Defilement Part 1: By What Standard?

DEFILEMENT PART 1: BY WHAT STANDARD?

An Exposition of Mark 7:14-23

By Pastor Brian Wilbur

Date: November 15, 2020

Series: Mark: Knowing and Following God’s Son

Note: Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Before we look into God's Word this morning, I'd like to pray and ask God for his help:

Father, we come before you as those who are weak and prone to wander –  prone to walk away from the path that you have set before us. Father, I pray, this morning, that you would send the Holy Spirit to be our teacher, to take the written Word of God and open our eyes and our hearts to see it, and to receive it, and to be transformed by it. Help us, I pray, in Jesus’ name, amen.

In just a moment, I'm going to read Mark 7:1-13. Before I do that, I just want to say that both this Sunday and next Sunday we'll be looking at the theme of defilement. Now I know that if I were to ask you for your top ten list of themes that you want to hear addressed in a sermon, defilement is unlikely to show up on your list. But it's a big deal. Defilement, uncleanness, dirtiness, filthiness, spiritually speaking, is a big deal.

It's bad enough to be regarded as defiled in the sight and judgment of men. Societies will always have their outcasts, their untouchables. Even churches can have their second-class citizens – the people that the insiders look down upon. Just the other day, Charlotta and I were listening to a Focus on the Family broadcast from many years ago. And this woman was sharing her testimony. When she was a little girl growing up in South Korea in the late 1950s and early 1960s, she was defiled in the sight of the Koreans, because although she had a Korean mother, she had an American father. So she didn't fit in, and they called her a derogatory term which meant ‘alien devil’.[1] How tragic to be called an ‘alien devil’! She was defiled in their sight.

Of course, it is one thing to be defiled in the sight and judgment of men. But to be defiled in the sight and judgment of God is the absolute worst possible predicament to be in. The prophet Isaiah declared:

“Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
    or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
but your iniquities have made a separation
    between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
    so that he does not hear.
For your hands are defiled with blood
    and your fingers with iniquity;
your lips have spoken lies;
    your tongue mutters wickedness. (Isaiah 59:1-3)

They had defiled hands (defiled deeds), and they had defiled lips (defiled words), all coming out of their defiled hearts, and they were separated from God. Of course, if we actually are defiled in the sight of God, we need to know. We need to know that we are defiled in the sight of God, so that we might hear and understand and respond to his invitation to repentance.

In Isaiah 1, the Lord was confronting a whole nation that was defiled in his sight, and he called them to repentance. He said:

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
    remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
     learn to do good;
seek justice,
    correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
    plead the widow's cause.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
    they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
    they shall become like wool.” (Isaiah 1:16-18)

Either you're going to hold onto your sin, and be defiled in God's sight and not have his favor. Or your sins will have to be removed far away from you, so that you can have a reconciled and gracious relationship with the Lord God.

However, what often happens, especially in the religious world, is that very faulty notions of defilement and uncleanness pop-up, and so we must be very careful and discerning. We don't want to feel falsely defiled because we are intimidated by the Pharisee-types, as we're going to see in Mark 7. At the same time, we don't want to be the Pharisee-types who are looking down upon others and making judgments not according to God's Word, but according to our own fancy and imagination.

So with that in mind, let me go ahead and read Mark 7:1-13.

THE SCRIPTURAL TEXT

Holy Scripture says:

“¹Now 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?” 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! 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.” (Mark 7:1-13)

This is God's Word, and it is for our good.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Before we walk through these 13 verses, I just want to make a bigger picture comment about verses 1-23. If you have your Bible in front of you, you will notice that the theme of defilement continues in verse 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” (Mark 7:15) – and this theme continues right on through verse 23.

And so we could look at all of verses 1-23 in one sermon, but I think that this subject is so important, and so full of application for us, that I think it's good for us to slow down and take these 23 verses in two parts. So next week, in verses 14-23, we will look at what the Lord says about what is and what is not true defilement. But before the Lord defines that for us, he backs up as it were to the proper starting point, which is the issue of authority. The fundamental question is: by what standard? In verses 1-13, Jesus brings up the issue of authority: by what standard, by what objective standard, do you differentiate defiled from undefiled? Pure from impure? Clean from unclean? What is your standard? If your standard is wrong, then you'll never be able to appreciate the discussion about what true defilement is or isn't. You must have the right standard. You must know what God thinks about it. And so that's what we're going to focus on here in verses 1-13. Let's walk through the passage.

