The Diagnosis (Mark 7.1-23)

A couple years ago, Jack got sick. He was weak, he was dizzy, especially when he would lie down. It lasted a while, so we started getting worried. We took him to the doctor and she ordered a blood test.

We couldn’t get an appointment with her until the week after to check the results, so I brought the test results with me to church one day and asked Josh (a doctor-missionary who was attending Connexion at the time) to look at them. I watched him nervously as he looked over the results, because we had noticed a few things were out of range. He looked them over grimly, then said, “From what I can tell, it looks like he’s extremely dehydrated.”

All that worry, because Jack wasn’t drinking enough water. Sure enough, we made him drink a lot more water, and a couple days later he was fine.

A good diagnosis, however unexpected it might be, can target an illness, allow you to treat it efficiently, and also change your perspective on what’s actually going on; it helps you worry less about things that are no big deal, and to take seriously things that need to be taken seriously.

This is essentially what Jesus does for us in today’s text: he takes advantage of a criticism from the Pharisees to give them a scathing diagnosis of their real problem, and ours.

This passage falls perfectly in line with what Mark has been doing since the beginning of his gospel. One of his main goals in this book is to explain to us precisely who Jesus is. Jesus comes preaching the coming of the kingdom of God and calling people to repent of their sin, and he travels from place to place, teaching the crowds and performing miracle after miracle. In the text we saw last time—the second half of chapter 6—we saw him multiply bread and fish to feed five thousand, walking on water, and healing the sick in Gennesaret. And we saw that the particular miracles he performed, and the way he did it, shows us that Jesus is ushering in a new exodus—moving his people out of death and into life.

Mark’s going to continue in that same vein in today’s text: by showing us how Jesus diagnoses the problem of the Pharisees, and of all humanity, he sheds more light on exactly who Jesus is, and what he came to do.

The Pharisees’ Question (v. 1-5)

When we start chapter 7, Jesus and the disciples have landed near Gennesaret off the Sea of Galilee, and Jesus has been healing people all over the region. And apparently a group of Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem have come to Jesus and are watching what’s happening around him.

Just as a reminder: the Pharisees were a group of highly religious men who prided themselves on observing the law of Moses to the letter—they saw themselves, in a sense, as arbiters of the Jewish faith. The scribes were religious leaders, experts in interpreting the law. So they’re not the same thing, but their interests often aligned.

And when they observed Jesus’s disciples, they got worried—because they observed a certain behavior in them that, presumably, told them a lot about Jesus. If the disciples act a certain way, that says something about their Master.

Let’s read starting in v. 1:

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4 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.) 5 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?”

Now the obvious question to ask is, why is this such a big deal? I mean, in terms of hygiene it’s not great—always wash your hands before eating—but why would that make their hands not just dirty, but “defiled”?

It all comes down to the notion of purity. Not moral purity, but ritual purity. In the law of Moses, there were certain things that were designated “clean” and “unclean”—certain meats the Jews weren’t allowed to eat, certain things they weren’t allowed to touch. The list of things that could make you ceremonially unclean is, all things considered, reasonably short, and the list existed for a reason: to show that you can’t come into the presence of God in a carefree way. The Jews were called to think hard about what it means to belong to God’s people, and the notion of ritual purity helped them recall that truth. If they touched something that was unclean, they had to go through a process of purification before coming back before God to offer sacrifices.

Being ceremonially unclean meant that you were required to stay away from other people while you were unclean, and it meant that you were excluded from the presence of God, at least temporarily. We have no equivalent for this in our modern society: we have no experience that  would exclude us from both our community and from God’s presence. Even if we did have something like that, most people today probably wouldn’t care—they’d just find another community or another god.

But for the Jews, this was a very big deal. If you were impure, you lost everything. If you were pure, you had access to everything. The stakes were incredibly high.

And what happens when the stakes of a given act or situation are high? We get nervous—we start to think of all the ways things could go wrong. So we start to make plans to keep that from happening.

This is, essentially, what happened over the centuries. The law of Moses forbade certain things—things they weren’t allowed to eat or touch—but over the years, the “elders”, the religious leaders, started adding things to that list, just in case. I understand this temptation completely—I myself would rather be too careful rather than not careful enough in most matters. But they added things God never intended to the list of “unclean” things.

Like the need to wash one’s hands before a meal. For hygiene, of course, it’s a good idea. But the law never said eating with unwashed hands made one unclean or “defiled.”

