Sermon: What’s In Your Heart? (Part 2)
February 16th, 2020 Rev. Betsy Perkins
First Baptist Church, Delavan WI
Scripture passage: Mark 7:1-23, Psalm 51
Have you ever had the experience of entering a fast food restaurant, and if you have been on the road for a while, your first stop is the restroom, not the food counter. When you walk in, one of the employees is exiting a stall and proceeds directly out the door, bypassing the sink, bypassing the soap and water. It’s disturbing, but you hope the worker is finishing a shift and heading home. However, after you do what you went in there to do, wash your hands and go out to the counter, there is the employee, standing at the register with a smile and asking “Can I take your order?” And what is going through your mind? Eeeww! No!
That may not be exactly how the Jewish leaders from Jerusalem were feeling when they saw some of Jesus’ disciples not washing their hands in the proper way before they ate, but it helps us begin to enter into the situation that Mark is relating. Hand-washing is a good thing! Medical science has proved that hand-washing is the most important thing you can do to keep yourself from getting sick. So why does Jesus jump down their throats with Isaiah’s prophesy about the hypocrisy of people who worship with hearts far from God, teaching “merely human rules”, when washing hands is a pretty good human rule!
Jewish Law
As he tells this story, Mark takes a moment to explain some of the Jewish laws that relate to being clean/unclean, or pure/defiled. He is clearly writing his gospel for people who are not familiar with the rules, just like we aren’t. So let us also take moment to review the context of this encounter. Mark 6 ends with this verse: “Everywhere Jesus went, to villages, towns, or farms, people would take those who were sick to the market places and beg Jesus to let them at least touch the edge of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.” Word is spreading about Jesus, about the miracles, about his preaching – healing and wholeness is breaking out wherever he goes. So some Pharisees and religious lawyers come from Jerusalem, the Jewish capitol, to check him out. Like the CDC sending out their experts to check on a reported outbreak, or the Health department sending out an inspector.
Only it is not sanitation law that they are concerned about, it is religious law: the Law of God given to Moses, plus all the many rules and traditions adopted since then as generations of God’s people have tried to work out the details of how to follow God’s Law in the various situations that Moses doesn’t specifically mentioned. In this nation we have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then we have volumes of case law and local laws developed as people try to apply the broad guide to particular situations and communities.
So too, at Jesus’ time, a wide variety of religious laws have been added to the Ten Commandments. These are what the Pharisees refer to as “the tradition of the elders” and what Jesus refers to as “human teachings.” These teachings and traditions vary from place to place. All Jesus’ disciples are Jews, so it is likely that they follow some kind of hand-washing tradition, yet they may not have washed their hands exactly the way that the Pharisees and lawyers from Jerusalem do it.
When I was in Nursing School, I took a Nurses’ Aide exam in order to get a summer job in a Nursing Home. One component of the exam was washing hands. I failed. I failed hand-washing, and having failed hand-washing, I failed the whole exam. The main issue was that I didn’t leave the water running while I dried my hands, to then use the paper towel to turn off the faucet. However, in my experience growing up in India, water was scarce. In fact, at certain times of the year it was so scarce that we were taught to shower by turning the water on to get wet, turning it off while you lathered up, then turning it on again to rinse off. I placed a high value on not wasting water, so in that exam I turned off the faucet with my elbow before drying my hands. Of course, that was not good enough for the nurse giving the exam – rules were rules. But here’s the thing – in my nursing school, the elbow technique was acceptable. I had not been taught the same hand-washing rules that were used to judge me on that exam. So perhaps it was not really my fault, but the fault of my nursing instructors. And that is part of the underlying message in this story of confrontation over hand-washing in Mark 7. The Pharisees are implying that the problem is not so much the behavior of the disciples, but the failure of Jesus’ teaching.
The Spirit of the Law
So Jesus doesn’t immediately answer their question, rather he addresses the deeper issue at play. The point of these various purity rules was to set oneself apart for God. God is holy, and therefore, we begin to comprehend God’s holiness by doing things to try to make ourselves acceptable, clean and holy, in order to come into God’s presence –even if those things are merely symbolic.
In the written law of the Old Testament, the book of Exodus contains the only reference to hand-washing. The priests are required to wash their hands (and feet) before putting an offering on the altar of the temple (Ex.30:18-21, 40:31). Over the centuries, human traditions had extended that law into the homes of all Jews, to eating, to pots and pans, etc. The spirit of the purity laws was to serve as a reminder that God was holy and we should try to live lives reflecting that holiness. The letter of their purity laws, dictated specific things that made a person dirty/defiled, and having been defiled by something in the world, in the marketplace, whereever, a person would be unable join in worship or participate in the community until they had taken steps to be clean again.
