WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert October 23, 2005

Mark 7:1-37 “Unclean”

I suppose it’s human nature – or at least fallen human nature – to divide the world into “them” and “us;” the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats. And there is nothing that is considered quite as bad as masquerading as “one of us” when you are really not. In biblical language, the categories were “clean” and “unclean,” and people who acted as though they were one while being the other were “hypocrites” – the Greek word for an actor.

Now this is not to say that there are not valid divisions in the world. God chose Israel as “his people,” and gave them Laws and practices that distinguished them from other nations. The purpose of his calling and election of Israel was that they should become a people “holy to the LORD” and that they should be “a light to the Gentiles,” and so display the greatness and goodness of God. But by the time of Jesus, Israel had forgotten both of these – if indeed they ever fulfilled them well. “Holy to the LORD” had become “obeying the traditions of the elders,” and the Gentiles – not surprisingly after Israel had been overrun by them for generations – were despised as “dogs.”

1) Outside or Inside?

Jesus is confronted by his most persistent critics: the Scribes (trained interpreters and teachers of the Law) and the Pharisees (who thought holiness meant separation from the world behind a maze of small observances). “Why don’t your disciples observe the traditions of the elders?” “Why do they not wash their hands ritually?” These had once been rules for priests, but the rabbis had made them rules for everyone. Keep clean; avoid defilement; separate yourself from unclean foods, unclean animals, unclean occupations, unclean people, unclean spirits, unclean nations. That was how you would maintain the state of being right with God and other people.

But Jesus has already abandoned such things, and his disciples have learned from him. Now they eat without ritual washings, and it’s also clear that Jesus constantly mixes with “unclean people.” He talks to women, he touches lepers, he visits Gentile territory, he “works” on the Sabbath. He is not, in the eyes of the Pharisees, a “holy man” at all. Jesus’ response to their criticism is biting; they, and not he, are the unclean ones! They are the hypocrites of whom Isaiah spoke: people who say all the right things but who in their hearts do not belong to God. Jesus sees thought their outward piety, notices their critical spirits towards others, and says that they are merely paying “lip service” to God.

Their traditions have become more important to them than true heart-worship of God, more important than obeying his commandments. They have ”fenced the Law” around with their 684 regulations, supposedly to stop anyone getting close to breaking the Law itself, but the result has been that the Law and its intentions have been hidden from view. The commandment says to honor your fathers and mothers - in practice, to provide for them in their old age; but they invoke customs like “Corban” to avoid doing this basic good thing. “Corban” was what we might today call “asset protection;” declaring that something was “set aside for God,” and so could not be used for anything else. So you could declare your entire estate “Corban,” meaning that at your death it would go to the Temple treasury, but then say you had no cash available to aid your parents or pay other bills.

In short, people who claimed to be pious were in fact avoiding God, and exploiting God, and were in no position to criticize Jesus and his disciples. Jesus takes the opportunity to teach the crowds, and his close disciples, the true meaning of being “unclean.” It is nothing to do with what you touch, who you mix with, how often you go through purification rituals. It has everything to do with your inner dispositions; with the state of your heart. That is the origin of your pollution; that is the sewer from which unclean things come. It’s within you, not outside you!

Of course Jesus’ disciples don’t understand this either, so he spells out some examples for them. Attitudes like envy, arrogance, malice, greed are what pollute relationships. Actions like pre-marital sex, adultery, obscene behavior, theft, murder arise from inner desires. These are the things that alienate people from one another and from God. It’s not a matter of what foods you eat, or anything you take in. And so, says Mark, in that moment Jesus rescinds the kosher laws and makes all foods clean. No wonder many pious Jews hated him! Who did he think he was, God?

2) Insiders and Outsiders

No sooner is this confrontation with the Pharisees over than Jesus takes off on a very unexpected journey – out to the Mediterranean coast to the Phoenician towns of Tyre and Sidon, now part of the Roman province of Syria. This is Gentile country; but Jesus is here acting out the implications of what he has just taught. If the external distinctions don’t matter, and what’s inside does, then the ancient barriers that separate Jew from Gentile are going to crumble. Jesus will not demolish the barriers, but he will point to their disappearance very soon now that his kingdom has arrived.

