SEVEN

THE STAIN

Jesus’s conflict with the religious leaders of his day did not abate. Mark relates an incident in which Jesus and these leaders were disagreeing about the cleanliness laws, the dietary laws, the regulations that had to do with ritual purity. It would be easy to assume that the controversy over such laws is arcane, maybe of some antiquarian interest but surely not relevant to us today. But actually it takes up matters that are profoundly relevant for human life in any culture, any century. Here’s what happened:

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean,” that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles.) So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”

(Mark 7:1–5)

According to the cleanliness laws, if you touched a dead animal or human being, if you had an infectious skin disease like boils or rashes or sores, if you came into contact with mildew (on your clothes, articles in your home, or your house itself), if you had any kind of bodily discharge, or if you ate meat from an animal designated as unclean, you were considered ritually impure, defiled, stained, unclean. That meant you couldn’t enter the temple—and therefore you couldn’t worship God with the community. Such strenuous boundaries seem harsh to us, but if you think about it, they are not as odd as they sound. Over the centuries, people have fasted from food during seasons of prayer. Why? It’s an aid for developing spiritual hunger for God. Also, people of various faiths kneel for prayer. Isn’t that rather uncomfortable? It’s an aid for developing spiritual humility. So the washings and efforts to stay clean and free from dirt and disease that were used by religious people in Jesus’s day were a kind of visual aid that enabled them to recognize that they were spiritually and morally unclean and couldn’t enter the presence of God unless there was some kind of spiritual purification.

If you’re going to meet up with somebody who is particularly important to you—for that big date or important job interview—you wash, you brush your teeth, you comb your hair. What are you doing? Getting rid of the uncleanness, of course. You don’t want a speck or stain on you. You don’t want to smell bad. The cleanliness laws were the same idea. Spiritually, morally, unless you’re clean, you can’t be in the presence of a perfect and holy God.

Jesus couldn’t have agreed more with the religious leaders of his day about the fact that we are unclean before God, unfit for the presence of God. But he disagreed with them about the source of the uncleanness, and about how to address it. Mark records:

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’”

(Mark 7:14–16)

According to Jesus, in our natural state we’re unfit for the presence of God. Most modern people have a problem with this idea. Many would say, “Okay, ancients found the world a scary place because they didn’t understand the way nature worked, and so they created myths to help them explain the world. They wanted to feel more in control of their destinies. They conjured up moral absolutes and wrathful deities that had to be appeased. When anything went wrong, it had to be that the gods were unhappy. Therefore ancient people were constantly ridden with shame and guilt.” Nowadays, they would go on, we’ve moved on from moral absolutes. Nobody knows what’s right and wrong for certain, nobody knows about God for certain. We all have to decide for ourselves and not be held to others’ standards. Besides, we believe in human rights and the dignity of the individual. We don’t see the individual as unclean, defiled, evil. We think human nature is basically good.

That’s what we often say today. If there is a God, we don’t believe he is a transcendently holy deity before whom we stand guilty and condemned.

And yet we still wrestle with profound feelings of guilt and shame. Where do they come from?

One of the great writers of the twentieth century, the brilliant and bizarre Franz Kafka, explores this problem in his book The Trial. In the beginning of the story, Joseph K. is having a normal life, but then he is arrested and taken into custody. Nobody tells him what he did wrong. What am I arrested for? What have I been accused of? He is not told. He goes from one prison cell to another to another, and then to a hearing, then another. Nobody ever explains. Everybody is hard, implacable, unsympathetic. They say, “You have to talk to my supervisor, I’ve got my orders.” He continues from hearing to hearing, custody to custody. Nobody ever tells him what’s wrong. Joseph K. puzzles over his whole life. Maybe it was for that. Have I been arrested for that? I did that. That doesn’t seem like it would have been bad enough, but maybe this happened . . . He never does find out. And in the end, one of the wardens stabs him and he dies.