THE SITUATION (v. 1-2)

In verses 1-2, we discover the situation. The situation is that the Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem are having another encounter with Jesus. The Pharisees are the elite religious class, very devoted to their religious observances. The scribes were teachers of the law, the theological bigwigs. And they're gathering to Jesus for yet another encounter.

You may remember that what we've seen develop in the earlier chapters of Mark is that there's this growing antagonism between the Pharisees and the scribes on the one hand, and Jesus and his disciples on the other hand. Do you remember back in chapter 2? The scribes asked the disciples, “Why does he [Jesus] eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Mark 2:16) And then, if you go on in chapter 2, the Pharisees were critical of the disciples because they had the audacity to pluck grain on the Sabbath day. They shouldn’t be working on the Sabbath, the Pharisees thought. So they asked Jesus, “Why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) And by chapter 3 things are really devolving. In Mark 3:6, we learned that the Pharisees along with the Herodians are plotting against Jesus. And later in Mark 3, we learned that the scribes actually accused Jesus of being demon-possessed (Mark 3:22). So the relationship between Jesus and these religious professionals is not good, in fact it is antagonistic. And so, we're going to see that come up again here in Mark 7.

The Pharisees and the scribes were gathering to Jesus and they noticed that the disciples were not abiding by their purity code (i.e., the purity code of the scribes and Pharisees). You know, almost everyone has a purity code, as elaborate or as simple as it might be. Hyper-religious people tend to have more elaborate and sophisticated and detailed purity codes. And you think that by abiding by your purity code, you rightly feel a sense of righteousness and peace and divine favor. And when you look across the way and you see that someone is not playing by your rules, you wonder, ‘What's up with that?’ ‘Why aren't they playing by the rules?’ ‘Why aren't they walking in the way of purity?’ And you're prone to judge them and to criticize them. So when the scribes and Pharisees see that the disciples didn’t wash their hands before supper, they were troubled – and they are going to ask Jesus about it in verse 5.

SOME INSIGHT INTO THE PHARISEES’ PURITY CODE (v. 3-4)

But first we come to verses 3-4. What happens in verses 3-4 is that Mark backs up and he tells us about the purity code of the scribes and Pharisees. They're clearly being critical of the disciples, because the disciples aren't measuring up in their eyes. But what is the purity code of the scribes and Pharisees? Well, Mark tells us in verses 3-4:

“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.”

Sometimes when we hear the word ‘tradition’, we automatically think that it's a bad word – we assume that tradition is bad. Well, that's not really true. Bad tradition is bad, of course. But tradition itself simply refers to that which is handed down. And if that which is handed down is good and right and helpful and pleasing to God, then it's good tradition. If that which is handed down is off the mark or unhelpful, or if it compromises our walk with God or distracts us in some way, then it's bad tradition.

And what had happened with the Pharisees is that the Pharisees would have acknowledged the authority of the written scriptures of the Old Testament, but in addition to Scripture they had a growing list of dos and don'ts that had been passed down through oral tradition over the course of many centuries. And this “tradition of the elders” articulated many rules about how to behave – and a number of them had to do with ritual cleansing – for example, with the washing of the hands before you eat as well as the washing of other vessels.

Now what the Pharisees were doing is not a case of germaphobia – it is not quite like you instructing your children to wash their hands before they come to the dinner table because you want them to wash off any germs that they've gathered while they were outside. That is not what's going on here in Mark 7. What is going on involves ritual cleansing. I think that this comment from James Edwards is really helpful:

“Unclean for Pharisaic rabbis were any form of human excretion (spittle, semen, menstruation, etc.), women after childbirth, corpses, carrion [that is, dead animal flesh], creeping things, idols, and certain classes of people, such as lepers, Samaritans, and Gentiles…. Ritual washings were a means of cleansing and protecting observant Jews from the above defilements.”[2]  

So in the Pharisaic mind, if you go to the marketplace to buy food, there's a really good chance that you're going to come across one of these religious contaminants. Indeed, according to this mindset, the entire world is full of religious contaminants wherever you go. And therefore you do these rituals: you wash your hands, and you wash your pots and pans, and you wash your furniture. Again, it's not about getting away the physical germs. It's getting rid of this sense of contamination that has resulted from having had contact with a religiously and spiritually unclean thing – and thus we need to wash ourselves, and make sure that we stay squeaky clean in the sight of God, and squeaky clean in the sight of others, and squeaky clean in our own sight. And of course, the disciples weren't playing by those rules. They weren't washing their hands before they ate. And the scribes and Pharisees noticed!