So that’s the context of this strange exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. Jesus’s disciples are eating with unwashed hands, so the Pharisees and scribes ask him why he’s allowing it, as if the disciples are breaking God’s law by doing so. (They’re not.)

Now of course Jesus could have just explained to them everything I’ve just said, but he knew what was going on in their hearts, and he apparently decided to take advantage of their question. Because, as we see over and over again in the gospels, two things that Jesus cannot stand are religious people who live hypocritically, and religious people who miss the point of their religion.

The Pharisees’ Hypocrisy (v. 6-13)

The question of the Pharisees and scribes is a trick question, of course; they don’t think he’ll have a good answer. So Jesus does what he does so well: he ignores the trick question and turns the tables on those who asked it. V. 6:

6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
                  “ ‘This people honors me with their lips,
      but their heart is far from me;
            7       in vain do they worship me,
      teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus tells the Pharisees that they “reject the commandment of God”? It sort of seems like they’re doing the opposite, doesn’t it? like they’re not rejecting the commandment, but rather taking it too far.

But if Jesus is telling the truth, by taking it too far, they are rejecting it. Let’s look at the example he gives and see if we can understand what he’s talking about.

V. 9 again:

9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 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)— 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

On the surface it may seem like Jesus’s example is coming out of nowhere; they were asking him about hand-washing, not about money given to God. But here Jesus shines a light on their whole attitude regarding the law. And their attitude makes a clear statement to God: that what he commands isn’t enough. It’s an attitude that tries to make sure God gets it right. Surely when God talked about ritual purity, and gave a list of things that could make people unclean, he meant that list to be a lot longer. So we’ll just go ahead and make that list as long as we can, just to make sure we’ve covered all the bases.

That’s the logic they apply to the law in general, Jesus knows, so he gives them an even worse example. The law says, “Honor your father and mother”—and it takes it very seriously, as we see in v. 10: according to the law, dishonoring your parents was punishable by death. (Hear that, kids?) Though its application changed over the years, the importance of honoring your parents continued all the way until your parents’ death; in their old age, when they can’t work anymore, it was the children’s responsibility to care for them, to contribute to their welfare.

But God also told the people to contribute financially to the tabernacle, and later, to the temple. This was a big part of the law as well.

So (here’s the Pharisees’ logic, taken to its conclusion), surely the commandment to give to God’s house is more important than the commandment to honor your parents. If you have to choose between one commandment or the other, which do you choose? After all, who is more important? God, or Mom and Dad?

God, of course. So all the money that would have gone to Mom and Dad, we can “dedicate it to God” (that’s what that word “Corban” means), so we don’t have to give it to Mom and Dad. Think of all the money we’ll save, when we can take two lines in our budget and shrink them down to one! And we’ll feel good and pious on top of it, because we’re giving to God.

You see the problem. Here’s tradition again, applying the law incorrectly in order to feed the egos of the obedient.

The problem is always the same. God commands a certain number of things (and make no mistake, his commands are strict, as we’ll see later). Then the religious leaders come along and establish tradition that goes beyond what the law says.

We all know that the Catholic Church elected a new pope this week, Pope Leo XIV. I know nothing about the man, besides the obvious; he seems like a nice man and it sounds like he’s done some good work.

But there are problems, not with the man himself, but with what he represents and what he says. I don’t have time to get into all of them right now, and I’m not trying to offend anyone—if you’re Catholic or come from a Catholic background, we love you and we’re happy you’re here—but the new pope’s speech gives us a very quick example of the kind of thing Jesus is talking about.

I won’t read the whole thing, merely give two select quotes. The first came early on in his speech:

“Therefore, without fear, united hand in hand with God and among ourselves, we move forward. We are disciples of Christ. Christ precedes us. The world needs his light. Humanity needs him as the bridge to allows it to be reached by God and by his love…”

To that, I say amen—there’s a need to specify who are the “we” who are disciples of Christ, but he’s right. Christ precedes us in our mission, and humanity absolutely does need him. He is the bridge between humanity and God.

So far, so good.

But this is how he ended his speech:

“Today is the day of the Supplication to Our Lady of Pompeii. Our Mother Mary always wants to walk with us, to be close, to help us with her intercession and her love. So, I would like to pray together with you. Let us pray together for this new mission, for the whole Church, for peace in the world and let us also ask Mary, our Mother, for this special grace.”

And he followed this with the famous Hail Mary. Only one prayer offered up by the new pope, and it was offered, not to our Savior Jesus Christ himself, but to Mary.