The Pharisees have lost sight of the spirit of the law as they try to catch Jesus in an infraction of the letter of the law. There are many ways in which they are doing this, apparently, but Jesus gives one example of how they manipulate the rules about money pledged to the temple, to God, to keep people from using those funds to help their parents when a need arises. From other stories we know that the religious leaders would give small handouts to widows and orphans as a way of keeping God’s law about caring for the poor, so they could then let themselves off the hook for not doing more to address their poverty and vulnerability. They would cheat people in the marketplace with inaccurate scales and unfair wages on weekdays, but justify it by not cheating anyone on the Sabbath, the Holy Day.
Unfortunately, it’s not just Pharisees that do this. At the last Homeless Shelter meeting we heard from a woman who works with the county housing department, frustrated about how regulations keep many who need the funds from getting them. Did you know that a person needs to provide proof of homelessness? Submit evidence that they did indeed sleep in their car or on the street for 30 consecutive days before they are eligible for assistance? Another example is the problem of massive student debt. Congress set aside grants for student loan forgiveness, yet the rules and regulations are so convoluted that less than half of 1% of all applicants have qualified! But we get to pat ourselves on the backs as if by setting aside the funds we have solved the problem.
A Heart Condition
After calling out the hypocrisy of following the letter of the law while defeating the spirit of the law and the higher Law of God, Jesus then addresses everyone. He tells the whole crowd that what makes a person unclean, unholy, goes beyond the dinner table. What defiles us, what keeps us from being in God’s presence, what keeps us from participating with the community, is not what we eat or how we eat it, it is not what we touch or who we hang out with, it is not where we live or where we go. Jesus is clear: the illness is real, but it’s not coming from where you think it’s coming from. It’s not something contagious you can catch, it is actually already within you.
It’s not an infection, it’s a heart problem! A genetic heart condition that affects all humanity. I am reminded of the famous line in the Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy, and he is us! I think that is why Jesus is no longer talking just to the religious lawyers but is talking to the whole crowd. Jesus is not just warning about evil people out there, but the condition of evil within each and every human being. Of course humanity is made in God’s image, so there is the capacity for goodness in our hearts, the capacity for love. Yet we have all been born with a heart condition, and that, Jesus says, is the real danger separating us from God and from one another. In the book we are studying on Tuesday evenings, The Prodigal God, Tim Keller relates a story where a newspaper posed the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” A Catholic theologian, submitted this letter in reply: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton.
So if we are going to take Jesus seriously when he says, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this,” we must stop and consider what is coming out of our hearts. What are the evil thoughts defiling me? What are the hypocritical ways in which we follow the letter of the law but defeat the spirit of the Law? Was it only me, or did it make anyone else uncomfortable that in this day of empowering women and recognizing of the dangers of pornography, that the Superbowl halftime show danced on that fine line? Or does it ever bother you that we teach our children not to lie or call people names, but that we allow our politicians to do both without consequence? Do we pick and choose which of God’s Laws to follow?
Jesus does not throw out God’s Laws or say they don’t matter anymore, rather he differentiates between God’s law and human law. As Jesus will say to another crowd, God’s whole law can be summed up in just 2 commands: love God and love your neighbor. When we look closely at the kinds of evil thoughts Jesus lists in verses 21-22, they all either break one of the Ten Commandments or are unloving and hurtful to others. Here is the list from The Message translation: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness – all these are the vomit from the heart. That’s the source of your pollution!”
Wash Your Heart!
So what can we do about it? Well, all those old rules about washing hands and keeping pure were really just a stop-gap measure. They were road signs pointing the way to the destination; that destination is Jesus. Jesus came to make people truly clean in a way that the old laws never could. That’s why Jesus and his disciples could eat with sinners, hang out with tax collector scum, he could touch lepers and preach to pig farmers, and drink water from a Samaritan women’s bucket. Because what defiles us is not what’s out there but our own selves, and what cleanses us spiritually is not washing our hands but washing our hearts!
Jesus came teaching the way of repentance and opening the way to forgiveness. In this, our Catholic brothers and sisters follow practices that we, as Protestants, have at times neglected: the practice of Confession and Absolution. Jesus tells his disciples that the Holy Spirit is the physician who opens our hearts and enables us to recognize when our heart condition is acting up. We can use list of evil thoughts Jesus gives as a tool to check our hearts. Then, we are to confess every shortcoming, every dirty thought, to God in prayer. In 1 John 1, it says, “If we are living in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from every sin. If we claim to be without sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all we’ve done wrong.” (1Jn.1:7-9)
Washing hands is not a one-and-done; we wash them again and again, everyday. So too with our hearts – we confess and repent again and again. Let us wash our hearts now, by praying together the prayer of confession that David wrote: Psalm 51.
God has made you clean! Through Jesus your heart is washed and you are forgiven!
Closing Song: “Grace Greater Than Our Sins” # 472
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