THE QUESTION (v. 5)

And so we come to verse 5 where the Pharisees and scribes asked Jesus about the disciples’ non-compliance: “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

Notice the Pharisees and scribes’ authoritative standard of purity: “the tradition of the elders” – this body of oral instruction and rules that had been handed down and ought to be obeyed. They ought to be followed, in the minds of the scribes and Pharisees. Now they ask, ‘Why are your disciples not doing that? Why are they eating with defiled hands?’ That is the question. And in verses 6-13 Jesus answers this question.

THE ANSWER (v. 6-13)

An Overview of Jesus’ Instruction

The answer that Jesus gives us in verses 6-13 is full of instruction for us. Let me give you the gist of his answer, and then we'll walk through it one bit at a time. What Jesus is basically saying in these verses is this: you better make sure that your standard is the right standard – and the right standard is the Word of God.

Your human tradition that has been handed down is not the right standard. The right standard is the Word of God. And your spiritual health is revealed by your submission to the Word of God. And the tragedy is that the Pharisees and scribes were actually rejecting the Word of God. They were rejecting the instruction that God had given them, and they were replacing it with something else (“the tradition of the elders”). This is, in fact, the fundamental problem of humanity: we reject God’s authoritative Word and replace it with a different word. This is exactly what happened in the Garden of Eden, right? God gave his instruction to Adam and Eve, but the serpent came along and proposed a different word. Satan cast doubt on God’s instruction (‘Has God really said…?’), and then Satan presented his false teaching to Eve. And what did Adam and Eve do? They set aside the Word of God. They took the bait, and they walked in accordance with the devil’s teaching. This happens over and over again. It is humanity's fundamental problem. The question that you must face is: is God’s Word your standard for believing and living, or do you have some other standard?

With that overview in mind, let’s walk through the details of the answer that Jesus gives in verses 6-13.

The Problem of Hypocrisy

Jesus hits the Pharisees and scribes hard right off the bat: “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites” (v. 6). Let’s stop right there. Do you know what a hypocrite is? This word hypocrite is taken from the world of stage. And what do actors do? Actors go onto stage, and they put on a mask. They put on a costume. They pretend to be someone or something that they, in fact, are not. That's the essence of hypocrisy – to pretend to be someone or something that you actually are not.

This concept of hypocrisy takes us right into the first part of the quotation from Isaiah 29: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (v. 6; see Isaiah 29:13). In other words, you scribes and Pharisees are putting on a really good show. In terms of the lips, you guys talk a big, religious game. You guys can quote scripture, and quote tradition, and engage in argumentation. You guys sound really spiritual. And we've already seen when it comes to their deeds – like their hand-washing – that these guys appear to be preoccupied with holiness.

Now what does the average, ordinary person think when they're looking on and they see some super religious person who can talk a big religious game and who looks like they are going out of their way to be pure and holy – what does the average person think? What does it look like? It looks like, ‘Man, these guys are really devoted to God. These guys are the cream of the spiritual crop.’ That's the way it looks, right? But Jesus saw right through it. They talked a big game. They have all these rules and regulations that they're following. And yet, Jesus says that their heart is far from God.

So learn this lesson: if your religious devotion is not flowing out of a heart for God, a heart that is near God, a heart that is in fellowship with God – if your religious devotion is not flowing out of a heart for God, then you're completely missing the point. All you're doing is putting on a good show. And God says your worship is a sham: “in vain do they worship me” (v. 7). It looks like you care about God. But in fact, you don't care about God at all. You're making all this noise. If you want to see a tragic picture of this kind of hypocrisy, you should read Isaiah 1. People are gathering together in the sanctuary and they're bringing their offerings and they're making their sacrifices and they're speaking these prayers, but God basically says to them in Isaiah 1 – I wish y'all would just go home, and shut the doors to this sanctuary, because this is obnoxious in my sight (see Isaiah 1:10-15).