The Bible never encourages us to pray to Mary, but it commands us continually to pray to Christ, because Christ—not a pope or a priest—is the intermediary between God and man.

“…teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.” And what is the danger of this? That we might hear God say, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.’”

Tradition in and of itself isn’t a bad thing; it can be immensely helpful and structuring. However, these leaders to whom Jesus is speaking put their tradition on the same level as the Word of God, treating disobedience to tradition with the same severity as disobedience to the Word of God.

It is an unbelievably arrogant way to behave, because it assumes that God didn’t get it right the first time. And the end result of this kind of behavior is always that our tradition will come and replace the Word of God, because our tradition comes from us, and we understand it. We like its rigidity because it makes us feel pious; it gives us concrete actions we can perform to prove our own worth to ourselves.

Treating God’s law this way takes the spotlight off of God, and puts it on ourselves. We do what we think is right, and we do it because we think it makes us holy. We assume that if we act a certain way, and obey these rules established by our tradition, God will look at us and say, “How amazing you are!”

But the point of the law was to show the incredible distance between God’s holiness and our sin; to show that sin is an active barrier to fellowship with God; in other words, the law existed to show us how good he is, not how good we are. “‘This people honors me with their lips,’” God said through the prophet Isaiah, “‘but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

When you hold too tightly to the tradition of men, you leave the commandment of God. Which is a grave mistake because the commandment of God actually cuts far deeper, than our tradition.

And that’s where Jesus goes next.

Humanity’s Problem (v. 14-23)

This time, Jesus speaks to the crowd again and he does what he always does so beautifully: he takes a simple commandment from the law and turns it completely on its head. This is what everything so far in this chapter has been building toward. V. 14:

14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

Now if you read v. 14 and 15 and you feel a bit confused, don’t feel bad. After all, the law of Moses explicitly said that there are plenty of things the Jews weren’t allowed to eat, or else they would become “unclean.”

Let’s face it: this parable (this teaching given through a picture) that Jesus tells in v. 14-15 is not very clear. That’s not a criticism of Jesus teaching. Remember what we saw about parables in chapter 4? We saw that the point of parables wasn’t usually to make things clearer, but on the contrary to make them even more obscure.

So it’s not at all surprising that the disciples would hear this and be confused, because it sounds as if Jesus is saying that God’s own laws of ritual purity are wrong. But the one thing the disciples almost always have in their favor is that when they’re confused, they ask questions. It’s the right thing to do. V. 17:

17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Look at the picture he’s painting. We eat food; where does it go? Into the stomach, to be expelled. When we eat food, what does it miss? It misses the heart.

Obviously there are foods that can lead to heart disease; Jesus isn’t being scientific here. He’s speaking in spiritual terms.

In the Bible, the “heart” is the center of one’s person, the seat of our thoughts and will and emotions and conscience. The heart is what makes us who we are as individuals.

Do you see what he’s doing? He’s helping the disciples see the forest for the trees. He’s taking the focus off of the commandment itself, and directing their attention to what the commandment was trying to say.

What was the commandment on ritual purity trying to say? It was trying to show that there is a natural barrier to fellowship with God, that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God’s holiness and our sin. The commandments on ritual purity merely took that abstract concept and made it concrete, made it feel more real, more immediate. When someone became unclean and was required to go through the process of purification in order to offer sacrifices again, they felt what it’s like to be cut off from God, and how badly they needed to be purified.

All the Jews knew what this felt like, because the list of things that could make one unclean included quite ordinary things that would happen to everyone at least once. Almost definitely, they had all been through the rites of purification before, and knew what it felt like to be temporarily unclean.

So imagine what a hammer-blow it would be to hear Jesus say that what they felt during their ritual uncleanness, they should be feeling all the time. Why? Because it’s not what goes into a person that defiles him, but what comes out of him. V. 21 again:

21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

These are devastating verses, because they show that the real problem is far bigger than we imagined. Jesus says the real problem isn’t what we do: what we eat or drink, or even the sinful actions we perform. Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness—these are all evil things, Jesus says. But they’re not even the main problem. Because where do these evil things come from? They come from within. From out of the heart of man.

What truly defiles us, Jesus says, is what comes out of us.

We see it all the time in children; when they get in trouble, what is their instinct? It is to defend themselves by throwing the blame onto something else. “I didn’t mean to, the cookie fell into my mouth!” “It wasn’t me, it was my sister; she took my fist and hit herself with it!” It sounds goofy, but parents, you’ll know—kids think of the dumbest things to lie about.

