the persecutions were worse than at other times. One of the worst persecutions was instituted to produce people who caved in to pressure, and gave up the names of other Christians. It was designed to created traitors. What would happen if the authorities caught a Christian was that they were tortured until they gave up the names of other Christians. Then the authorities would grab those folks and kill them, and set the traitor free. Brutal.

The Church was faced with a dilemma. If the person repented, realized they should have died instead, and wanted to come back into church membership, there was a 17 year process by which people could get back into full membership in the church. A number of years outside the church weeping over the sin committed, a couple years in the Narthex, but not the sanctuary, a few years kneeling through the service and finally a couple years with a sponsor, a co-stander, who would stand next to the person coming back into the church. Finally, they would be back in. Well, what happens if that person died during the process? The church invented a place for the person to go, on the basis that Christ had given them the keys to the kingdom. Purgatory is a human invention. But it has been raised to the level of Scripture. Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the traditions Jesus was fighting the Pharisees over. Mark 7:1ff.

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of His disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean”, that is, unwashed. (the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless hey give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the traditions of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean hands’?

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”

And he said to them, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”

Let’s pray.

You may have noticed that we are working our way through Mark. This, as you might have guessed, is intentional. I think we don’t know our Bibles well enough, and to slowly work our way through a book in the Bible seems to help us know Scripture better than does jumping around from place to place in the Bible, from topic to topic. I have great respect for pastors who do preach like that, but it seems to me that going through the Bible, knowing the context and the themes, and dealing with the topics when they present themselves, is the way I like to preach. Mark has always been the most basic story of Jesus; who He was, what He did, what He was like, what He accomplished and why we should give our lives to Him. Mark is what Campus Crusade uses to introduce new Christians to the faith, I suspect because they, like me, assumed the gospel according to Mark isn’t complex, it isn’t deep, it isn’t very nuanced. This past year I came to the place where I’m okay with being a little wrong about Mark. It is a much deeper and nuanced gospel than I had given it credit.

Having said all that, we jump into the topic of tradition today. There are traditions that help us worship and know God better, but there are also traditions that drive us away from God. Traditions can become hollow rituals that we do just because we always have. And that isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing what we always have done; just because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Those are the last words of any church. “We can’t do that new program or event or style of worship because we’ve never done it that way before.” Boom. Last words. Let’s dig into the text and see how Jesus points out to the Pharisees that their traditions were killing people’s relationship with God, and pray that we aren’t doing the same.

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean hands’?

You’ll notice the Pharisees are back. We haven’t seen them hovering around and checking Jesus out since chapter 3 when the bigwigs from Jerusalem declared that Jesus was doing His miracles by the power of the Devil. Earlier, of course, Jesus had run ins with the religious powers in His declaration that He had the ability to forgive sin, so the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees was strained, at best. And in today’s passage, its going to get worse. The Pharisees keep coming around and around; eventually they will get so upset with Jesus that He will die at their hands. But that’s toward the end of the story, not now. But as you read Mark for yourself, watch for the Pharisees. They keep coming around and around, looking and waiting for Jesus to mess up; they will want Him dead at the end.

This whole first section is confirming that the traditions of the elders weren’t being kept. The Pharisees noticed that the disciples weren’t adhering to the tradition of washing one’s hands before eating. Certainly washing our hands is a good thing. It was back then as well. But there is the deeper issue. The Pharisees were ignoring the most important commands of God, and focusing on little piddly issues. Micah 6:8ff puts it like this: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? TO act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” But these commands were ignored by a focus on the minutia, worrying about washing one’s hands before eating. The whole thing is that the disciples and Jesus weren’t bowing down to the religious hierarchy. You know how irritating it is when someone just doesn’t do what they are supposed to do. They barge into a situation, don’t know how things have always been done, and step on people’s toes. Even worse is someone who knows the unspoken rules, and ignores them because they are stupid.

The Pharisees were very excited that the rules were not being kept, except for the fact that the rules weren’t that important. What is the point of keeping all the silly little rules when the larger commands are being ignored? It would be like a person feeling morally superior when keeping every single rule of the road, and yet owning a company that uses slave labor to make shirts. Jesus says you’ve lost sight of the big picture. You focus on the little, external things that other people see, when in fact you honor tradition over Scripture. It ought not be like that.

Jesus responds to the Pharisees, less graciously that we might have imagined He would.

