THE PHARISEES AND some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and 2saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean,” that is, unwashed. 3(The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4When 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.)
5So 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?”
6He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
7They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.’
8You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”
9And he said to them: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! 10For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ 11But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), 12then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. 13Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”
14Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’”
17After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18“Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? 19For 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.”)
20He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ 21For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”
Original Meaning
THE POLEMICS OVER washing hands and food laws divide into two parts. The first (7:1–13) reports Jesus’ confrontation with the Pharisees and teachers of the law over the issue of eating with unwashed hands. These religious directors are completely oblivious to the miracles that God is working through Jesus and only notice inconsequential matters. Jesus has miraculously fed the crowds in the desert with an abundance of bread, but they only dither about eating bread with unclean hands. Jesus turns their niggling complaint about his disciples’ conduct into a caustic condemnation of their whole tradition. The second part (7:14–23) consists of Jesus’ stunning announcement to the crowd that defilement only comes from within, from an individual’s heart, and not from contact with anything external. He follows up this radical declaration with a private explanation to his disciples about the nature of purity and impurity.
Confrontation Over the Tradition of the Elders (7:1–13)
ANNOYED PHARISEES AND teachers of the law, who regard themselves as the keepers of the tradition, clash with Jesus by publicly protesting the glaring failure of his disciples to observe the rules about unclean hands. This marks the second time that teachers of the law have come “from Jerusalem,” chafing over Jesus’ influence as a rule-breaker (see 3:22), and it foreshadows Jerusalem’s hostility to Jesus that will ultimately lead to his death. In this confrontation, they appear with Pharisees (see 2:16).1
To understand the controversy we must digress and discuss briefly the program of the Pharisees. They were not the power brokers in Jewish society, as many imagine, but were struggling to impose their vision of morality and obedience to the law on Israel. Maintaining purity was a key item in their agenda. The disagreement over washing hands had nothing to do with hygiene but was a matter of purity.2 These Pharisees obviously expected Jesus and his followers to conform to their standards of piety. They tried to promote obedience among the people and must have been galled when a popular prophetic figure like Jesus appeared to subvert it. To them, Jesus was religiously incorrect, and his cavalier attitude toward such things threatened their vision of a smoothly running, holy community.3 His immense popularity also threatened to reduce their sphere of influence since he called into question the authority and validity of their traditions. “The tradition of the elders” was unscriptural law, and they may have been particularly defensive about the washing of hands since it had no explicit biblical basis.4
The conflict in Mark 7 revolves around the issue of defilement. The Pharisees accuse the disciples of eating with hands that are “unclean” (“common,” the opposite of “holy,” “devoted to God”). Mark explains that “unclean hands” refers to “unwashed hands” (7:2) and inserts a parenthetic explanation about Jewish ritual washings for readers unfamiliar with these customs (7:3–4).5 The levitical system regarded uncleanness as something transferable to persons, vessels, clothes, and even houses by touch, lying, sitting, or by an overhang. Layers of impurity could be removed by ablutions.
The brief explanation of Jewish washings clarifies the seriousness of the charges.6 The statement “the Pharisees and all the Jews” implies that to be Jewish, one washes hands, cups, and vessels. If Jesus undermines this tradition, he is redefining what being a Jew means. Moreover, the disregard of purity is serious because it was assumed that uncleanness belongs to the realm of death and demons and breaks fellowship with God.7 To disregard such concerns means that Jesus redefines what it is that inhibits fellowship with God.8
Jesus does not try to justify or explain his disciples’ behavior but vilifies his challengers instead. He scornfully pronounces that Isaiah beautifully prophesied concerning them that they are nothing but hypocrites, who cleverly swap their own words for God’s commands. Hand washing from the Pharisees’ perspective was a sign of piety that allowed one to come close to God. Jesus insists, however, that they have drifted away from God, who cares nothing about their ablutions or their lip service. He will explain privately to his disciples that God cares only about morality, which comes from a pure heart.
