1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Today, our Lord Jesus calls us from human tradition to God’s Word and His priorities and letting His voice declare us clean, so that he can say, by His death on the cross, “Come to me, and I will make you clean.” The message from God’s Word on this 13th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Mark 7:1-13. It’s entitled, “Jesus Makes Us Clean,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Clean hands are important. We expect any restaurant to provide the customer with a place to wash his or her hands. Hand sanitizers are everywhere these days, especially during this pandemic. Employers have strict polices about hand washing. You can see it in their signs for their employees that they have in their restaurant bathrooms. But, who’s to tell us when our hands are truly clean? Scientists, doctors, teachers, parents, employers? There are actually those who argue we’ve so sanitized our world, including our hands, that our children are growing up less healthy than we did, more susceptible to resistant microbes. But, all of this pales in comparison to the question of a clean heart.
3. Some time ago, a Hollywood celebrity, as part of a high-profile visit, had the chance to spend an afternoon with the president of Taiwan. Surprisingly, the topic the celebrity wanted to pursue was the treatment of dogs in Taiwan. Humane treatment of animals is important, but if you had one chance to speak to the president of a country, would that be the issue you’d focus on?
4. The contrast between Jesus’ reception at the end of Mark 6 and his encounter with the Pharisees and scribes in our passage to open chapter 7 is remarkable. The contagious excitement about a Jesus who heals all who come to him is replaced with a concern about the ritual cleanness of his disciples’ hands. Mark 7:1-2, 5 says, “Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, 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. . . . And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ ” (Mark 7:1–2, 5).
5. If you had the opportunity for a private audience with Jesus, would you argue about the proper way to wash up before a meal? It may even be that this wasn’t a matter of the disciples not washing their hands at all, but of not washing their hands thoroughly enough to meet the Pharisees’ standard. Jesus’ opponents seem to have completely lost sight of what really matters before God. The way they ask their question suggests that the root of the problem is that they’ve begun to put human concerns above what’s important in God’s eyes. Our initial sympathy with the Pharisees’ concern over clean hands at the table goes right down the drain when we begin to see the real problem in all its seriousness.
6. Do you remember when you were a child wanting to pass “bath-time inspection?” You probably quickly learned that your mom wasn’t going to check the easy-to-reach places like your hands or your stomach. If you wanted to be declared “clean,” you had to make sure you washed behind your ears and between your toes. Jesus reminds his questioners that they still need to learn this lesson. Centuries before, through his prophet Isaiah, the Lord had tried to teach Israel to check for true cleanness by considering their hearts: “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” (Mark 7:6–7; Isaiah 29:13).
7. We may make the same mistake they were making if we miss the very important way Jesus introduces this quote from Isaiah. “Well did the prophet Isaiah prophesy of you,” Jesus says (Mark 7:6). Right after this, Jesus will speak of the Commandments God gave through Moses and how these ancient words of God should be shaping the lives and thoughts of his hearers. The Pharisees are more concerned about whether people’s hands are clean than whether their bodies have been cleansed of disease by the words of Jesus and whether their hearts have been filled with the peace Jesus is proclaiming. That’s exactly the sort of thing that happens when we stop asking what’s important to God.
8. You’ve heard the expression “lip service,” and you probably know what it means. Did you know that expression was inspired by this passage in the Gospels and by the passage from Isaiah Jesus quotes here? (That’s what Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says.) No one is impressed by outward professions that are completely unsupported by attitude and action. But, the Lord’s words, both in Isaiah and in Mark may suggest another image when he speaks of far distant hearts. Here we might think of close lips and distant hearts. Have you ever had the uncomfortable or even infuriating experience of someone whom you know opposes you greeting you warmly—even with a handshake, a hug, a kiss? We immediately think of the example of the kiss of Judas, the kiss of betrayal, in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was there ever a case of greater separation between lips and hearts?
9. But we’d better not answer too quickly. If Isaiah’s words are prophesied about us, and if Jesus’ warnings speak to us, we had better examine our own lips and hearts and heads and hands to see how we’re doing. How have we lost sight of what’s really important? What traditions of men, what traditions of our own, have we let crowd out God’s Word from its proper place as the Word that demands our total obedience? Maybe, we allow our viewing of sports or entertainment get in the way of our observance of God’s Word and Sacraments. Instead of spending time reading God’s Word, we replace it with time in front of our tablets, our smartphones, or TV’s, or we let our own hobbies get in the way of being in God’s Word. In what ways have we ceased to care about the hearts of those around us and taken, instead, to examining the cleanness of their hands?
10. The wrongness of the Pharisees’ approach is shown in the behavior that results. Replacing God’s Word with man’s, listening to human traditions that establish themselves at the cost of the honor due God’s Word, results in a life lived only for self. Our Lord points to one of our most fundamental relationships to make this clear: Jesus said to them here in Mark 7:9-13, ‘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 Corban’ ” (that is, given to God)—then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do’ ” (Mark 7:9–13).
11. When our own voices and no others guide us, when our hearts are filled with self and far from God, even those dearest to us will suffer the consequences. Instead of gratitude, honor, obedience, and love toward those who have endured pain and deprivation to give us life, we look for excuses and loopholes so that we can be free of the burden of caring for our parents. Though the particulars of this example may be hard for us to reconstruct, Jesus’ concluding “and many such things” shows that this is merely one example among many of what life turned in upon itself looks like. The contrast between man-made definitions of marriage in our world today and the picture of marriage that Paul gives us in our Epistle from Ephesians 5 is just one more example. It’s a long list. Our hands may be clean, but our hearts are filthy.
12. God so desires that our hearts belong to him that he gave his own Son. The pages of Holy Scripture record for us how our God does more than just pay lip service to his desire to restore the world to himself. The lips of God’s prophets—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, John the Baptist—announced again and again God’s promise to give the world a Savior from sin and death. But, the Holy Scriptures also record for us the story of all God actually did in order to keep his promises—preserving his people through the flood, the Red Sea, from the Philistines, from Babylon. Our God didn’t just make promises. He kept them all, finally, by giving his own Son. God gave his Son Jesus to die for you. That was no lip service. That tore out the Father’s very heart! And Christ went willingly to the cross. All his words of teaching he backed up with that action of deepest, heartfelt love for you.
13. Human traditions may set standards for outward cleanness, but they can never make us clean within. Jesus points out the true source of the Pharisees’ uncleanness because he wants to make them clean. This is clearly demonstrated in the casting out of the unclean spirit and the compassion Jesus shows the crowds in the accounts that follow (next week’s Gospel, Mk 7:14–23). Jesus draws our attention away from human traditions, which can’t save us, to focus on God’s Word, which can. God’s words, spoken to us and for us, expose the “dirt behind our ears,” the “dirt” we’ve been hiding in the hope no one would see, the “dirt” that gets in our eyes and blinds us to the needs of those around us, the “dirt” that clogs our hearts and shuts them down, the “dirt” that kills. But the point of all this is not so God can say, “Look, you’re dirty!” Rather, Our Lord Calls Us from Human Tradition to God’s Word and His Priorities and Letting His Voice Declare Us Clean, so that he can say, by his death on the cross, “Come to me, and I will make you clean.” 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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