In one of his diaries Kafka says something that many have taken to be the theme of The Trial: “The state in which we find ourselves today is sinful, quite independent of guilt.”30 In other words, we live in a world now where we don’t believe in judgment, we don’t believe in sin, and yet we still feel that there’s something wrong with us. Kafka was really on to something. Though we’ve abandoned the ancient categories, we still have a profound, inescapable sense that if we were examined we’d be rejected. We have a deep sense that we’ve got to hide our true self or at least control what people know about us. Secretly we feel that we aren’t acceptable, that we have to prove to ourselves and other people that we’re worthy, lovable, valuable.

Why do we work so very hard, always saying, “If I can just get to this level, then I can relax”? And we never do relax once we get there—we just work and work. What is driving us? Why is it that some of us can never allow ourselves to disappoint anybody? We have no boundaries, no matter what people ask of us, how much they exploit us, trample on us, because to disappoint somebody is a form of death. Why does that possibility bother us so much? Where are all the self-doubts coming from? Why are we so afraid of commitment? Kafka is saying, “You don’t believe in sin, you don’t believe in judgment, you don’t believe in guilt—and yet you know somehow you’re unclean.” You may psychologize it: I have a complex, my parents didn’t love me enough, I’m a victim, I have self-esteem issues. But there’s no escaping the fact that we all have a sense we’re unclean.

Outside-In Cleansing

Jesus shows us why we can’t shake that sense of uncleanness. The story continues:

After [Jesus] had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”)

(Mark 7:17–19)

Jesus’s language is quite graphic here: Whether you eat clean or unclean food it goes into the mouth, down to the stomach, and then (literally) out into the latrine. It never gets to the heart. Nothing that comes in from the outside makes us unclean.

He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”

(Mark 7:20–23)

What’s really wrong with the world? Why can the world be such a miserable place? Why is there so much strife between nations, races, tribes, classes? Why do relationships tend to fray and fall apart? Jesus is saying: We are what’s wrong. It’s what comes out from the inside. It’s the self-centeredness of the human heart. It’s sin. In fact, these evils that come from the heart make us so unclean that Jesus later tells the disciples:

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’”

(Mark 9:43–48)

Sinful behavior (the reference to hand and foot) and sinful desires (the reference to the eye) are like a fire that has broken out in your living room. Let’s say a cushion on your couch has ignited. You cannot just sit there and say, “Well, the whole house isn’t burning—it’s just a cushion.” If you don’t do something immediately and decisively about the cushion, the whole house will be engulfed. Fire is never satisfied. It can’t be allowed to smolder; it can’t be confined to a corner. It will overtake you eventually. Sin is the same way: It never stays in its place. It always leads to separation from God, which results in intense suffering, first in this life and then in the next. The Bible calls that hell. That’s why Jesus uses the drastic image of amputation. There can be no compromises. We must do anything we can to avoid it: If our foot causes us to sin, we should cut it off. If it’s our eye, we should cut it out.

But Jesus has just pointed out that our biggest problem, the thing that makes us most unclean, is not our foot or our eye; it’s our heart. If the problem were the foot or the eye, although the solution would be drastic, it would be possible to deal with it. But we can’t cut out our heart. No matter what we do, or how hard we try, external solutions don’t deal with the soul. Outside-in will never work, because most of what causes our problems works from the inside out. We will never shake that sense that we are unclean.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”31 Time after time the Bible shows us that the world is not divided into the good guys and the bad guys. There may be “better guys” and “worse guys,” but no clear division can be made between the good and the bad. Given our sin and self-centeredness, we all have a part in what makes the world a miserable, broken place.