The charge of hypocrisy causes surprise.9 The Pharisees have asked about a matter of pressing concern to them, and nothing seems inherently hypocritical about giving thoughtful attention to matters of purity and the traditions of the elders. But they have challenged Jesus in public and thereby have sought to shame him as an incompetent teacher. If his disciples have violated purity rules, then he must be held responsible as their teacher. The situation would be similar to guests from denominational headquarters interrupting a worship service and asking the pastor, “Why does your congregation not close their eyes and bow their heads and refrain from talking during the prayers? Is it because you are so poorly trained and have not taught them?” Understanding that the Pharisees are trying to shame him publicly in a culture where a good reputation is the highest authority helps us see that Jesus does not simply evade the issue but regains command of the situation. He exposes their rigid and superficial religiosity as something that permits one to transgress the direct commands of God.
Jesus’ counterattack cites an extreme example to show how the tradition of the elders sanctions the subversion of God’s will. God commands children to honor their parents, and in Jewish tradition that entails more than showing them respect. It also requires providing them with physical necessities.10 In the case example, the Pharisees would allow a son to duck that responsibility by informing his parents that what support they might expect from him is “Corban,” dedicated to God, and therefore it cannot be touched to help them.
“Corban” was a dedicatory formula used in setting aside property for God and barred one from gaining profit from it. It only expressed an intention to give property and not its actual disposal. From Jesus’ point of view, the command from the Decalogue to honor parents soars above the command to honor vows. The Pharisees’ tradition turned the law on its head by insisting that the sanctity of the vow superseded the parents’ right to support.11 The son can say to his parents that he cannot offer them any help because he has dedicated to God everything that could help them. He could claim that doing so would be a sin against God.
Jesus assumes that such a vow, whether made spitefully or not, is automatically invalid because it violates God’s command to honor parents. One cannot elude God’s commands by resorting to shrewd legal loopholes. Jesus exposes these sticklers for the law as more interested in legal niceties than the requirement of love, more devoted to unwritten traditions than the written law, and more concerned with property than care of one’s parents. Because they set aside God’s will with their tradition (7:8, 13), Jesus annuls their tradition. In this controversy Jesus comes out as the champion of God’s law over scribal law.
A Public and Private Explanation of Purity (7:14–23)
JESUS GIVES THE Pharisees no answer to their question about why his disciples eat with unclean hands. The explanation comes only in a general announcement to the crowds (7:14–15) and in private instruction in the house for the perplexed disciples, who request it.
The general announcement goes beyond the issue raised by the Pharisees, for they did not ask about unclean foods, only about unclean hands! One can only infer from Jesus’ vigorous response that he rejects the Pharisees’ opinion that unclean hands defile food. He now goes much further by explicitly rejecting the proposition that contact with anything profane defiles a person. Not only does he challenge the validity of the traditions of the elders but the very legitimacy of the food laws.12 Jesus does not differ with the Pharisees only over details such as washing hands; he rejects their whole approach to God’s law. They are concerned about surface impurity and piety; Jesus is concerned about internal impurity that one cannot wash away by washing the hands. They do not understand that true holiness that imitates God and opens one up to God is something internal.
Jesus’ straightforward announcement to the crowds puzzles the disciples, and they ask him about “the parable” when they enter the privacy of the house (7:17). This word recalls Jesus’ remark in 4:11 that everything comes “in parables” to those outside. Are the disciples moving closer to the outsiders? Jesus expresses his dismay when he responds: “Are you so dull?” His response takes for granted that the crowd has not grasped the implication of his pronouncement but assumes the disciples possess some token of knowledge. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’?” This question expects the answer “Yes.” They do know something, but they cannot carry this knowledge through to its logical conclusion, which requires a radical change in their whole outlook as Jews.
Jesus does not disown his dense disciples but follows his pattern of providing them with a further explanation when they do not understand. He illustrates his point by reminding them of what happens to food when it is consumed. It passes through the digestive tract and winds up in the latrine.
