St. Mark 7:14-23
Divine Service
Pentecost 13 (Proper 17) 

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

How many of you have dealt with Orthodox Jews?  I mean the ones who still follow the strict guidelines of the Old Testament law, and the restrictions of the various traditions.  Did you know that meat and dairy must be served on separate dishes?  Meat – the flesh of birds and mammals – cannot be eaten with dairy.  Fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables and grains can be eaten together with either meat or dairy!  An egg that contains a blood spot must be thrown away, not eaten, because the Torah prohibits consumption of blood.  The meat of the some animals, including the pig, is completely forbidden – because “it has a split hoof completely divided, [it] does not chew the cud; it is unclean!” (Lev 11:7)  Some of these dietary restrictions that the Orthodox Jews follow come directly from the Old Testament; some are tradition; some are extrapolations of what the ancient Laws of the Torah say. 

These restrictions are not a modern invention.  Most of them existed at the time of Christ.  That was a part of what our lesson last week dealt with, as the Pharisees berated Jesus and His disciples for not washing their hands before eating.  These dietary restrictions were, and are, among the most significant things that make a Jew Jewish.  Without these, the Jew becomes something else – they no longer are doing those things that made them unique: a Jew.  Even though the origin of many of these rules that the Pharisees were following came from God,

Jesus condemns the hypocrisy of the Pharisees because it exalts man, not God.

Each culture has something that it believes makes it unique.  And it seems like they will fight to keep that uniqueness.  We can look into history, and see that the early Christians were persecuted and killed because they were neither Jews nor Roman pagans.  And the struggle continues today.  We look to the Middle East and we see the animosity between the Shiite and Sunni Muslims.  We see the open warfare between the Jewish nation of Israel and their Muslim neighbors.  The island of Ireland continues to have violence between the Catholic and Protestant factions.  Even in the United States, we have a variety of traditions that bring conflict and ridicule between the various groups – note how the Amish struggle to maintain their uniqueness.

The other guys are all judged as filth because of something on their outside.  But it is those who hate, who discriminate, who are filthy.  For “Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean'.”  Look at how backwards it seems to be. We look at things on the outside of a person—skin color, their dress, their culture, their language, and we call the outside dirty.  Jesus tells us different.  Jesus tells us that things on the outside do not make a person dirty, do not make a person someone to be distrusted or hated.  Rather, says Jesus, a person is dirty because of what comes out from inside them.

And what kind of dirty things come out of us?  The dirty things that are “within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.”  Inside us are murder, stealing, not being faithful to your partner, lying to them, and pride and folly, being mean, uncaring, boasting about being better than the other guy, and the attitude of thinking we can insult anyone we want to.  A person’s wealth is outside of them; yet too often we will look down on those who have no wealth and pretend they do not exist and simply allow them starve to death. 

But there is a filth even dirtier than all that stuff that comes OUT of us.  Because even deeper inside us, deep in our hearts, there is our distrust of Jesus and our distrust of God.  We saw in our lesson last week that that distrust is visible in the Pharisees as they point out to Jesus that his disciples are eating with defiled hands.  Something dirty is on their hands!  Shocking.  It’s not that the disciples’ hands are dirty from everyday activities.  It’s that their hands are not pure, not holy, not ritually cleansed from the chance of having touched unholy people—the poor, the sick, the unemployed, or anyone who wasn’t Jewish, who wasn’t of the same ethnic people as they were; or unclean animals the pig, the coney, the rabbit or the camel.  To the Pharisees, Jesus was not holy; therefore, and nothing unholy could make something holy to God, particularly the disciples.

We do not trust Jesus to make us holy to God either.  We are concerned about looking good, being respected, earning not only our pay but also a raise, and we like to make other people look worse than us.  And we expect things like this to impress God.  Do we think so little of God that we think God is going to be impressed with how we look on the outside?  God has made galaxies of billions of stars, so why would God think our clothes and our money are that important?  God has made us – he knows our most inmost parts – and we expect to impress Him!?!?  But we keep insisting that appearances are important to God.  We keep distrusting Jesus to do it for us. 

We look to the rituals and the rules that we have made for ourselves and we judge our worthiness before God by them.  We show up for church every Sunday, and think that that purifies our heart.  We make sure that we are here for communion – thinking that that will rinse out the stains from our heart.  We remember to say grace at every meal – usually – and we think that this food that we have asked God to bless will purify us.  These are things of this world, and will remain in this world when we are no longer in it, even when they are the things commanded of us by God!  We cannot add to our purity – all of those things that we do are as unholy as we are!

Still, these are the things that are expected of man by God.  When we do them simply in a ritual fashion, we are doing EXACTLY the same thing that the Pharisees did.  When we think that just the act itself is sufficient, we make it OUR act, not God coming to us, and thereby it becomes worthless before God.  We continually attempt to make OURSELVES acceptable before God.  We do NOT have that power.  We are filthy – unholy – incapable of doing ANY good – condemned by our very existence as sinful human beings.  For we know that “No one is good – except God alone.” (Mark 10:18b)  We cannot raise ourselves to be acceptable before God for we are poor, miserable sinners who are desperately in need of forgiveness.  We, like the Pharisees, would prefer to see Jesus on the cross as simply a poor condemned criminal, not as our God giving His life so that we can be clean.  We would rather look to ourselves as our salvation, rather than someone who was hung on a cross between two thieves.  We want to continue to insist that we are clean and good.

But God has raised that dirty, filthy, unclean, unholy Jesus from the dead!  God has declared that dirty, filthy, unclean Jesus to be his new definition of holiness and goodness and life!  Jesus is holy and good!  Jesus, killed on a cross, is God’s most holy treasure.  For God has raised Jesus up to sit him at his right hand and to put all things under his feet.  The good news is that Jesus gives us his holiness.  He gives us his very crucified self so that God may also see us to be the same as Jesus and so be God’s holiest treasure, too, just like Jesus.  Our faith in Jesus that has been given us, our trust that Jesus died for us and has been raised for us, that faith within us is what God calls holy.

With Christ in us, then there comes out of us that which is good and holy from Christ—the good things of forgiveness and love and mercy and kindness and helpfulness and respect for others, even those we consider to be different than us.  Now, instead of stealing coming from our heart, our heart gives help; instead of pride that makes us look down on others, we have Christ’s mercy come from our hearts.  Instead of greed, we now have generosity.  Instead of slander, we have words of kindness come from our hearts.  Instead of trivial things mattering more to us than the life of another, out of our heart now comes love for one another.  For Christ is now our heart.  Christ is now our way of living.  Christ is now how we treat others who are different than us, because Christ is God’s greatest person, the one God raised from the dead.  We may have wanted to ignore that dirty person named Jesus, but God has made that dirty person on the cross the best there is.  God has made him to be our goodness and our eternal life.  Yes, the crucified, beaten, dirty Jesus, is our spotlessness before God. 

And, yes, we should come to church every Sunday – to hear the Word of God and not despise preaching and the Word.  But that is not what makes us holy.  Yes, we should come to the Lord’s Supper, to partake in the body and blood of our Lord and Savior.  But this does not rinse all of the stains from our heart.  And we should say grace before meals – in fact we should, as Paul told the Thessalonians, “Be joyful always; pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)  Through the Word, prayer, and the sacraments God comes to us and is exalted!  And in God coming to us we become holy.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.

+ SDG +

Sermons | Sermon Archives