Do you remember what we've been learning – what Pete has been trying to drive home in the two messages that he preached? What is the greatest commandment in the law? To “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). In other words, that's just another way of saying that the most basic instruction to us in the Word of God is for us to have a heart that is near God.

How did the prophet Micah describe the truly righteous life? This way: doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God (see Micah 6:8). That's where it's at. Walking humbly with your God, loving him with all your being, having a heart that is near him and in fellowship with him and following him. And so, for all of their religiosity, for all of their spiritual theatrics, the Pharisees and scribes were essentially nothing in the sight of God with respect to the worship that they were offering. Their worship was in vain. It was worthless in his sight.

Rejecting and Replacing God’s Word

And here's the thing: if your heart is far from God, not only will your worship be a sham, but you will always replace his Word with another word. Jesus hits this theme four times in verses 7-13:

• Verse 7: “in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

• Verse 8: “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

• Verse 9: “You… [reject] the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”

• Verse 13: “thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.”

So Jesus hits this hard four times in just this small space of verses. And it really makes sense, doesn't it? If you don't have a heart for someone, then you really don't care about what they say. If you have a heart for another person, whether that person is God or whether that person is another human being, if you really have a heart for that person and you love that person, then you will pause and listen and care about what they say. But if you do not have a heart for God, if you do not love the Lord God, then you really don't care what he says. So, what are you going to do? You're going to leave his Word behind and you're going to replace it with another word.

Now, if you're like the hyper-religious scribes and Pharisees, what you will do is, instead of having a tender heart for the Word of God, you will pile up the religious rules. You will pile up the dos and the don’ts, you will pile up the boxes that you can check off, so that you look good in your sight and in the sight of others who share your outlook. That's the ultra-religious way of rejecting the Word of God. There's also an irreligious way of rejecting the Word of God, and you might call it ‘cheap grace’ – the mistaken notion that because God is gracious, he really doesn't care what I do. That’s convenient – so I'll just do whatever I want to do, and I'll just do my own thing. The Pharisees, of course, were the hyper-religious type. They replaced God's Word with their elaborate religious traditions. Other people replace God's Word with simply their own preferences, their own selfish desires. And again, you have to ask yourself: where are you?

A Specific Example of Rejecting and Replacing God’s Word

So, let's look at the specific example of Pharisaical error that Jesus talks about in verses 10-13. Remember the context: what Jesus is saying in verse 7, where it says that the Pharisees are “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men”, is that the doctrines and teachings that you really value and that you love to think about and speak about and promote and put into practice, the doctrines that you cherish that way, are not the commandments of God. They should be, but they're not. The doctrines that you cherish and that you love to talk about and that you love to promote are the commandments of men. You should always ask of any doctrine: Is this something that God has said, or is this just something that man made up?

Then, in verse 9, Jesus says, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.” “You have a fine way” – in other words, you are good at this, you are really skillful, you are clever, you are accomplished at rejecting the Word of God and replacing it with your tradition. That’s not a compliment! And to drive the point home, Jesus gives a very particular example starting in verse 10.

In verse 10, Jesus quotes God’s holy Word, which was given through Moses and written down in the book of Exodus: “For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’” Jesus is quoting two passages – Exodus 20:12 and Exodus 21:17. This is the Word of God! This is “the commandment of God”! God calls us to honor, love, and serve our father and our mother. So verse 10 highlights what Scripture says, that is, what God says.

But in verse 11, Jesus draws attention to the fact that the scribes and Pharisees “say” something else: “But you say”. Do you see the flow of thought? “For Moses [speaking on God’s behalf] said…. But you say [something else].” This isn’t good! It is not good to say something contradictory to what God has said. If God has said something, then our responsibility is to humbly listen and then to act and speak in ways that are faithful to God’s Word. But the Pharisees have gotten off track. What do the scribes and Pharisees say? Verses 11-13 say:

“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.”

What is going on here? What is this “Corban” situation? It's admittedly a little bit difficult to understand, but I hope I can get you at least in the ballpark of understanding. So the idea here of Corban is that you might take an oath or make a promise to, at some future time, give some of your assets to the temple, to the temple treasury. The commentator James Edwards compares it “to the concept of deferred giving.”[3] I think that deferred giving is a really good way to understand Corban – the idea that I have this piece of property, it is worth a certain amount of money, and I'm going to keep it in my possession for now, I'm going to keep it under my control and use for now, but I have willed that when I die the property will go to the temple treasury and enrich what's going on in the temple.

