“Journey to the Cross: Purity”

Scripture: Mark 7:1-23

As we follow Jesus on his Journey to the Cross, we see his ministry beginning to unfold. He seeks out a man who is filled with a legion of demons, and who is ostracized by the people of his village. A man comes to Jesus in faith, but not for his own healing, but for his young daughter who is dying. Jesus then encounters a woman who has been plagued with a hemorrhage for many years, and, unable to ask for his healing and in a desperate demonstration of faith, she touches Jesus’ clothes. Jesus heals all three of them.
The people of Nazareth wouldn’t believe, and his power is limited to only a few minor miracles. These three, though, are healed perfectly and completely in the power of faith. But Jesus’ ministry wasn’t only about healing. His primary mission to earth is to teach us that he is the true and only way to salvation, which, of course, is our ultimate healing from sin. And today we see this other branch of his mission, which is in his teaching.

Read Mark 7:1-5

When the teaching flies in the face of tradition, it always causes problems.

Pastor and author Mike Cope writes:
My wife and I recently had a college student and the girl he was dating over to our house for lunch on a Sunday. As we started to relax, I said, “Why don't you take your coat off?” I'd already taken off my tie and coat.
The young man kind of hem-hawed around, however, as if he didn't want to do it. Finally, he got me off in a corner and said, reminding me of an old trick I knew well when I was in college, “The only parts of my shirt I ironed were the cuffs and the collar.” He had pressed just the parts that showed. The rest of the shirt looked as if he had ironed it with a weedeater!
That was the way of the Pharisees: the part people could see looked great, but a weedeater appeared to have done the ironing on the inside.
--Mike Cope, “Righteousness Inside Out”, (Nashville, Tenn.: Christian Communications, 1988), 26.

When Jesus saw the ragged outside of people, he healed them. When he saw the raggedness of their heart and spirit, he forgave them. The Pharisees wouldn’t confess to either one. For them, the outside was an indication of the inside – if you were sick, or crippled, or lame, that meant that you were sinful. If you looked good on the outside, it meant that you were righteous. If you didn’t, you weren’t!
It seems that the learned of Israel had a major disconnect with the reality of faith, at least that which Jesus represented, but that never seemed to deter them. For the Pharisees, it was all about what you did and how you appeared that mattered. If you did everything according to their interpretation of Torah, you were in! If not, you were out.

And the Pharisees are still alive and well in the year 2013. Do you know anyone who is like that? That if you don’t do everything just right, you are a waste? If you don’t pray the way they do, if the proper hymns aren’t sung, if the parishioners aren’t wearing the right clothes, if the liturgy isn’t the same as they remember when they were growing up, well, something is amiss, and they will be the first to tell you about it. I don’t see too much of this in our churches, but every church is going to have some, and some pastors talk about this all the time, and it drives them to distraction! Their frustration drives me to distraction! What can we do about it?

Read Mark 7:6-13

Jesus knew what to do about the ones who were only holy on the outside – he told them what was true. “You have let go of the commandments of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” (v. 8) Now, I don’t want anyone to think that I’m advocating for the concept of rigid conformity. Jesus never did, and neither do I. That’s what got Israel into trouble in the first place. Order must still hold some importance in our lives, but to live it to the point that it damages our Christian witness is dangerous.
The Lord tells them that they nullify the word of God by their traditions. The United Methodist Church Discipline speaks of “The Wesleyan Quadrilateral”. John Wesley felt that there were 4 aspects to our understanding and the living out of a faithful Christian witness. He “believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illuminated by tradition, vivified [to make alive] in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.” (The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2012, pg 80) Unfortunately, many today take the stand that all 4 of these are equal, and that if scripture doesn’t seem to meet up with the others, then it must by lacking and must be corrected. Jesus would passionately disagree.

The truth and ways of God must always be first, and if our traditions and our experience, and our reason supports it, that is good. But when we begin to let the mortal things of earth take precedence, then we need to rethink our position.

Read Mark 7:14-23

Jesus’ teaching ministry, for some, was as difficult to accept as his healing ministry. But he never wavered in presenting the truth of God to whoever would hear him. Sometimes people listened to learn from him, and others listened to gain ammunition to condemn him. Either way, Jesus saw them all as his reason to teach and heal and proclaim and love. And he explains to the crowd, including the Pharisees, why cleanliness is a moral issue, and not a ritualistic one. He was, in essence, telling them that you can wash your body 50 times a day, but if your heart is a cesspool, you haven’t got a chance.

Everything that Jesus would teach would center on this concept of morality versus ritual. He told the Pharisees that the lack of washing your hands before you eat doesn’t make you a sinner, but that there were many other things, many of them attitudes that these learned leaders lived with daily, that did condemn you. Let’s think about some of these “heart failures” for a moment.

How about “evil thoughts” – any thought that goes against one of God’s commands; “greed” – the desire to have more than you really need; “envy” – the desire to have something that someone else has, which is a specific form of greed; “malice” – hatred for another person; “arrogance” – the attitude that you are better than another person.
How about “lewdness” – vulgarity, or using the Lord’s name in vain; “slander” – an intentional lie to demean another person; “deceit” – a deceptive act intended to tear another person down. All of these are also addressed in the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), but apparently people were still falling short on them; “theft” – #8, “you shall not steal, #6, murder – “you shall not murder” - #7, Adultery – “you shall not commit adultery.”. These had been spelled out very clearly ever since the exodus – 1,200 years before Jesus, and they still didn’t get it, and we still don’t get it.
And sexual immorality – the others were fairly narrowly defined, but this one was about as broad as any condemnation that Jesus would ever offer, and he doesn’t grant any exceptions. This one covered nearly every sexual practice that the Romans and Greeks were know for – everything from bestiality to incest to orgies to homosexuality to extramarital affairs to multiple partners and the list could go on and on. In one sentence - in almost one breath - Jesus told the people of Judah that it would behoove them not to imitate the ways that the people of the world lived, that they were being held to a higher standard. And the Pharisees were worried about washing their hands before eating?

Every one of these acts make us unclean, every one disrupts our quest for Christian purity, to be Christ-like. These commandments weren’t given only for Judah in the first century – they are for the people of all time. To paraphrase Jesus – “we have set aside the commands of God and are holding on tightly to our own, precious understandings and ways.” We don’t get to define our relationship with the Lord – he and only he gets to do that. We don’t get to offer God our covenantal relationship – he and only he gets to do that. We don’t get to define which things make us unclean, and which ones make us righteous – God and God alone does that.
Jesus’ teachings were never easy to take, and they were never intended to be. But when we try to follow, and even when we fail, the Lord is always with us, ready to pick us up, dust us off, and begin the journey with and for us all over again. His journey to Jerusalem, and his appointment, with the cross would be a long and difficult road to travel, but he never slowed and he never veered off the way that would take him to Calvary.
Can we do any less for him?