Many take 7:19b as the narrator’s aside that crowns the argument. The NIV reflects this interpretation: “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods ‘clean.’” The phrase “In saying this, Jesus declared,” however, is not to be found in the text. Literally the words used here translate, “cleansing all foods.” The masculine nominative participle, “cleansing” (katharizon, with an omega), would modify the verb “he says” in 7:18. A well-attested variant reading, however, has a nominative neuter participle (katharizon, with an omicron).13 It is the hardest reading and may be the best.14 It would affirm that the food has somehow become clean in the process of its elimination. This reading has two things to commend it. It would help explain why such a dramatic pronouncement from Jesus that declared all foods to be clean was not cited to settle the later debate over this issue in the churches.15 Jesus’ explanation does not explicitly declare that all foods are clean, only that they somehow come out clean.
Furthermore, the statement fits the rabbinic perspective on defecated food. According to the Mishnah, excrement is not ritually impure though it may be offensive.16 This surprising judgment may be the key to Jesus’ argument. With a droll twist Jesus argues that if food defiles a person, why is it not regarded as impure when it winds up in the latrine—at least according to the tradition of the Pharisees? Defilement must come from some other source than food. Jesus’ logic derives from the Pharisees’ own rules regarding clean and unclean, which sets up his concluding words on the real source of defilement. The only defilement that the disciples need worry about has to do with the heart, not the hands, with evil thoughts that leak out from within a person, not food that ends up in the latrine. What does not enter the heart does not make a person unclean. The heart is the core of motivation, deliberation, and intention. How one handles food, therefore, does not make the heart clean or unclean. It has nothing to do with the internal purity (what is “inside,” 7:21, 23) that matters to God.
The list of vices that come from the heart deals with behavior that harms others. After the general “evil thoughts,” the list in Greek contains six nouns in the plural that refer to acts and six nouns in the singular that refer to characteristics. The first six divide into three parallel actions:
fornications |
adulteries |
thefts |
covetings |
murders |
malicious acts |
The second six—deceit (treachery), licentiousness, evil eye (stinginess), slandering (blasphemy), insolence, foolishness (moral senselessness)—reflect the kind of spiritual defilement that is the most difficult to detect and to remedy. One needs more than a little water poured over cupped hands to cleanse this impurity.17
Bridging Contexts
EVERY COMMUNITY HAS to apply the word of God to situations in real life, and traditions inevitably develop from this undertaking. One should note that Jesus does not reject tradition as such. Societies need traditions to function. Stern points out a significant fact:
A state cannot be run by a constitution without legislation. Likewise the Jewish nation could not be run by the Written Torah alone, without the orderly application of it and in addition to it implied the concept of tradition. But just as a country’s legislation cannot contradict or supplant its constitution, so too tradition … cannot violate or alter God’s word.18
Jesus recognized that we need wineskins—forms and traditions—to hold the wine; otherwise, we will be standing in a puddle of juice. He warned only about wineskins that become old and brittle and no longer serve their intended purpose. Traditions become evil when they run counter to God’s purposes expressed in the ethical commands of how to relate to others. Traditions become dangerous when persons are blind to how they undermine God’s commands. Traditions become corrupt when people become more devoted to upholding them than obeying God’s direct commands. As Pelikan astutely puts it: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”19 One may compare tradition to the shell of the blue crab. To live and grow it must shed its shell from time to time. Until it creates a new shell, the crab is extremely vulnerable. But if the shell becomes so strong and rigid that the crab cannot escape, that is the shell in which it dies. Losing traditions that make one feel safe and comfortable can cause great anxiety. But hanging on to traditions so that one becomes “hard-shelled” is fatal.
With our 20/20 spiritual hindsight we can readily see how the Pharisees’ tradition thwarted God’s will and strangled faith. We quickly dismiss their traditions about purity of hands, pots, and pans as a silly fixation on matters of no consequence. To bridge the context to our own situation, however, we must understand the honest concerns behind these traditions. We should not disdain their issues before asking why they were important to them so that we can relate it to our own religiosity. We will thus first look at the custom of washing hands, which precipitated the controversy, and then analyze the purposes behind the tradition of the elders. We can then see how they resemble our traditions so that we can spot parallel dangers.