Now this oath of Corban could take place in a couple different ways. Some people totally misused Corban, just as a way around the call to help people. Think about it: if you don't have a heart for God, and if you really don't love people, then you really don't want to do loving things for people – and thus you try to find loopholes. So, some people would just take the oath to get out of helping someone – as in, ‘Sorry, Dad and Mom, I have devoted that property to the Lord and I am unable to utilize the value and worth of that property in order to help you as you are aging and weakening and need help. Sorry!’ all uttered with pathetic hypocrisy. That would be one example of doing Corban.

But here's another example of how Corban could work, which is actually the one that Jesus envisions here, because Jesus isn't primarily being hard on the person who pledged their property to the temple. Instead Jesus is really being hard on the scribes and Pharisees for not letting the man get out of his oath. Do you see? Do you see what's going on in verse 12? Jesus says, ‘you’ – speaking to the scribes and Pharisees – ‘you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother’. If he's pledged that property or that money, if he's promised it on oath, then you – you scribes and Pharisees – you do not let him get out of his oath. You make him keep his oath, even though this is all just human tradition. God has said to care for your father and your mother, but that carries no weight with you. What carries weight with you is this: he pledged this property to the temple. That's really good for the temple treasury! The scribes and Pharisees say that you can't break your oath – you can’t break your oath regarding a man-made rule in order to be faithful to a God-given command. And thus Corban effectively nullified the Word of God. Corban made God’s commandment of no effect. So what had the ascendancy was the tradition: the scribes and Pharisees esteemed their own tradition more highly than God’s Word! What a tragedy!

And Many Such Things…

Jesus concludes by saying: “And many such things you do.” (v. 13) In other words, Corban was just one example of the Pharisees’ misguided religiosity. Indeed, I want you to notice a theme in these “many such things you do”. The Pharisaic mindset was like this: never let mercy get in the way of your religious observances. That was their mindset.

The greatest commandment is to love the Lord with your whole being to have a heart that is near God. And the next greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. In the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments), what's the first commandment that pertains to loving your neighbor? It's this one in Exodus 20:12 – “Honor your father and your mother.”[4] But the Pharisees weren’t on board with true love for neighbor, as evidenced by their dismissal of this and other commandments.

If you think about the other games that the Pharisees played – were they going to go to the house of Levi, the tax collector, where there were all these tax collectors and sinners and prostitutes and spiritual nobodies hanging out? Were they going to go to that house and love those people and try to bring those people into the way of the Lord? Were they going to do that? No, because they had to keep their distance from such people: never let mercy get in the way of your religious purity! (See Mark 2:13-17)

And so what if this dear family or this group of disciples is hungry on the Sabbath day. Tough it out. Don't pluck grain. We're not going to be kind-hearted and gracious to you and let you gather needed food on the Sabbath: never let mercy get in the way of strictly adhering to your religious purity code!(See Mark 2:23-28)

Or how about the how about the man in the parable who fell among thieves on his way down to Jericho (Luke 10:29-37)? The priest saw the man, but the priest “passed by on the other side” (Luke 10:31). The Levite saw the man, but the Levite also “passed by on the other side” (Luke 10:32).

Do you see? Do you understand? All of these religious purity rules had the practical effect of prioritizing formal religious observances and formal religious purity over practical acts of kindness and mercy.

But the Lord Jesus taught us a better way – the good and right way. “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13) “Honor your father and your mother.” Love the tax collectors and prostitutes. Have a heart for the people who are hungry on a Sabbath day. Care for the man who's fallen half-dead among thieves.

So learn this very important lesson from our passage: if your religious devotion prioritizes formal sacrifices over practical acts of love, then you are out of step with God's Word. 

This lesson echoes exactly what the Lord was saying in Isaiah 1. After the Lord tells these hypocritical worshipers to close the door to the sanctuary and go home, what does he tell them to do? He tells them, among other things, to learn to care for orphans and widows (Isaiah 1:17). Start there. Love somebody. Lay down your life and your resources in order to help family members, friends, relatives, neighbors, enemies. Do something for somebody, with a heart of love in it.

