“Majoring in the Minors”
Mark 7:1-8, 14-23
When I was interning in the News Department of a Television Station during college, the Bureau Chief gave me, what seemed like, a nasty assignment.
There was someone running for office, he must have already been in government somehow, and she wanted me to dig up dirt on him.
She didn’t have any dirt on him—she just wanted me to dig some up.
She had me hide-out in the Capital Parking Garage and watch him get into his car in order to find out whether he was using government vehicles for private use.
She also had me searching the Capital Building itself, searching for anything that might be news-worthy.
I couldn’t find a thing.
In any event, one day this politician came to the station for an interview with this Bureau Chief.
I greeted him and then whispered in his ear: “They’ve had me searching for dirt on you for the past couple months and I wasn’t able to find a thing. Good for you!”
A few days later that same politician had a new commercial on the air waves.
In it a news director was screaming into a phone to a guy in a hat, overcoat and with a big micro-scope— and the news director was yelling: “Find dirt on…”--I can’t remember the politician’s name.
Then the investigator or whatever (who was obviously portraying me) called his boss back saying, “I can’t find anything,” to which the boss screamed back into the phone ever louder and more frustrated: “Find dirt!”
Our Gospel Lesson for this morning reminds me of my experience of searching for dirt on that poor guy and also the funny commercial that followed.
The Pharisees and some teachers of the Law are following Jesus around in order to “find dirt” on Him.
It sure seems like they are wasting a lot of time chasing Jesus around, angry as hornets making such a big deal about all the things He and His disciples are doing.
Up to this point in Mark’s Gospel they have found Jesus flagrantly disregarding ritual purity laws.
In Mark Chapter 1 Jesus touched a leper.
In Chapter 2 Jesus’ disciples didn’t fast, and also ignored Sabbath Laws.
He touched a woman with a discharge and handled a corpse in Chapter 5 and later in this chapter he will heal 2 Gentiles.
This Jesus is quite the rebel, and He is quickly making lots enemies in the religious establishment.
And in our Lesson for this morning they “saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is unwashed.”
Now this had nothing to do with being sanitary or unsanitary.
They had no concept of germs back then.
And the ritual washing of hands before eating was not a law found in Scripture.
It was a “tradition of the elders.”
In other words, it wasn’t a law of God; it was a religious tradition.
Now, of course, traditions can enrich life and faith.
Traditions can help bring structure and discipline.
Traditions can be wonderful things.
But, sometimes they can be so-ingrained in us that we don’t even know why we practice them.
There is a story about a little rural church that got a new minister.
And he began to notice an interesting thing that would happen every Sunday.
At the beginning of the service the entire congregation would sit on the left side of the sanctuary.
But after the offering, the entire congregation would stand and move to the other side.
They did this every Sunday.
The pastor wondered why they did this and so he kept asking folks in the congregation.
People would answer: “It’s just the way we have always done it.
I’ve been going here my whole life and it’s the way we worship.”
Finally, the minister asked the oldest member of the congregation.
She gave him the answer.
A long time ago, the church had a wood burning furnace that would heat the sanctuary.
Someone would light the furnace a few minutes before the service, but it would take a while for the place to heat up.
By the time the offering came around it was too hot on the furnace side so everyone would stand up and move to the other side.
It became a tradition.
Once the furnace was gone, people didn’t know why they were doing it.
They just knew it had always been that way.
They figured it had some kind of religious meaning.
That’s a little like this hand washing thing Jesus is dealing with in Mark Chapter 7.
It’s like asking men to remove their hats inside, or thinking that an organ is the only instrument God accepts in a sanctuary.
It has nothing to do with Scripture.
It has everything to do with tradition.
Now, it is true that the Law of Moses devoted a lot of attention to ritual purity.
Lots of things from normal bodily fluids to touching a dead body to mixing milk and meat could make a person ritually unclean and therefore barred from Temple worship.
So could eating certain foods such as animals that do not chew their cud and do not have cloven hoofs which would include pigs.
Fish without fins or scales were forbidden as were shellfish, shrimp, crabs oysters and a host of other things.
These Laws are in the Bible, in Leviticus.
But ritual hand washing and the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles were not.
They were traditions, and when the Pharisees see Jesus’ disciples ignoring these things they figure they have “found dirt” on Jesus.
“Dirt” they can use to discredit Him, to bring Him down.
After-all, they were the ones in charge of the religious rules and traditions.
They were the ones who told people what God expected of people and what was important to God.
How dare this new carpenter-turned Rabbi come in and upset the apple-cart, and thus, threaten their power structure, their jobs, their status, their Temple rules.
How dare He go against the way things have always been, even if He is healing people, and doing so many other good and loving things—even if He is drawing in huge crowds of folks who otherwise would probably have had no interest in Temple worship and their rules anyway—no interest in God.
Lives were being changed, transformed…
…but these people were eating with unwashed hands!
How dare they!!!
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 defiled hands?”
At this, Jesus probably blew out a breath of frustration as he replied: “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites…
‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
In Jesus’ response, we get a sense of what is important to God.
For the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, ritual purity became a way of excluding people they considered to be dirty, polluted, or contaminated.
It was a way of keeping the “riff-raff” out of the sanctuary.
But Jesus turned the “purity system on its head!
And in its place He announced a new community that would be characterized by inner compassion for everyone, not external rules…
…it would be based on inclusivity rather than exclusivity, by inward transformation rather than outward rituals and play acting—in other words—hypocrisy.
There would be no outcasts in the Kingdom of God.
