The Danger of Religious Traditions
Mark 7.1-23
April 20, 2008
We have been going through the Gospel of Mark and we now step aside from the miracles and healings, for the time being, and get into debates between Jesus and the religious leaders about the authority and interpretation of Scripture. How do you interpret the Bible? What is the role of religious tradition?
This is a very important issue for us today. There are many popular books out there questioning Biblical authority, reinterpreting Biblical material, critiquing religious traditions. No book draws more heat and raises more ire than the Bible. Jesus gets into a fierce debate in this text over how to interpret it and how to regard its authority.
The outline for this message is:
1. Tradition of the Elders: skewered and jeered.
2. Purpose of the Bible: revealed and cheered.
3. We’re all unclean and we know it.
4. How we all get clean – Jesus shows it.
1. The tradition of the Elders: Skewered and Jeered.
Three times in this passage Jesus criticizes the tradition of the Elders. (8,9,13). What is wrong with tradition? Nothing is wrong with Tradition itself. We have a tradition that we hold services here every Sunday at 8:45 and 10:00. If we suddenly threw that out and met at 9:00 one week and 11:00 the next week, there would be chaos. Traditions help keep us organized and sane.
But the tradition of the Elders in Jesus’s day was something quite different. For centuries they had been making rules about the Bible that were not themselves part of the Bible, but were regarded as authority. In other words, they were binding regulations for life. And they expected everyone to keep them.
A couple of examples. The Bible said you should rest on the Sabbath. The teachers felt they had to define what rest was, so they made up hundreds of rules about what constituted work. For instance, you could spit on the Sabbath, but you couldn’t scuff the spittle into the ground with your shoe because that would be regarded as cultivating the soil. You could not carry your handkerchief up or down the stairs, because carrying was work. But if it was tied around your neck you could go down the stairs. So if you had a runny nose you could tie your handkerchief around your neck, walk down the stairs, untie it and blow your nose. But you couldn’t carry it.
Jesus criticizes them for this. “You are setting aside the commands of God in order to keep the traditions of men” he says in verse 9. He is saying that your extra Biblical rules are distracting people from the main points of the Bible because they are focusing on minutia, and you oftentimes outright contradict the Bible.
Two examples are given here of the traditions of the Elders directly contradicting the main points of the Bible. The first is the handwashing. If you look back in the OT, the commandment for handwashing only applied to the priests. They had to wash before they performed their priestly duties, and that made sense. If you were coming to God you had to be pure, so washing was a symbolic statement of purification. It was a good idea. But by Jesus’ time, the handwashing rules applied to everyone. Every person had to be pure all the time. you could be defiled in a thousand ways, by touching any dead creature, by coming in contact with bodily fluids, by touching a Gentile, or having him touch you, or even by having his shadow pass over you.
So you can imagine what going to the marketplace was like for an observant Jew. Defilement was everywhere. You never knew when a Gentile might jostle you. You’d be worse than a clean freak.
Now the Biblical principle of Gentiles is that the nation of Israel is supposed to be a light for the Gentiles. They are supposed to be attractive to them, showing them how great God is and how great being the people of God is. The Gentiles are supposed to look at the Israelites and say, “I want to be one of them.” The problem was the Gentiles looked at them and said, “that’s the last person I want to be like.”
So the main thrust of the Bible gets contradicted. “Set aside” in Jesus’ terms.
The second example is this case of adult children who were ducking the care of their elderly parents. The OT law clearly said you have to take care of your parents when they are old like they took care of you when you were young. But the tradition of the elders created a loophole, which heartless children went through. It involved “corban.” Corban is the transliteration of an Aramaic word that simply means “offered,” and it refers to anything given to God. If something was given to God through the Temple, it could not be used for anything else, even your parent’s needs in their old age. So someone could make an impressive gift to the Temple and get their name on a plaque and completely stiff their parents, and it was perfectly legal.
And Jesus adds in verse 13: “And you do many things like that.”