Yet we’re all still trying to address that sense of uncleanness through external measures, trying to do something that Jesus says is basically impossible. Let me give some examples. One example is religion itself: If I stay away from dirty movies and profane activities and bad people, if I pray and read my Bible, if I try really hard to be good, then God will see that I’m worthy and come in and heal my heart. The problem is that, as Jesus said, that model doesn’t stick. You never feel you’re good enough. Though you’re praying and trying your very best to be good, your heart doesn’t change. You’re never filled with love and joy and security. You’re actually more anxious, because you never know if you’re living up. When something goes wrong in your life, you’ll immediately be thrown into doubt: “I thought I was living a good enough life. Why did God let this happen?” You never find out. Religion doesn’t get rid of the self-justification, the self-centeredness, the self-absorption, at all. It doesn’t really strengthen and change the heart. It’s outside-in.

Politics tends to work outside-in as well. Right after World War II a great many British political intellectuals found their entire worldview shattered by what had happened during the war. In 1952, just before he died, C. M. Joad, a socialist philosopher who had been an atheist, published a book, The Recovery of Belief, in which he tells of coming back to belief in God. He said, “It was because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the Left were always being so disappointed; disappointed by the refusal of people to be reasonable . . . by the behavior of nations and politicians . . . above all, by the recurrent fact of war.”32 Both the behavior of the people and of the leaders were inexplicable to his circle of intellectuals, Joad argues, because they didn’t believe in sin. Lord David Cecil said this after the Holocaust: “The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us. . . . But barbarism is not behind us, it is [within] us.”33

Dorothy Sayers, a British writer and poet who lived at the same time, said that World War II was a terrible blow to the educated class of England, who had “an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment.” These were the people who found “the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states, the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of capitalist society, not . . . merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe.”34

In her book Creed or Chaos? Sayers said that over the previous century and more, politics had operated on the following basis: What was wrong with human society was not in the human heart. It lay in social structures, in a lack of education. It was a lack of applying what we know through science. Therefore, if we could just fill those gaps, human society would achieve greatness. But modern history is littered with disillusioned people who thought capitalism would make us better or socialism would make us better. The sins of the human heart just express themselves differently in each of these systems. Politics is another outside-in approach that does not change the heart.

Then there is the world of popular culture. Christina Kelly was a very successful editor of young women’s magazines; over a period of several years she was on the staff of Elle Girl, YM, Jane, and Sassy. Some years back she wrote a confessional piece in which she asked:

Why do we crave celebrities? Here’s my theory. To be human is to feel inconsequential. So we worship celebrities and we seek to look like them. All the great things they have done we identify with in order to escape our own inconsequential lives. But it’s so dumb. With this stream of perfectly airbrushed, implanted, liposuctioned stars, you would have to be an absolute powerhouse of self-esteem already not to feel totally inferior before them. So we worship them because we feel inconsequential, but doing it makes us feel even worse. We make them stars, but then their fame makes us feel insignificant. I am part of this whole process as an editor. No wonder I feel soiled at the end of the day.35

That is so Kafkaesque. To be human is to feel inconsequential. Every one of us has at some time or other felt this kind of inexplicable sense of inconsequentiality, that we’re unclean, that we need to prove ourselves. Popular culture says to us, “Aha, here’s a way to be clean: Be pretty. Have flawless skin. Change your look. Get thin. Look like a celebrity.” But Christina Kelly says the celebrities themselves are incredibly unsuccessful in dealing with their sense of inconsequentiality through their beauty, while the rest of us feel worse because we can’t even come close to them. Outside-in doesn’t work.

Maybe you’re saying, “Religion’s not my thing, nor politics, and I’m not into popular culture.” Just to show you that we’re all trying to cleanse ourselves from the outside in and it doesn’t work, let me turn briefly to Christian ministry itself. You’ll see that no one is immune. Why do people go into a life of ministry? Noble motivations, right? Some years ago I read this line in a book for ministry students by Charles Spurgeon: “Don’t preach the gospel in order to save your soul.” I was in my twenties at the time, and I remember thinking, “What kind of idiot would try to save his soul by preaching the gospel?” But after a few years in the ministry, you start to realize that if your church does well and grows and people like you, you feel disproportionately good—and if your church doesn’t do well and people don’t really like you, you feel disproportionately devastated. You’re working outside in. You had assumed, “If people like me and say, ‘Oh, how much you help me,’ then God will like me and I will like myself, and then that sense of inconsequentiality, that sense of uncleanness, will go away.” But it doesn’t. Many years ago I was reading a critical study that rendered Romans 1:17 in the following way: “He who through faith is righteous shall live,” and I almost heard a voice saying, “Yes, and he who through preaching is righteous shall die every Sunday.”36