Simple or Complicated?

Let me ask you a question: Is your understanding of the Christian life simple or complicated? For the scribes and Pharisees, religion was very complicated. You had to have an extensive rule book in front of you, so that you would know how to act in every situation. And you better follow it, or they're going to come investigate. But you know what? Over and over again, we see that the way of Jesus is actually very simple. It's very simple: have a heart that is near God! And having a heart that is near God, listen to him. In other words, this is not some just kind of subjective feeling of being near God ­– this nearness to God is demonstrated in listening to him. We pay attention to what the Lord says – and what he says over and over and over again is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). In other words, love the Lord with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. It's very simple. So what about you? Is your understanding of the Christian life that it is complicated? Or that it is simple, and therefore very freeing?

FOLLOWING JESUS

A couple more things before we close. First, look to Jesus. As Jesus neared the end of his earthly life, he remembered his father and his mother. First, he remembered his heavenly Father as he wrestled with this supreme act of sacrificial love that he was about to undergo on the cross. He wrestled with his heavenly Father and he prayed: “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). He had a heart for his Father! And when he was hanging on the cross, he remembered his physical and earthly mother. From the cross, Jesus said to his mother: “Woman, behold, your son!” (John 19:26) thus directing her attention to his disciple John. Then Jesus said to John: “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27) thus directing his attention to Jesus’ mother. Jesus was thinking about his mother while he was dying on the cross, and he entrusted her care to John. If you want to see love for God and love for neighbor perfectly embodied without any flaws, then I urge you to study carefully the life of Jesus, because he was always in the very center of the will of God.

Second, remember the standard! Brothers and sisters, true spirituality – a healthy spiritual life – is the heart’s glad submission to the right standard, and the right standard is the Word of God. That’s what Jesus did all the time! And that’s what he calls us to do. In verse 5, the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus a question – and I'm going to say it again because I'm going to turn it around and ask you a different question. In verse 5 they asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” That was their question to Jesus. But do you know what Jesus’ question would be to those of us who profess to be his disciples? Well, here’s one question Jesus did ask:

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46)

It's not a big deal to not walk according to the tradition of the elders. But it is a very big deal to not walk according to the instructions of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “If you love, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15)

I conclude with words from the musical group 4Him:

“Draw back your bow, let love go

Shoot straight for the heart

With all of your might, set your sight

Take aim from the start

To love God, love people

That's the center of the mark”[5]

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would peel away all the layers of unhelpful religiosity that is represented in this room, that is represented in my life, and that is represented in anyone who has gathered here this morning. We want to hit the center of the mark, and we know that we cannot do that in our own strength, we cannot do that in our own wisdom. We pray that your Holy Spirit would come in a mighty and powerful way, peel away the layers of religiosity, and fill our hearts with love – the love of God, the love of neighbor, the love of parents, the love of children, the love of those on the fringe. Fill us, O Lord God, with the love of Christ, in whose name I pray, amen.

Finally, I invite you to stand to receive the benediction:

Brothers and sisters, embrace the simplicity of following Jesus; be near your Lord; listen to his Word; walk in the way of love; go in His peace.

ENDNOTES

[1] For Stephanie Fast’s testimony, see the two-part “Healing Childhood Traumas”. Available online from Focus on the Family:    https://www.focusonthefamily.com/episodes/broadcast/healing-childhood-traumas-part-1-of-2/ and https://www.focusonthefamily.com/episodes/broadcast/healing-childhood-traumas-part-2-of-2/.

[2] James R. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark (The Pillar New Testament Commentary). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002: p. 205.

[3] James R. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark (The Pillar New Testament Commentary). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002: p. 210.

[4] Perhaps it would be better to say that the command to honor father and mother is the first command that is directly focused on love for neighbor. But it should be noted that the Sabbath command, which precedes the command to honor father and mother, entails love for neighbor in that the head of household must see to it that the other members of his household participate in Sabbath Day rest. See Exodus 20:8-11.

[5] 4Him, “The Center of the Mark.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

James R. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark (The Pillar New Testament Commentary). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark (The New International Commentary on the New Testament). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974.

Eckhard J. Schnabel, Mark (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries Vol. 2). Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017.

James W. Voelz, Mark 1:1–8:26 (Concordia Commentary). St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013.

Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.