Jesus’s reaction is anger. It is vitriolic. He quotes the prophet Isaiah in 6-7. He says you people are hypocrites. You have no heart for God, your worship is vain. God doesn’t even hear your worship. You think you are getting closer to God for all your rule observance but you are actually going farther away. He skewers them and jeers them.
He then goes into the main point of the Bible. This is point two. The purpose of the Bible. He says the purpose of the Bible is not compliance with the laws, but the alignment of the heart with God. “You honor me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me.”
Jesus says the purpose of the Bible is to lead us to an intimate relationship of love with God. Rulekeeping looks religious, but it misses the heart. Jesus is saying, “the purpose of the commands that are in the Bible is that in keeping them you get closer to me. I want intimacy with you.”
In Exodus 19, when God is giving Moses the commands, the 10 Commandments, which is the ultimate expression of His will, He says an amazing thing. He says “if you obey me fully and keep all these commands, you will show everyone that you are my treasured possession.” Out of all the nations of the earth I treasure you the most.
He does not say, if you keep all these commands then I will save you. He says the reason I brought you out of Egypt is because I love you. I adored you. You are my treasure. Now obey these commands in keeping with this love.
People today object to the thought that obedience to the law and intimate love can be compatible. They think of abusive marriages or legalistic religion like that Fundamentalist Mormon compound in Texas that’s been in the news recently. Strict law keeping and intimate love are antithetical.
But think of this. If you fall in love with someone – you meet the girl or the guy of your dreams – what do you do? You start to study them. You find out what they like and what they don’t like. If they don’t like a certain kind of food you avoid those restaurants. If they like the theater, you surprise them with theater tickets. You look for the little things that delight them and you do them.
You don’t even think of it as keeping commands. You want to do these things because you have found your beloved. You mold your life around hers. You conform your life to hers because that is what love does.
So the purpose of the Bible is to lead us to an intimate relationship with God. To this end the OT has hundreds of commands and regulations. The real truth is this – and this is the truth that the Elders of Jerusalem could never bring themselves to grasp – the God of the Bible, the God who they were supposed to fall in love with, was standing right in front of them in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus does a remarkable thing in verse 19. He is talking about the clean food laws, which we will get to in a minute. The Jewish law clearly noted what foods were clean and unclean. They could not eat pork, for instance. In verse 19, it says “Jesus now declared all foods clean.” In other words, is he saying all the rules Moses gave about keeping kosher, not combining meat and dairy, not eating pork – is that all now over? You can eat anything you want?
Yes it is. Jesus is saying, I am the fulfillment of the law. All the laws pointed to me – the purity laws, the social regulations, the moral laws – they all pointed to me and now that I am here they are complete. As Tom Wright says, the purity laws were signposts telling us that coming to God required a radical purity of heart, mind, soul and strength. In keeping them, or trying to keep them we are aware of the great distance between us and God.
But now Jesus is here. Wright says, “The Scriptures spoke of purity, and set up laws as signposts to it. Jesus was offering the reality. When you arrive at the destination, you don’t need the signposts any more, not because they were worthless, but precisely because they were correct.”
The OT Scriptures are not a timeless code of behavior, but a story that leads to Jesus. None of it is untrue. It is all right and all correct. But their purpose is to point to the deeper truth, the greater reality, the ultimate fulfillment of all the laws, and that is Jesus.
So the sacrificial laws will be brought to an end, because Jesus’ death and resurrection is the secret for forgiveness and cleansing and purification.
The social regulations setting apart the nation of Israel will no longer apply because the people of God are newly constituted, not according to physical birth but by the birth of the Spirit and faith in Christ. The moral laws receive new depth as Jesus reveals not outward behavior but inward attitude.
So point number two, what is the purpose of the Bible? It is here revealed and cheered. It is to bring us to an intimate love relationship with Jesus Christ. He is the fulfillment of God’s laws and He wants to be the treasure of our hearts since we are the treasure of His heart.