You see, we’re all trying to cleanse ourselves, or to cover our uncleanness by compensatory good deeds. But it will not work. The prophet Jeremiah puts this very vividly: “‘Although you wash yourself with soda and use an abundance of soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me,’ declares the Sovereign LORD” (Jeremiah 2:22). Outside-in cleansing cannot deal with the problem of the human heart.

Inside-Out Cleansing

Unlike Matthew, Luke, and John, Mark almost never makes editorial comments or interpretations in his book. So when Mark does make an interpretive comment, it’s really significant. And he makes one in this story: “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods ‘clean.’”

It doesn’t read, “Jesus said all foods were clean.” If it did, then maybe the meaning would be, “Jesus says you don’t need to worry so much about these foods, everything is all right, go ahead, eat them.” Jesus would be saying that the cleanliness laws were an outdated idea, and let’s get beyond them. He would be giving an authoritative opinion on the subject.

But that’s not what happened. It reads, “Jesus declared.” Jesus pronounced. Greek experts and scholars agree: Jesus is saying, As of now I make these foods clean. I called the world into being; I called the storm to a halt; I called a girl back from death. And now I call all foods clean. In order to understand the magnitude of this, you have to remember that Jesus has an incredibly high regard for the Word of God. He considers it binding, even on himself. In Matthew’s Gospel he says that not a jot or a tittle—that is, not a letter—will pass away from the Word of God until it is all fulfilled.37 Now, the cleanliness laws are a part of the Word of God. Jesus would never look at any part of it and say, “I’m abolishing this; we’ve gotten beyond this now.” So what he is saying here is that the cleanliness laws have been fulfilled—that their purpose, to get you to move toward spiritual purification, has been carried out. The reason you don’t have to follow them as you once did is that they’ve been fulfilled. What an incredible thing to say.

How could that be?

Years ago my wife Kathy and I heard a sermon preached by Ray Dillard, an Old Testament professor at Westminster Seminary and friend of ours who has since passed away. He wept through most of the sermon, which was based on Zechariah 3. Zechariah is one of the prophetic books in the Old Testament, and in the first line of chapter 3, Zechariah, in a vision, is transported into the center of the temple. He says this: “Then [the Lord] showed me Joshua, the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD.”

The temple had three parts: the outer court, the inner court, and the holy of holies. The holy of holies was completely surrounded by a thick veil. Inside was the ark of the covenant, on top of it was the mercy seat, and the shekinah glory of God, the very presence and face of God, appeared over the mercy seat. It was a dangerous place. In Leviticus 16, God says, “If you come near the mercy seat, put a lot of incense and smoke up in the air, because I appear in the cloud over the mercy seat and I don’t want you to die.” Only one person on one day of the year was allowed to go into the holy of holies: the high priest of Israel on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Zechariah, then, was experiencing a vision from the center of the temple, inside the holy of holies, and he saw Joshua the high priest standing before the Lord on Yom Kippur.

Ray Dillard, preaching his sermon, then drew on his scholarship and spoke in great detail about the enormous amount of preparation that took place for the Day of Atonement. A week beforehand, the high priest was put into seclusion—taken away from his home and into a place where he was completely alone. Why? So he wouldn’t accidentally touch or eat anything unclean. Clean food was brought to him, and he’d wash his body and prepare his heart. The night before the Day of Atonement he didn’t go to bed; he stayed up all night praying and reading God’s Word to purify his soul. Then on Yom Kippur he bathed head to toe and dressed in pure, unstained white linen. Then he went into the holy of holies and offered an animal sacrifice to God to atone, or pay the penalty for, his own sins. After that he came out and bathed completely again, and new white linen was put on him, and he went in again, this time sacrificing for the sins of the priests. But that’s not all. He would come out a third time, and he bathed again from head to toe and they dressed him in brand-new pure linen, and he went into the holy of holies and atoned for the sins of all the people.