Legislation in Exodus 30:19–21 (see 40:12) required only priests engaged in the tabernacle service to wash their hands. The law also required the priests to regard as holy the portion of the sacrifices that they were allowed to eat. They and everyone in their household could share in this food only when ceremonially clean (Num. 18:8–13). The Pharisees’ tradition extended these laws to everyone in the land, not just to priests serving in the temple, and to all food, not just to holy offerings. The Pharisees were striving for holiness above and beyond what the law prescribed. In a variation of the aphorism that a man’s home is his castle, the Pharisees believed that a man’s home was his temple.20 This statement is an exaggeration, but it conveys how important purity issues were to them. God demanded for the people to “be holy because I … am holy” (Lev. 19:2). To the Pharisees, holiness was not restricted to the sacred temple area but extended to the entire land in descending degrees from the temple (see m. Kelim 1:6–9).21
The Pharisees identified the washing of hands as belonging to “the tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:5; see Gal. 1:14), but Jesus labels it pejoratively as “the traditions of men” (7:8). The Pharisees and their spiritual heirs, however, believed that their tradition had been delivered to Moses by God (m. ’Abot 1:1–2). This tradition consisted of unwritten law that tried to fill the gaps and silences in the purity laws in Leviticus and Numbers. Because they based their decisions on the logical analysis of the explicit and implicit data in Scripture, the Pharisees considered them rooted in Scripture and equal in authority.
We can identify three purposes behind the development of this tradition that have affinities with the development of traditions in Christian circles. (1) The tradition of the elders tried to make the basic requirement that Israel be holy to the Lord (Lev. 19:2) something that was attainable in everyday life. The Pharisees were quite liberal in reducing the biblical requirement of bathing the whole body (Lev. 15; 16:26, 28; 17:15–16; 22:1–7) to the simple act of washing hands. They did not attempt to skirt the demands of the law. These pious interpreters had a genuine desire to provide precise guidance for laypeople on what one must do to be holy. They did not think they were voiding the commands of God but making them applicable. The tradition was designed to give laypeople a map that charted what was permissible or proscribed, clean or unclean, so that they could live the life of godliness.
(2) The tradition of the elders was intended to deter pagan influences that surrounded the nation from making inroads into Judaism (see Lev. 20:1–7). This attitude is expressed in the Letter of Aristeas 139, which exults in the law that “surrounds us with unbroken palisades and iron walls, to prevent our mixing with any of the other peoples in any matter being thus kept pure in body and soul, preserved from false beliefs, and worshiping the only God omnipotent over all creation.” It encouraged people to make a conscious effort to set themselves apart from the unwashed hordes who were destined for destruction. Actions such as immersion and washing hands were tangible, positive gestures that displayed who God’s elect were who would be vindicated at the end of the age.
The Pharisees acted like Daniels by trying to preserve and proclaim their distinctive holiness, not like Mordecais, who counseled Esther to keep her national identity a secret (Est. 2:10, 20). The concern for ritual cleanliness was motivated by a desire to insulate Israel from the onslaught of Hellenism (the secular humanism of the day). Harrington writes: “The purity laws were emphasized because they plainly distinguished Israel from non-Israel and defined Israel as physical and dependent on history and genealogy not on a universal, spiritual idea.”22 The laws created the illusion of an ordered cosmos, with carefully erected boundaries that kept every person and thing in its proper place. All these distinctions became important for conserving the distinctive nature of Judaism and to prevent it from being mongrelized.23 By making such things critical, they could reinforce group identity and increase devotion to the law.