If this is still fuzzy to you I think the next section will sharpen the picture. Jesus takes up the case of how to get morally clean.
Point 3 on your outline, we are all unclean and we know it.
The Adversaries were arguing for keeping the Mosaic clean laws. They said you get contaminated in the marketplace and you have to wash. The contamination, as I said, could come from any contact with a dead person or animal, or with a bodily fluid, or with a Gentile. If you did any of these things you were ritually impure and you could not go into the Temple and worship God.
Jesus disagreed with these leaders on many things, but He did not disagree with them on this one. Everyone is unclean.
The problem was that the Elders thought that relentless ritual obedience can fix this problem, but Jesus said it is a matter of the heart. It cant get fixed like this no matter how many times you wash.
Shakespeare shows us this in MacBeth. Lady MacBeth is loaded with guilt. Her guilt is expressed in a constant feeling of being unclean. “Out, out damn spot,” she says. She is expressing the inner sense of inadequacy we all feel.
And like Lady MacBeth and like the Jerusalem Elders we are constantly trying to cleanse ourselves. The point Jesus is making is that we cant do it. It is not a matter of externals. We don’t get contaminated by eating the wrong thing. uncleanliness is a matter of the heart. Food that is eaten goes through the digestive tract and is eliminated. It doesn’t come near the heart. Externals don’t matter a bit. You never get clean from the outside in. there must be a different solution.
Which brings us to the final point. How we do get clean? If we can’t do it through keeping the rules and if it is a matter of the heart which all of us realize down deep, then what can ever do it?
I was listening to a sermon on tape on the airplane this week and the speaker was talking about listening to a lecture years and years ago by an Old Testament professor named Ray Dillard. He was talking about Zechariah 3.
Zechariah the prophet is transported into the center of the Temple. In 3.1 he is shown Joshua the High Priest standing in the Holy of Holies. The temple had three parts, the outer court, the inner court and the Holy of Holies, and this is where the High Priest was. This was where the Ark of the Covenant was and this is where the shekinah glory of the Lord dwelt. It was a dangerout place, and the book of Leviticus commands the priests to come in with a lot of incense and a lot of preparation because in the presence of the Lord they might die. We know from another Biblical text that they used to tie a rope around the ankle of the priest who went in there so in case he died they could drag him out. The presence of the Lord was a fearsome thing.
Only one person, just one day a year, could go into the Holy of Holies into the presence of the Lord, and that was the High Priest on the day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.
Ray Dillard, who was teaching on this passage, drew on his scholarly knowledge and talked about the preparation that would take place before the High Priest could enter the Temple. He would begin his preparation a week before. He was put into seclusion, away from his family, into an apartment set aside for this purpose. Why? So that he would not touch anything unclean, or eat anything unclean, so that he could wash, and prepare his heart. Then the night before he would go into the Holy of Holies he would not sleep, but stay up all night reading the Scriptures and praying in order to prepare his soul.
Then on the day of Atonement itself he would take off his clothes and put in clothes of pure white linen. But before he put them on he would bathe completely from head to toe. Then he put on the clothes and went into the Holy of Holies and performed the sacrifice for his own sins. Then he would come out, bathe himself again head to toe, put in the clean white linen and go back in there to sacrifice this time for the sins of the priests. But that was not all. He would come out again, bathe completely a third time, and now put on entirely new clean white linen, and go in and finally make the sacrifices for all the people.
And please know that all of this was done in public. He was doing this on behalf of the whole nation, so it was out in public. His bathing had a screen for modesty, but the people would watch because this was their action. He was representing them before God, so they were there to cheer him on and be assured that he was doing everything right, that he was as clean and pure as possible, because their sins were atoned in this act.
Now only if you know all that background – the tremendous extent to which Joshua the High Priest and the entire nation went to be sure that when this man was standing before the Lord there was not a speck on him, not a germ of dirt or defilement – only when you realize that, can you appreciate what comes next in Zechariah’s vision in verse 3.