Did you know that this was all done in public? The temple was crowded, and those in attendance watched closely. There was a thin screen, and he bathed behind it. But the people were present: They saw him bathe, dress, go in, come back out. He was their representative before God, and they were there cheering him on. They were very concerned to make sure that everything was done properly and with purity, because he represented them before God. When the high priest went before God there wasn’t a speck on him; he was as pure as pure can be. Only if you understand that do you realize why the next lines of the prophecy in Zechariah 3 were so shocking: Zechariah saw Joshua the high priest standing before the presence of God in the holy of holies—but Joshua’s garments were covered in excrement. He was absolutely defiled. Zechariah couldn’t believe his eyes. Ray said the key interpretive question is: How could that have happened? There’s no way that the Israelites would ever have allowed the high priest to appear before God like that. Ray’s answer was this: God was giving Zechariah a prophetic vision so that he could see us the way that God sees us. In spite of all our efforts to be pure, to be good, to be moral, to cleanse ourselves, God sees our hearts, and our hearts are full of filth.

All of our morality, all of our good works, don’t really get to the heart, and Zechariah suddenly realized that no matter what we do we’re unfit for the presence of God. But just as he was about to despair, he heard: “‘Take off his filthy clothes.’ Then he said to Joshua, ‘See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you. . . . Listen, . . . I am going to bring my servant, the Branch, . . . and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day’” (Zechariah 3:4 and 8–9). Zechariah probably couldn’t believe his ears. He must have thought, “Wait a minute, for years we’ve been doing the sacrifices, obeying the cleanliness laws. We can never get the sin off ourselves!” But God was saying, “Zechariah, this is a prophecy. Someday the sacrifices will be over, the cleanliness laws will be fulfilled.”

How can that be? Ray Dillard closed the sermon like this: Centuries later another Joshua showed up, another Yeshua. Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua—it’s the same name in Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew. Another Joshua showed up, and he staged his own Day of Atonement. One week beforehand, Jesus began to prepare. And the night before, he didn’t go to sleep—but what happened to Jesus was exactly the reverse of what happened to Joshua the high priest, because instead of cheering him on, nearly everyone he loved betrayed, abandoned, or denied him. And when he stood before God, instead of receiving words of encouragement, the Father forsook him. Instead of being clothed in rich garments, he was stripped of the only garment he had, he was beaten, and he was killed naked. He was bathed too, Ray told us—in human spit.

Why? “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). God clothed Jesus in our sin. He took our penalty, our punishment so that we, like Joshua, the high priest, can get what Revelation 19:7–8 pictures: “Let us rejoice and be glad. . . . Fine linen, bright and clean, is given [to us] to wear.” Pure linen—perfectly clean—without stain or blemish. Hebrews 13 says Jesus was crucified outside the gate where bodies are burned—the garbage heap, a place of absolute uncleanliness—so that we can be made clean. Through Jesus Christ, at infinite cost to himself, God has clothed us in costly clean garments. It cost him his blood. And it is the only thing that can deal with the problem of your heart.

Are you living with a specific failure in your past that you feel guilty about and that you have spent your life trying to make up for? Or perhaps you are more like Kafka: not particularly religious, not especially immoral, yet you’re fighting that sense of your own inconsequentiality. You might be doing it through religion or politics or beauty. You might even be doing it through Christian ministry. Doing, doing, doing from the outside in. It won’t work.

Cast your deadly “doing” down—

Down at Jesus’ feet;

Stand in Him, in Him alone,

Gloriously complete.38