As Garry Wills writes: “No one was cast far enough out in Jesus’ world to make Him shun them—not Roman collaborators, not lepers, not prostitutes, not the crazed, not the possessed.
There was no one who could possibly be outside His all-encompassing love.”
I’ve found it helpful and humbling in my spiritual journey to ask myself: “what ‘outcastes’ do I sanctimoniously look down on as impure, unclean, dirty, contaminated, and, in my mind—far from God?
How have I distorted the self-sacrificing love of God into some sort of self-serving, exclusionary elitism?
What boundaries do I wrongly build?
What boundaries is God calling me to bravely shatter?
Which church traditions and practices do I busy myself with that causes me to lose touch with God’s heart?
To what could Jesus point and say, “You have let go of the commandments of God and are holding on to human traditions”?
Sometimes, we the Church, are our own worst enemies to growing the Church or being the Church God created us to be.
Sometimes, we hold on to traditions which cause others to stumble and which keep others out.
What is truly important to God?
What should be truly important to us?
Over and over again in the Gospels Jesus instructed the religious leaders to “go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’”
I want to learn what this means as well.
I think it is a key to honoring God not only with our lips but with our hearts and lives as well.
After Jesus spoke to the Pharisees, He called the crowd together to Him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this.
Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them.
Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
I don’t think we can even pretend to grasp the magnitude of what Jesus said here.
To know the context and to whom He is speaking is crucial.
This is a culture that prizes Jewish food laws.
The Old Testament goes into great detail regarding clean and unclean foods, and Jewish people distinguished themselves from their pagan neighbors by observing these food laws.
To say that a person is not defiled by what he or she eats is a seriously bold statement, although it is in keeping with what Jesus did in other situations…
…He ate with unclean people, He included women in His ministry—and some of them didn’t exactly have very good reputations…
…He had compassion for people—for sinners rather than contempt.
In any event, we get a glimpse of the magnitude of what Jesus has just told the crowd because even His disciples can’t grasp what He is really saying.
It’s too radical.
In verse 17 we are told that Jesus’ “disciples asked him about this parable.”
And yes, it was a parable.
But a parable is not a joke, and this one in particular was no laughing matter.
For example, many Jewish people had been martyred, tortured, killed for refusing to eat unclean food, pork in particular.
And Jesus is shining a light on something, a deep truth about the way humans are.
He knows the message of the Kingdom is not going to go down easily.
You might as well try to tell the leaders of the old South Africa that all races are equal in the sight of God.
It’s not something they are going to want to hear.
That’s why Jesus uses parables, not only here but in other places.
It was the only way He could say some of the most devastating things He wanted to say.
I mean, if you are trying to tell your own religion that it’s going the wrong way…that things which have been taken for granted for so long are not the way of God…
…you have to do it carefully.
But His disciples don’t get it.
Talk of “what goes into you” and “what comes out of you” seems to them like a sort of potty humor that might have been done in Greek comic plays but certainly not as part of Jesus’ Kingdom teaching.
What could He have meant?
Only when they get back to the house does Jesus explain.
He is talking about what comes out of the heart.
Eating meat from crocodile to kangaroo, from pig to porcupine has nothing to do with that.
And when people get stuck on regulations about food and so forth, they never move on to the truly important things.
And the truly important things are what is in the heart.
When a society or culture feels threatened, it will enforce what we might call “purity codes” to enforce its boundaries.
The Jewish people in the Middle East had for centuries been surrounded and infiltrated by paganism.
And so, these codes were very important to them.
They were cultural symbols that said: “We are Jews! We are different! We don’t live like you do!”
But Jesus is throwing open the doors of God’s Kingdom to anyone and everyone who would repent and believe.
What happens to the boundaries then?
What happens to the symbols?
This is one reason Jesus opposes the purity laws that were being applied—they excluded people.
And they didn’t get at the heart of God and what God and God’s Kingdom is really about.
It’s about mercy—not sacrifice.
It’s about grace—not Law.
It’s about the transformation of the heart—of the person…
…not religious traditions.
It’s about the Spirit not the flesh.
I mentioned the t-v series that you can get for free through an app. on your phone, I think it was last Sunday.
It’s called “The Chosen.”
My wife and I have been watching it.
It is a well-done depiction of Jesus and His disciples.
And in the show some very politically minded Pharisees are trying to put a stop to Jesus’ blasphemous adventures.
And they are being so nit-picky.
They are searching for “dirt” on Jesus in order to put a stop to Him—sort of like me digging for “dirt” on that politician.
All the while they are ignoring or over-looking the things that really, truly matter.
The Prophet Micah wrote some 2,750 years ago: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, 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.”
We have a world that is reeling from a pandemic that hasn’t loosened its grip.
We have people who are living in the streets—homeless.
We have children who are neglected—basically raising themselves.
We have extremely high suicide rates, a big problem with racism, and political division.
We have a younger generation that is basically absent from the Churches.
What are we concerned with?
What is in our hearts?
What is Christianity about?
A bunch of outward rules and rituals?
Or is it about mercy rather than sacrifice?
Is it about the heart?
Is it about new birth?
Transformation?
Grace?
Forgiveness?
Is it about loving people, accepting people, including people?
Is it about doing what Micah talked about?
Is it about doing what Jesus lived out and did?
Is it about us—living this way, and thus bringing God’s Kingdom not only into our hearts and minds, but into the hearts and minds of those who live around us--And maybe, just maybe…making a positive difference in a world that is so broken, so sad, so lost, so frightened, so angry?
Lord, give us the grace to be people of grace. In Jesus name. Amen.
