Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person
I want to preach mostly about this morning’s Gospel lesson, but before I do, I think something from the letter of James is the perfect way to begin. “If any think they are religious,” James warns, “and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. These two things mark true religion. In the Bible, widows and orphans are a kind of symbol. Without family and in a culture that did not much value women and children, they were usually precarious, vulnerable. They represent the poorest people, the desperate people, the people who don’t have anyone else to rely on except themselves and God. Well, says James, if you are God’s people, then you had better show it by caring for them, too! You’d better do the good things that God calls us to do.
That’s the first half of true religion, and it is not always easy. But the second half is harder still: keep yourself unstained by the world. Don’t just do the good things; avoid the bad ones! Keep yourself from sin. If you look around the world, or even around this community, you will notice this is very difficult! There are lots of things in the world that tempt us into sin. Think about a few. There are, for example, so many temptations about what to do with our time, money, and attention- for example, making more money, so that we forget about God or about those widows and orphans. There are also people who enrage us, who argue with us, who hurt us- they tempt us to respond with hatred or anger or to hold on to a grudge. And there are also evils and tragedies that tempt us into despair. We all have problem people or problem things in our lives, and we sometimes think (or at least I do), “if only that person would go away,” or “if only that thing would get fixed.” In a world so full of these problems, these sources of temptation and sin, how are we to keep ourselves unstained?
Well, our Gospel reading tells of an argument about just this question: how to keep unstained from a corrupt world, how to follow God and avoid sin in a sinful world. On the one side are a group of Jews from the group known as Pharisees, and on the other is Jesus. Now it’s easy to immediately side with Jesus in these arguments because, well, he’s Jesus, but really listen to the Pharisees’s case. Like us, the Pharisees wanted to follow God in a world that did not make that easy. Indeed, their country was occupied by the Roman Empire, and all around them, many of their fellow Jews were making compromises in their faith- collaborating with the Romans, not following God’s law. In a world like that, sinning is easy and following God is hard.
Faced with these threats from outside, the Pharisees’ response was to insist on following God even more closely. Instead of watering down God’s commandments, they raised them up. So, in the law, priests were commanded to wash their hands before serving in the temple; the Pharisees extended this to all of God’s people, and not just in the temple but before every meal. The other traditions that Mark mentions- washing foot and cleaning pots and pans- have a similar function. By following God even in these little things, they wanted to honor God with their whole lives. Don’t even sin in these little things, they counseled. In distinction from all the defiling, corrupting things in their world, they wanted to make sure that their lives were as godly as possible. Their very survival as a people, as God’s people, was at stake.
Jesus steps into this carefully constructed system for keeping unstained by the world, for not sinning. His disciples do not follow all of these traditions. They do not wash their hands before eating. And so the Pharisees wonder, do they not care about following God? Don’t they realize that the world is a corrupt place, that the last thing they need is to start relaxing the rules and saying anything goes? When it’s so easy to sin, the last thing you need is to give sin an opening.
Like I said, it’s easy to immediately side against the Pharisees, so maybe we can find a parallel in our own church life. As Episcopalians, we have a beautiful and very helpful set of traditions compiled in our Book of Common Prayer that help us worship God. We don’t follow all of these rules just because we like rules or because we want to be legalistic; we follow them because they are a good way of making sure we actually follow God, actually worship him, and avoid sin. Imagine if a new priest showed up at St. Michael’s and suddenly started changing everything, threw out the Book of Common Prayer and the hymnal. Whatever that new priest’s intentions, I don’t think it would go over well to say that the traditions which we find helpful are actually not important. That gives you a sense of why the Pharisees were so concerned about Jesus’s disciples not washing their hands. It’s not because they just liked enforcing rules but because these were rules, traditions, which they thought were good and helpful for following God and avoiding sin.
That’s important, because Jesus’s harsh words aren’t just about this one rule that some Pharisees two thousand years ago thought was important. Jesus isn’t just saying “You Pharisees are wrong about washing hands; don’t worry about that rule anymore.” No. What he says is much deeper and broader, and it applies to us just as much as it applies to those Pharisees.
Because we do the same thing as the Pharisees! Their mistake wasn’t to care about following God and avoiding sin but to think that carefully following the rules and traditions was going to keep them from sinning. It’s such a natural mistake to fall into. If we just had a list of the rules, then we could follow them and we’d be good. Just tell us the things to do and the things to not do, and then we’ll be sure to do the good ones and follow God and avoid all the sins.
Please understand, I’m not saying this is desire to do the right thing is bad! Jesus didn’t say that, either. We need rules and traditions for living our lives, for avoiding sin and following God. What I am saying is that no rules, no traditions, are enough by themselves to keep us pure and unstained by sin because sin isn’t out there somewhere. It’s not something we can avoid just by trying very hard. Sin is inside us. Jesus says, “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Evil isn’t just lurking out there, trying to get in; evil is already inside us. The Pharisees, and we, are too optimistic- we can’t avoid getting stained and mixed up in sin by following the rules perfectly. We already are stained and mixed up in sin.
Photo Credit Piron Guillaume Unsplash
Maybe an analogy would be helpful. Imagine a person whose heart no longer works very well. I mean his real, literal heart- it doesn’t pump blood well anymore. Once your heart has gotten into very bad shape, it’s not enough to change your behavior. It’s not enough to start exercising, or eating better. The damage is already done. What you need is not better behavior but a new heart, a heart transplant. Then you can worry about changing your lifestyle.
Well, if Jesus is to be believed (and he is), the picture with our souls is very similar. Before we can worry about avoiding sin and keeping unstained from the world, we need to recognize a simple truth. We’re not basically good people who just need to choose the right thing, who just need to keep sin away. We’re sinners. Our hearts are the ones that produce sin-Jesus gives some examples. Deceit, envy, pride- these are some of the most common, but perhaps you can think of others, ones that you know come out of your heart.
Really think of those sins that come out of your heart. And then think- would it help to hear me or any other preacher sternly tell you that those are sins? That you should try your hardest to avoid them? Deep down, we already know they are sins. We know we should do better, but we can’t. Our hearts are corrupted and sinful, and no amount of scolding, no amount of law, will fix them.
But Jesus Christ did not come to Earth just to teach us how to act. He came to live and die for our sins, to give us new hearts that beat with faith and love. He came, not because we are unstained by the world, but to clean us from the sin and evil that is already inside. Paul writes in 1 Timothy, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Not to tell sinners to act better, not to give us better rules to follow, but to save us because we cannot save ourselves.
And so if you feel the force of his words about sin, then hear that his mercy is for you, too. If you feel that your heart has sin, then hear that the Son of God took on your sin and took it to the cross. If you feel stuck, like you cannot make yourself better, than hear that the Son of God rose from the dead to give you new life, too. The mercy and the love of God are precisely for us who need them, for us who have tried to keep unstained by the world and by sin and yet feel that our hearts are full of sin. We are not perfect, but God is. We do not have hearts full of love, but Jesus does, enough love to fill and heal each of us. That love is for me, sinner that I am, and that love is for you, sinner that you are. Whenever we sin, may we remember that.
Amen.
