Scripture Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
A reading from the Gospel according to Mark, beginning at chapter 7, selected verses.
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders, and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash, and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Response Holy Wisdom, Holy Word:
Thanks be to God!
Sermon “What Comes from Within”
I have never once preached on this passage, not in almost twenty-one years as an ordained minister, nor in the opportunities I had to preach in the fifteen or so years prior to that. I just couldn’t see my way clear to preaching on a passage where Jesus gets mad about hand washing. How do I defend that? This was an era when people ate with their hands, and did everything else with them, too. It's unimaginable, especially post Covid era. I remember going into a public restroom in a Massachusetts theater, in March 2020, where there were pages taped to the mirror in front of each sink. The pages contained lyrics from different showtunes—each amounting to twenty seconds worth of singing, so that we’d all sing and wash our hands long enough to fight off this new, terrifying virus. Each of us was told by our parents over and over again: You need to wash your hands before supper. Because little kids will pick up everything including cat poop if they get the chance. We all need to wash our hands.
I’ve never preached on this passage before. But in there, beyond everything that makes me squirm and say, “Ew,” is a message that is important. A message that is central to the gospel, to scripture itself: What we put out into the world, whether our words or or actions, matters. Even more important, where they come from matters. Where they come from, what matters, is the human heart.
As always, context matters, too. We are at the beginning of chapter 7 of Mark’s gospel, but chapter 6 is a doozy. In this one sweeping passage, Jesus is rejected by the people of his hometown—people who say, “We know him, that’s Mary’s son.” And they are offended. Who does he think he is, preaching in the synagogue? Claiming to heal people? Then Jesus trains his disciples and sends them out to do the work of preaching and healing. Then he learns of the death of John the Baptist, the man who scripture tells us was his first mentor—the one on whom, in many ways, he modeled his ministry. John’s death was a terrible blow—a devastating loss. Jesus responds by trying to go off by himself, to pray and find solace in his connection with God. But people need him, and they follow him, and eventually they get hungry. So, Jesus feeds them. He feeds five thousand of them. After this, trying again to find some quiet time, he ends up, instead, walking to the disciples on the sea, to save them from a storm. The last portion of the chapter tells us he was healing—but he was healing all along. Chapter 6 is made up of weeks of working, preaching, and healing punctuated with rejection, life-altering events, grief, and exhaustion.
Suffice to say, the Jesus we meet in chapter 7 has reason to be tired, irritable, and reactive. Some Pharisees and scribes question the fact that his people are not washing their hands—they are defiled, according to Jewish practice. Jesus’ response is swift and furious. He hurls the prophet Isaiah at them—he accuses them of being poseurs, people who only play at worshiping God, but have no true love for God in their hearts. And furthermore, he says, you abandon God and hold to human tradition.
Jesus is right. What he is criticizing is not the law, the Torah, but specific practices that evolved over the centuries. The text even gives us a lengthy parenthetical statement, assuring us that what is at question is nothing to do with the law, but which is rather, the “traditions of the elders,” which is to say, the evolving wisdom of the Rabbis. It is true—some of Jesus’ disciples are not abiding by these practices. But that is also true of the population in general—none of these kinds of practices have been universally adopted.
Jesus’ response seeks to move the conversation away from these traditions, away from hands, and toward the place where the real problem can be found: the heart. “Listen to me, all of you, and understand,” he says: “the things that come out of you are what defile. They are what is unclean.” And these things come from the heart.
I want to be clear. This is not an anti-Jewish argument. Jesus is a Jew, and like the Pharisees, he takes part in a venerable tradition of debating with others in order to find the truth. We don’t know whether Jesus observes these customs or not. But Jesus is trying to say that if you’re looking to promote the good and restrain what is evil, you’re looking in the wrong place. This is not one group against another. This is us against ourselves. [1]
Human beings are complex. Each of us is raised in a particular situation, by particular people, and our early experiences can by anything from thoroughly wholesome and loving, to traumatic and violent on the other, and everything in between. In the Hebrew scriptures we read the following:
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children
to the third and the fourth generation.” Exodus 34:6-7
God’s forgiveness is free and abundant, that is without question, and it is a main tenet of the Reformed tradition, which gave birth to Presbyterianism. But it is also true, as this passage reflects, that brokenness and dysfunction can travel down through the generations—addiction, abuse, abandonment, and cruelty can live on in our children and our children’s children, until someone summons the strength and awareness to change themselves and change the pattern for the next generation.