When Zechariah is shown the vision of the High Priest standing before the Lord on the day of Atonement, he sees the High Priest dressed in garments covered with excrement. There he is, despite his elaborate preparations and efforts, standing before the Lord, and his clothes are covered with feces and urine. He is absolutely defiled.
How could that be? Ray Dillard asks. How could the High Priest and the whole nation, who spent a week in preparation and elaborate safeguards to guarantee his purity, how could he be dressed in such filthy, abhorrent garments?
And the answer is, Professor Dillard said, the only possible explanation is that God was giving Zechariah the prophet a vision, just for a moment, so that he could see us the way God sees us. That in spite of all the efforts we make to be good, to be moral, to be clean – it doesn’t work. That God sees our hearts and they are filthy.
Then an amazing thing happens in the vision. God sends an angel to Joshua and says, “take off his filthy clothes.” Verse 4 says “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you.” And he does it, and Joshua now stands in bright new garments provided by the Lord Himself. Then the angel of the Lord said this to Joshua, “Listen O High Priest Joshua and all your associates, who are men symbolic of things to come, I am going to bring my servant, the Branch, and when He comes I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.
Zechariah probably cant believe his ears. God says, “instead of condemning you, instead of killing you for your defilement, I am going to take your filthy clothes off you and clothe you in a rssness that is not yours. And not just you, but I will send my servant the Branch, and he will cleanse all the sins of all the nation in a single day.
Zechariah must have been incredulous. Wait a minute, you can never get these sins off. We have been doing the clean laws, we have been keeping the purity laws day after day, year after year. The sin never comes off.
But God is saying, “Zechariah, this is a prophecy. Some day it will happen. Some day I will. Some day the sacrifices will all be over, the clean laws will all be over. Someday it will happen.
But how?
Ray Dillard finished his teaching like this: Centuries later another Jeshua showed up. And he was preparing for his own Day of Atonement. But his preparation was exactly the opposite of Joshua’s preparation in every way. Instead of the crowds cheering him on, the crowds mocked him and jeered him and even his own friends abandoned him. Instead of being clothed in pure linen, he was stripped naked. Instead of being bathed in clean water, he was bathed in human spit.
Why all this? 2 Corinthians 5:21: God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that we might become the rssnss of God in Him.” God clothed Him in our sin. He was the true lamb of God, the true sacrifice, who took away the sins of the world.
When God gives St. John a vision in the book of Revelation, the very last book written in the Bible, John sees a remarkable vision, in chapter 19. The entire church stands before the Lord – all the redeemed from all the ages. And everyone is wearing fine linen, bright and clean. The very same garments Joshua was given by the Lord, we are all given.
It is not our own rssness that earns these. God gives them to us. We are cleansed by what Jesus Christ has done for us.
In the movie Atonement, a young girl makes a horrible mistake. She misinterprets something she sees and wrongly accuses an innocent man who is sent to prison. He is released from prison only if he will join the army and fight in WWII. The young woman realizes she has ruined this man’s life, and the life of her older sister who loved him, and goes to Europe herself to try to make it right. She is too late, the young man and her sister have died in the war. She spends the rest of her life consumed by guilt trying to atone for her sins. She never can.
It is such a powerful movie because it captures the human condition. You can never atone for your sins. Purity cannot come no matter how hard you scrub. It comes only one way. Through the Branch.
Realize you are forgiven and cleansed in Jesus, then go out and live in freedom. Serve God, love others and serve the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FOR FURTHER STUDY
English, Donald, The Message of Mark ((IVP)
Hughes, J. Kent, Mark (Wheaton: Crossway Books: 1989)
Keller, Tim, sermon “Becoming Clean” www.redeemer.com
Keller, Tim, sermon “Jesus and the Bible” www.redeemer.com
Morgan, Brian, sermon, “What is Clean and What Defiles” Peninsula Bible Church Cupertino
Wright, NT, Mark for Everyone (SPCK: 2001)