And really, we adults are no different, we just do it better. When we sin against God, we think of the most brilliant justifications for why we couldn’t help it. Why it wasn’t our fault. Why we couldn’t have done any differently. We do it so well that we actually convince ourselves that we’re not that bad; in the deepest parts of ourselves, we really are good people, and it’s the circumstance that made us disobey God’s clear commands.

If you read the Bible, you’ll notice two things that seem to be at odds. You’ll see that the Bible is both far more positive than we are in its view of humanity, and far more negative. It tells us that we have been created in God’s very own image. So it fights directly against everything in us that tells us we’re worthless, that we can’t do anything right, that God could never love us.

At the same time, it tells us that sin has so corrupted us that as bad as we often think we are, we’re actually worse. Jesus tells us here that everything wrong with our world doesn’t come from outside of us—not from Satan or demons or anything else. Everything wrong with us comes from inside of us.

Incredible potential, crushed by incredible evil.

It’s a doctrine we refer to as “total depravity”. Total depravity doesn’t mean that we’re all as bad as we could be, but that sin has sunk its fingers into every corner of our hearts and souls. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

That sounds terribly grim; the problem is far worse than the Pharisees or the scribes had imagined. What possible hope could we have, knowing that the human heart is responsible for every wrong, every injustice, and that we are all infected with it? Look at the list that Jesus gives of what comes out of the heart of man in v. 21-22. It’s not exhaustive, but even so, not a single person in history could look at that list and not find themselves on their somewhere. Maybe I’ve never killed anyone or cheated on my wife…but I’m definitely guilty of coveting, of deceit, of envy, of pride, of foolishness.

What hope could we possibly have, if the real problem doesn’t come from outside of us, but from inside? Jesus called people to repent, to abandon their sins and to follow him. But how do we do that? I might be able to stick at least sort of closely to a pattern of behavior, but I can’t abandon my own heart; I carry it with me wherever I go. And this heart I carry around produces all these evil things.

What hope do we have?

Well, think about it this way: why would Jesus say this to his disciples? Jesus isn’t cruel; he doesn’t ever want to just frighten people for the fun of it. What is he trying to help them see?

He’s trying to help them see what they need to be rescued from, so they can understand what kind of Rescuer Jesus is.

Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas des comportements extérieurs, mais qui visera le cœur de l’homme. Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas de réhabilité les habitudes sociales ou morales de son peuple, mais qui prendra leur péché sur lui-même et leur donnera sa justice. Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas de maquiller les cadavres que nous sommes, mais qui nous ressuscite avec lui pour faire de nous des nouvelles créations.

Our diagnosis is incredibly brutal; it’s far worse than we thought. But when we have a diagnosis, we can welcome the cure.

The Diagnosis and the Cure

Now when we read this text, our temptation will be to rush to the cure as quickly as possible. If Jesus tells these things to the disciples to help them understand what kind of Rescuer he is, then we want to immediately go to the comforting truth that Christ really has paid for our sin.

But notice that he doesn’t go there quite yet. He doesn’t tell the disciples, “You see? You all have evil hearts—but don’t worry, I’m the Rescuer. I’ll die to change those hearts and pay for your sin.” He’ll get there eventually, and they will understand all that…but for now, Jesus lets them sit in the uncomfortable truth of what their problem is.

It makes sense. The cure for our sin is given freely in Christ. Our evil hearts that produce evil ways have been punished, once and for all. Our sin was nailed to the cross with Christ.

But we saw it last week, in Isaiah 55: to accept that cure means a radical reorientation of our priorities, of our view of ourselves, of everything we are.

And I’ve seen far too many people who look at this reorientation and say, “You know, that just seems like a lot.” And they reject the cure, because they don’t fully feel the weight of the diagnosis.

We cannot make the same mistake.

So the challenge to all of us this week, after spending time meditating on this text, is to sit in these truths for as long as we need to. To meditate on the reality that the sin which condemned us came from within us, and not from outside.

And then, once we begin to feel how desperate our situation was (and perhaps is still), to marvel at the fact that it is this kind of sinner Christ came to save. He took on himself, not only our sinful acts, but our sinful hearts. He didn’t just free us from condemnation; he died to make us new creations. He didn’t just teach us lessons, he made us alive.

Sit under the weight of your sin for as long as you need to, in order to fully understand the weight of his glory. And then come to him—perhaps even for the first time. Come to him and know that, when he described the darkness of our hearts, he knew perfectly well that it was those kinds of hearts he was dying for. Let us marvel at our Savior this week, and thank him for loving the unworthy.