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”

Jesus quotes Isaiah and then adds His own comments at the end. What Jesus wants to say, what He wants the Pharisees to hear, He quotes from Scripture. It can’t have been very often that Pharisees got Scripture quoted at them. They don’t seem like the sort who would appreciate being accused of vain worship of God; that they were worshipping human traditions instead of God. And yet, that is exactly what Jesus is saying. You’ve taken something man-made and substituted it for the love and worship of God. You’ve elevated tradition to the level of Scripture, in fact, over it. When you ignore the hard teachings of Jesus, but look good to people by obeying easy commands of other humans, there is a real problem. It is hard to live a life of kindness. It is much easier to do whatever we want to and wash our hands. It is hard to love mercy and live to see it, but it is easy to keep valuables for oneself, and piously promise it to God.

We have some of the same problems. We try to live for God all the time, but so many decisions we make are not based on what God would have us do and be, but on our own desires, our own wisdom about the way things should be in our life. We too struggle to live a life marked by kindness, a life marked by loving mercy, offering forgiveness, all the hardest part of being a Christian. We fail all the time, at least I do. We fail to live the way we know we should, reflecting Jesus in our lives all the time. But, on the positive side, we don’t frequently elevate anything human to the level of Scripture. One of the hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation was to throw out of the church all the traditions that weren’t mentioned in Scripture. Candle lighting to saints isn’t mentioned in the Bible, so we don’t do it. In fact, praying to saints isn’t mentioned either, so we don’t do that. I don’t have big flowing robes or a collar; in fact my robe is to signify academic achievement, rather than a position of grandiose authority. But these traditions don’t keep us from God. I want us to think about the little, personal traditions we have that keep us from following God; ---------------------------------

Jesus repeats Himself; the Pharisees are honoring tradition over Scripture. And this time, instead of quoting Isaiah, He quotes Moses in the 10 commandments. The Israelites had discovered that sometimes it is inconvenient to care for older members of their family; they couldn’t work as hard as they used to; they were consuming more energy than they were creating. In essence, they weren’t earning their keep. So the traditions had a way of getting around the obligations people had toward their parents. If they wanted to, instead of selling valuable property where the money could have gone to the support of parents, instead the property could be declared off-limits because it was for God. So now, the valuable stuff could be kept, and the people could say to their parents, ‘look, I’m sorry, I have no money to give you. Its really too bad you are hungry. Go ahead and beg beside the road and good luck to you.’

The really bad thing is that people would come to believe that by observing the human traditions, they were worshipping God. The worship of God isn’t just a Sunday morning thing. It is a worldview and it is a lifestyle. It is a commitment to live before God always. Observing traditions is nice; especially around Lent when we have certain traditions. But the traditions should always lead us closer to God, rather than closer to doing whatever is most convenient. We should be growing in love and faith; in compassion for our fellow human beings because of the grace and forgiveness we have received in Christ. There shouldn’t be anything that I do, or any burden put on you by the leadership of this church that leads you away from God and toward empty rituals. We do have traditions that are designed to bring us all closer to God, rather than further away.

There ought not to be anything that stands between us and God. That is what Jesus died for; to become the sacrifice for our sin so that, in Christ, clothed in His righteousness, His right relationship with God, we can speak to God, we are acceptable to God. Anyone who puts anything between us and God is not doing us a favor; there ought to be not person in between us and God, there ought to be not tradition that comes between us and God, there ought to be no sin that comes between us and God. So we avoid sin because it damages our relationship to God, we avoid empty traditions because they don’t make our relationship to God better, we avoid anyone who would stand between us and God because that power is not theirs.

The Pharisees allowed people to slide in the sin of failing to honor their parents. In effect, they placed both themselves, as the redefiners of God’s Word, between God and the people, as well as their unrepentant sin, which also stood between the people and their relationship with God. There is great danger in allowing anything to come between us and God. First, it becomes very hard to hear God; hard to respond to His calling and His guiding. Second, we less and less seek God, and more and more rely on ourselves; our flawed wisdom for the way life ought to be lived. Don’t let anything get between you and God. Whatever there is, get it out of your life. Maybe it is a sinful habit. Maybe it’s the adulation of someone or something, maybe its that we are depending on others to do our Bible reading for us, or our praying for us. Don’t let anything get between you and God.

Let’s pray.