So he crosses geographical and cultural and ethnic barriers to go to Phoenicia, he crosses theological and gender barriers to talk to a pagan woman. She begs Jesus to aid her possessed daughter, but hears a response that has shocked people ever since. “The food is for the children, not the dogs” says Jesus. What is he talking about? The food is his word, and his power to heal and his invitation into his kingdom; the children are the “lost sheep of the house of Israel,” as he calls them elsewhere. And the dogs? That was what Jews called Gentiles! To get the impact, you have to remember that as far as we know, Jews at this period did not keep dogs as pets. As in any Middle Eastern or even Mediterranean town today, dogs roamed wild in the streets, scavenging. That was how Jews saw Gentiles.

Is Jesus being offensive, or is he trying to draw something out of the woman? (The scholarly debates on that are endless). She responds brilliantly – “even dogs eat the scraps the children drop.” Jesus commends her for her faith, and her grasp that even she, a Gentile woman, can find the grace of God in Jesus at a time when more and more in Israel will decide that he is not worth bothering with. Her daughter is delivered, and the Greek-speaking Phoenician becomes a part of Jesus’ kingdom; perhaps even the first Gentile believer in Jesus.

Jesus is on the move again: back across Galilee to the eastern side of the Lake, back again to the Decapolis region where he had healed the wild possessed man who lived in the tombs. After that incident, and the drowning of the pigs, the people there had asked Jesus to leave. Now they welcome him back into semi-Gentile territory again, and ask him to touch a man who is deaf and also cannot speak clearly. Again Jesus reaches out to the unclean, the foreigner, and with a sigh and a prayer he opens the man’s ears and looses his tongue. Now he joins those who “if they have ears to ear, let them hear,”as Jesus says.

3) Who’s In, Who’s Out?

Some things haven’t changed much in 2 millennia, I think. About once a year the popular magazines publish lists of “Who’s In, Who’s Out.” We still have our boundary lines, our sense of who is “one of us” and who is not. It functions at every level in our society, from pop culture to fashion to government to the church.

Are we part of the “in crowd”? In with whom? With other like-minded people? With God? Where and how do we draw the lines that separate “us” from “them”? Too often today, even in this polyglot immigrant nation, the lines are based on language, ethnicity, culture, religion. Who are the “outsiders”? A few generations ago it was the Irish, or the Catholics, or the Jews; not so long ago, it was people of African descent; today it’s often native Spanish-speakers, or Muslims.

What about our churches? Where do we draw the lines? It used to be about tea-totallers, or tithers, or the once-married. Where are the barriers today? How far do we still relate to people based on external appearances, actions, practices, behaviors? When will we ever grasp that, as the prophet Samuel said so long ago when God chose a rough sheep-herding teen named David as the next king of Israel, that “God looks on the heart, and not on the outside”?

Are we still playing games with God? Do we suppose that if we keep up the outward things, he will be pleased with us? Do we still think that regular church attendance, sending in our pledges every week, giving clothes to the Thrift Store, will put God in our debt? We all have our little observances that make us feel “holy;” for some it’s our daily devotions and Bible readings; for others it’s the work we put into the service of the church in the course of a month. There are things and actions we avoid, which makes us feel “cleaner;” and we don’t think well of people who “dirty themselves” by indulging in them.

Maybe we all need to ask God to shine the bright light of his Spirit into us so that we can take inventory of our hearts. If we are dealing in envy, anger, unkindness to other family members; if we are constantly criticizing, blaming or putting down our spouses or our children; if we are full of arrogance and foolishness; if we are frequently involved in or always looking for sexual adventures, adultery, pornography; if petty or major theft, minor or major violence are part of our lives or our thoughts, then we dearly need the grace of God to lead us to acknowledge these things; we need repentance and God’s strength to turn away from them; we need to know God’s mercy and forgiveness.

All these can come to us if we will put our faith and trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior, if we believe that he can heal and deliver and forgive us. If we have never trusted him then we need to do it, for the first time. If we have done it long ago, we need to learn to redo it every day, every week, every month of our lives – because we are all prone to self-righteousness, to falling back onto externals that we imagine appease God, and we all need constantly to come to him for forgiveness and cleansing and power to overcome our inner sinful inclinations.

In all this, it’s worth remembering that we are the Gentile “dogs” whom Jesus graciously invited to enter his kingdom. We are privileged to “pick up the scraps” of God’s grace that have fallen from his table. So let’s not get too high an estimate of ourselves, or of our holiness; and let us not become classed as the “actors” – the hypocrites - rather let us be thankful and devoted disciples of Jesus, who has allowed “outsiders” like us into his family and his kingdom. It is pure grace that we are what we are, and not our great goodness that has earned us our place!

Let us pray...