Like many Americans I became hooked on “The Sopranos” back when it debuted in 1999. We know who Tony Soprano is from the first episode. He’s a charming monster and mobster, who faints at a party and decides to go into therapy to figure out why. Through that therapy we learn about his parents—his father, also a mobster, who commits violent acts in front of his young children, and his mother who, when she can’t get her own way, tries to get at least two of Tony’s associates to kill him.
This pattern of violence is carried from one generation to the next—Tony tells his therapist the awful things his father said to him when he was a child—and we hear him say those very same things to his children. At the show’s conclusion there is no sign that the violence and cruelty will come to an end. The sins of the parents are indeed visited on their children, who carry that heritage forth into the world, their lives, their relationships, and their patterns of behavior.
But there is good news here, too. The goodness and love of parents and caregivers is also passed onto the children, as well as emotional and psychological health. And those children carry into the world that love and kindness with which they were raised. The passage from the Hebrew scriptures tells us that God’s steadfast love goes to the thousandth generation (contrasted to the passing on of dysfunction for three or four). Our goodness and love continue on, and on, and have effects beyond our understanding, beyond even our own lifetimes.
Most of us are somewhere in between, having been raised with perfectly imperfect caregivers who loved us, and who also lost it from time to time when we didn’t wash our hands or do our homework. There are episodes I recall with my children that make me cringe and wish to God I’d had greater wisdom and gentleness in those days. But like a lot of parents, I grew with my children, and knew, in the end, how it should have been from the beginning. Perfectly imperfect.
Have you noticed that all throughout the gospels, Jesus, even Jesus, who scripture tells us is God’s own son, seeks times to check in with God and with himself… time away from the routine, the work, the stress of what he’s trying to do, and time with God in prayer, contemplation and rest. Even Jesus takes breaks. Even Jesus pays attention to how he’s doing, and seeks to reground himself in God’s love, for the sake of his ministry.
On this Labor Day weekend, when we celebrate, among other things, the labor movement that gave us the 40-hour work week, it strikes me that there is one kind of labor we all have in common. Whether we are teachers or trombonists; electricians or engineers; poets or police officers, we all have in common the work we must do on ourselves. The exploration needed to know ourselves better, to understand our emotions, our reactions, our motivations. The search for ourselves, our true selves, the people God created us to be.
This isn’t a one and done kind of task—we don’t get to take a quiz in our twenties and find the label that fixes us in place once and for all. It is a lifelong journey—we learn about ourselves all along the way, and there is never really a point when we’re done. According to Carl Jung, our task in the second half of life is the return to, and conscious rediscovery of, the Self. Jung calls this task individuation, the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own inner center. And this lifelong labor is beautifully served by prayer, meditation, and the assurance that God is with us in this journey.
What would our lives be like if our day started with a sentence or two from scripture, and a prayer that God would guide our words and our actions? What would our interactions be like if we responded to a tense conversation by taking a beat—just a moment—to breathe deeply, and remember: what I say next matters. What if we took seriously the invitation to abide in God—not so that God would abide in us, because God’s already doing that! But what if we remembered that God abides in us when our day starts to take a turn for the worse? What if we remembered that gracious presence inhabiting us, and let that presence light and guard, rule and guide us? How much better we might understand ourselves, with God’s help. How much more beautiful and loving might all our words and interactions be, having tended to our hearts.
I wish Jesus’ guys had washed their hands. I really do. But more than that, I wish each of us—I pray that each of us—might always know ourselves to be held in God’s loving arms, and so greet each moment of our lives in faith, hope, and love.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] [1] Matthew Skinner, “Commentary on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23,” Working Preacher, September 2, 2012. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-2/commentary-on-mark-71-8-14-15-21-23.