Mark 7:1-23

At a local coffee shop sipping on a mint latte.  Sometimes it is really good to get away from the office and work in another environment.  Its even better if you have the discipline to shut off parts of the internet like Facebook.  I'm off the grid today except for blogger and things I need to do what is on my task list.  Here's to a productive day!

South's SOAP for the Day S-Read Mark 7:1-23.
O-Jesus spoke out against the spiritual leaders because they honored their own laws over God’s law.
A-Examine any rules or guidelines you live by, making sure they are from God and not just habit or tradition.
P-Pray that God will help you get rid of the man-made rules in your life that keep you from properly worshiping Him.

Since I am at the coffee shop today, I'm flying without my safety net of scholars and study bibles.  Those are always important tools in studying scripture.  We will make a go of it without them for now...

Do you remember always being told to wash your hands when you were little.  Your parents keen and smart.  They knew that when you were little, you had your hands in everything, and you really didn't know that having your hands in everything was bad, especially if you were going to eat something.  We were taught you had to wash your hands to get rid of any germs that might make you sick if they made it inside of you.

That is the idea that our passage today starts with.  The Pharisees are asking (criticizing) Jesus why his disciples don't ceremonially wash their hands before eating.  See, in that day, keeping yourself pure, or clean, was the aim of the Law, the set of rules we talked about a few weeks ago.  The Jewish faith felt that anytime you ate, you needed to ceremonially wash your hands to make sure you dealt with any uncleanliness that was on you.  If you didn't, your contaminated yourself--you became unclean.  The reason this is bad is that being unclean keeps you from being in relationship with God, it kept you from worshipping God.  It made you unclean to the rest of the community.

So, it makes sense that the Pharisees are asking (criticizing) Jesus about this.  His disciples are not doing as the Law says and defiling themselves.  This is offensive the the Pharisees.  Since they don't already like Jesus, it is another point of attack for them.

Jesus responds to them by quoting a passage out of Isaiah.  Now, understand that the Pharisees were fanatics about scripture.  By the time a Pharisee was a young teen, he would have already memorized the first five books of the Torah (Old Testament).  Once they had mastered that, it was on the the Prophets and the Psalms.  Needless to say, when Jesus quotes from Isaiah, the Pharisees know what chapter and verse.  They know the back story.  They are fully tracking with him.

The point of the Isaiah passage?  God felt that his people were not very focused on him. They gave him lip service, but really didn't live their faith in him from the heart.  Thus, everything they did was for show, so that others could see how "faithful" they were.  They lost track of what the Law was to be.  It was to be a way of life to live under God's reign, bringing him glory, and showing the world around you that your life was different.  Jesus is calling out the Pharisees about the fact that the Law has lost its godliness to them.  It is now simply a set of rules to show off their religious-ness.  Rather than faith lived out from the heart through the Law, they are living rules and regulations for the sake of rules and regulations.

After Jesus quotes from Isaiah, he leans into the Pharisees even more by challenging them on how they treat their parents.  "Honor your father and mother" is one of the Ten Commandments.  It wasn't directed at little children to be good for their parents.  It was directed at Jewish men.  Honoring your father and mother meant caring for them as they got older and couldn't support themselves.  You "honored" them by caring for them until they passed away.

"Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death." is from the Law (Exodus 21:17, Leviticus 20:9).  It directly related to the honor your father and mother commandment.  At any point, if you cursed your father and mother, the community, which was in charge of keeping the community clean, was to take you outside of the community and stone you.  Stoning meant throwing stones at you until you were dead.  We are not talking pebbles here either.  Think soft ball sized stones or larger, thrown at you until you were dead.  That's how voracious God wanted his people to be about their lives lived for him.

The Pharisees and the rulers created a way around this in their customs and "laws".  Their angle was that if they gave what they would have spent "honoring" their father and mother to the temple, they were released from the commandment.  It makes total sense, doesn't it?  I don't really want to live up that commandment, so I'm going to create something that still looks religious AND gets me out of what I don't want to do.

Jesus calls them out on their man made law.  I wonder what their response was at that point?  Did they look like puppy's being yelled at, all sad eyes and remorseful?  I doubt it, especially seeing what Jesus does next.  From this conversation back and forth with the Pharisees he turns to the larger crowd and says:

Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. (Mark 7:14-15)

What?  Did Jesus just rewrite the Law?  Sounds like it to me.  Think about the looks on the faces of the Pharisees.  I figure it was a horrified look like they had with him when he told the man lowered through the roof in Mark 4 that his sins were forgiven.

Now, as has been the case too many times now, when the disciples are alone with Jesus they ask about what he's said because they don't get it.  I love Jesus' response: "Why are you so dull?"  He then proceeds to explain what he meant.  Its not what you eat that defiles you.  Food goes into the stomach and then leaves the system.  Jesus is focused here on the heart.  How you lived (your fruit) showed what was in your heart.  Jesus even goes a step further to explain his analogy.  I really like how the Message lists this:

It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution.

 Pretty easy to grasp.  Hard to live out.  But that's what we are called to do.

So, what is the point for us?  The first question we need to ask ourselves is have we made up anything in our own "religion" that gets us out of the true responsibility that God is calling us to?  One that quickly comes to my mind is making disciples.  The church has become the entity that makes disciples, rather than each person in the church bearing the responsibility to make disciples.  Another might be the thought that going to church on Sunday is all I need to do for my faith.

I think Jesus would ask us the same hard questions.  What is the fruit of your life?  What is your heart producing?  Are you producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self control?  Or, are you producing vomit from the heart?

Be honest with yourself.  Find some time today to be reflective over what you are producing with your life.  I'd love to help you or find someone to help you produce good fruit.  Its not about washing your hands, its about washing your heart.  God is willing to give you a new heart if he needs to.  You have to want it and be willing to make the change.

Lord, help us to be makers of good fruit.  Help us to flee from the vomit that Jesus teaches the disciples about.  Give us a passion for You so we can be made new!