1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts, be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this 14th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Mark 7:1-13, it’s entitled, “Traditions in the Church,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Are they really arguing about washing their hands before they eat? Isn’t that just common sense? Who wants to stick filthy fingers into their mouths? Were Jesus’ disciples just a bunch of pigs? No, that’s not the point here at all. The issue between the Pharisees and Jesus here isn’t hygiene. The issue is about their traditions and the place those traditions have in the life of God’s people. Considering that we ourselves have plenty of traditions that we make use of in the church, we should pay careful attention to what Jesus teaches us today about traditions. I would summarize it this way: there is a place for traditions in the Church, just not in the place of the law or the gospel!
3. Traditions in the church can be very good. Traditions can teach important theological truths. Traditions can give us a common practice that unites us together in the Body of Christ. Traditions can even help train and strengthen our faith and build virtue. As I said, the church has many such traditions. Making the sign of the cross, for instance. That’s a tradition that we see several times each week. Some of you may even do it at home when you say your prayers. And as you can see right there on page (LSB, pg. 203) in the hymnal, making the sign of the cross is meant to remind you of your baptism and all the blessings you have received from it.
4. We Lutherans have the tradition of following a church calendar with different seasons. We have Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter seasons. And each season has its own color: purple, white, green, red. Right now, we’re in what we call the Time of the Church, the long green season. Following this church calendar helps to remind us of all the important things Jesus did for us and our salvation—his incarnation and birth, his suffering, dying, and rising again, his ascension into heaven, and so on. And the church year also connects us with other Christians across the world who celebrate these events at the same time we do. It’s a good tradition. Maybe you can think of other traditions we do regularly. Have you ever stopped to think about why we do them and what we’re supposed to learn from them?
5. Now, let’s think of the traditions in question in the Gospel reading. Mark explains that the Jews had a tradition of washing their hands, along with other things, as a ritual before they ate. “For the Pharisees and all the Jews do 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. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches” (Mark 7:3–4).
6. There’s definitely nothing wrong with washing your hands before you eat. Not only is it sanitary, but I suppose it could also serve a theological purpose. Having such a tradition might remind you of your need to be clean in the eyes of the Lord. That was certainly a major concern for the Jews. We know that they couldn’t enter the temple area and participate in certain aspects of their spiritual and social activities if they were ritually unclean. And of course, there’s the bigger concern of being clean on the inside, that is, having a pure heart and being free from the stain of sin. Any tradition that reminds us of that truth could be very useful. Having the tradition of observing penitential seasons like Advent and Lent serves this exact purpose.
7. Jesus also mentions a tradition called Corban. The word corban simply means giving an offering to God. Surely, we can’t say anything bad about that. After all, God instructed the people of the Old Testament to give many different kinds of offerings. So what could Jesus possibly have against it?
8.
The problem isn’t in
the tradition itself but in the place they assigned to it. Even though these
were man-made traditions, the Jews had placed them on the same level as God’s
law. In the case of Corban, they had actually replaced God’s law with
their tradition. Making a monetary offering to the temple is one thing. But
dedicating it to the temple so that you wouldn’t be obligated to care for your
aging parents is another. And it seems as if Jesus is implying that’s exactly
what they were doing with this practice of Corban. Their man-made
tradition had replaced the Fourth Commandment! They were
dishonoring God and their parents by this tradition. That’s clearly not right.
9. They had done the same thing with the handwashing tradition. It became more than a tradition for them. It was as good as God’s law, even though God never commanded it. And what was the result? They wrongly and unnecessarily burdened people’s consciences. The Pharisees had accused Jesus’ disciples of sinning because they didn’t wash before they ate. God never said it was a sin for his people to eat without washing first, so how could they make that accusation? Yet they did. That’s one of the big problems with putting tradition on the same level as God’s Law. It creates sin where there is no sin and guilt where there is no guilt.
10. Making the sign of the cross is a fine tradition. But can I accuse you of sin because you don’t do it? Can another pastor accuse me of sin because I do it backward? No, of course not, because God never commanded that we do it. It is just a tradition. Should we make somebody feel guilty because he or she doesn’t get ashes on Ash Wednesday or accidentally lit the Advent candles in the wrong order? God never commanded these things, so it would be wrong of us to accuse others of sinning for not doing them. We can’t call something a sin that God has not called a sin, and we can’t create guilt in somebody where there is no guilt. If we were to do that, we’d be putting these traditions in the same place as God’s Law. And then these good, useful traditions would stop being good and useful.
11. But the problems don’t stop there. It’s bad enough that we’ll put traditions in place of God’s Law, but it’s equally bad, if not worse, to put our traditions in place of the Gospel. And yet, that’s basically what we’re doing if we begin to think that our traditions make us righteous or more pleasing to God.
12. Why do you suppose the Pharisees were so strict about their traditions? They believed that they could become clean and pure in God’s eyes by keeping their handwashing tradition perfectly. They mistakenly thought that their giving of Corban to the temple was so pleasing to God that it earned them merit with God. They assumed that God would be impressed with them because they were so good at keeping these laws they had made, which in their eyes were over and above all the other commandments God had given.
13. It’s easy to fall into that trap, isn’t it? We all do it. You feel superior to others because you make the sign of the cross and nobody else does. There’s a sense of pride when you walk through the grocery store with the ashen cross on your forehead for all to see. Why? Because deep down, we believe that keeping these traditions makes us better in the eyes of God. And that’s wrong.
14. We should never think that keeping our traditions, no matter how useful they are, makes us righteous or pleasing to God. That job belongs to Jesus and only to Jesus! As Paul said, we “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom 3:24–25). There is nothing else, not our traditions, not our keeping of the Law, not handwashing or ashes on our foreheads or fasting perfectly for forty days—nothing but Jesus makes us righteous and clean and pure in God’s sight.
15. “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor 6:11). You have been washed in the waters of Baptism and covered by the precious blood of Jesus. You are already clean. And not just your hands, but your heart. You are righteous and pure in God’s sight because you have been joined in Baptism to Jesus’ perfect suffering, dying, and rising again. It is a gift given to you by Jesus and is received only by faith.
16. If we have a tradition that distracts us from Jesus’ salvation, directs our faith toward something that we do, or entices us to spurn God’s Word, we need seriously to reconsider using that tradition lest we also become hypocrites who honor God with our lips while our hearts are far from him (Mark 7:6).
17. But traditions done with faith in Christ that direct us to Jesus and his salvation can be good and useful. That’s what all our traditions are meant to do—support the Law and the Gospel, not replace them. The sign of the cross, the seasons with their different colors on the altar, ashes on the forehead—they are meant to point us sinners to Christ and teach us about the salvation that he has accomplished for us. May God continue to preserve for our use such beneficial traditions, that our faith in Christ and our love for his Word would continue to grow and increase among us. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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