(3) The tradition assumes that God ordered the details, and one must study and enact them to meet God. The later oral law specifies, for example, not only how to wash your hands, but where to lay your napkin during the meal so as not to defile it, when to say the prayers, when and how to sweep up. These may seem like trifling things to concern a religion. But Neusner counters that the claims of the law were important precisely because they could be extended to the humble things that one can actually control in life. If one were to ask, “How do I approach almighty God?” the psalmist says, with “clean hands and a pure heart” (Ps. 24:4). But what precisely is a person supposed to do? The rabbis would say that when one eats, one approaches the throne of the almighty God, and one must wash one’s hands and hold the wine in the right hand and the oil in the left. That is something that one can do! “And in doing it,” Neusner says, “one shall know that there are rules for guidance, and these rules stand for reverence and awe, for mindfulness and thoughtfulness, in God’s presence.”24
This tradition gives everyday acts of life holy significance and reminds one of God and how one can concretely show one’s devotion to God. The Pharisees affirmed that God created order and that human affairs prosper only when things are ordered. Consequently, they preferred strict rules, orderly programs, and careful debates about the application of texts, lest they lose control. From their perspective Jesus was completely out of control because he disregarded their rules and crossed their boundaries.
What are the Christian affinities with the Pharisees’ traditions of the elders? (1) Christian communities also have an oral tradition that fills the gaps and directs them on what precisely they should and should not do. For example, someone may ask, Should we tithe gross income or net income? Do we need to tithe the produce from the garden? Should a church accept a tithe from lottery winnings? The answers to these questions usually do not come from explicit passages in the Scripture but from a tradition that tries to honor God’s requirements and make things definite so that we know what we are to do and when we have done it. But we court danger when we treat decisions on such matters as sacrosanct and apply them rigidly.
(2) Christian communities will also stress one thing or another to reinforce their identity over against others. Sometimes the stress will be on a particular practice; sometimes, a distinctive doctrine. In holding to this tradition, they want to make clear that they are this kind of people and not like “them” (whoever “them” may be). The danger lurks that we may turn our distinctiveness and purity into an idol that supersedes the word of God. Many years ago a professor who taught at my seminary was challenged on his teaching concerning a particular belief. He overwhelmed his critic with passage after passage from the Scripture to support his point. The critic refused to yield, however. In frustration the critic exclaimed, “That may be Bible, but it’s not Baptist!”
Maintaining our heritage can be valuable as we seek to be faithful to our vision of the truth. Insisting on doctrinal purity to fend off corruption from outside is not ignoble. Yet we must guard against the pitfall of the Pharisees, who drew the circle so narrowly that they excluded 99 percent of the human race. Christian communities may erect barriers so high and so thick to preserve their theological virtue that they cannot reach others. The outward signs of obedience in Jesus’ day—keeping the Sabbath, observing food laws and circumcision, washing hands—became the badges that marked out the elect as those who are “in.” These same badges were used to bar others from the circle of God’s grace and acceptance.
Mark shows Jesus’ whole ministry challenging the categorization of persons and things into pure and impure. The law of clean and unclean establishes boundaries, and the Pharisees set themselves up as the border guards. Keep lepers, sinners, and those with a flux out; follow Sabbath rules and wash hands before eating clean food. They defended a certain kind of community and order. Jesus overstepped the boundaries by attacking their purity regulations and by claiming that true uncleanness is a moral, not a ritual, deficiency. One need not protect holiness with a fence of rules. On the contrary, God’s holiness bursts all bounds. It does not suffer contamination but transforms everything it touches. As Augustine said, “Light, even though it passes through pollution, is not polluted.” Jesus displays this power when he touches a leper, is touched by a woman with a flow of blood, and touches a corpse. He is not made unclean but instead cleanses and restores to life. Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees reveals that religious observance should not clash with common sense and common decency.
(3) Christian traditions also have parallels with the elders’ concern for details. Things are to be done in a certain way. All sorts of disputes have broken out in church history and local churches over what are perceived to be violations of those ways. Baptism is to be done in a certain way. Celebration of the Eucharist is to follow certain patterns. We must guard against the danger that we become so focused on the details that we develop tunnel vision and miss the grand design. We can easily become enmeshed in technicalities and in minutia while ignoring the weightier commands of the law—the broad and inexhaustible principles, such as the exercise of justice, mercy, and faith (Matt. 23:23–28).
For years preachers have ridiculed the petty concerns of pharisaic tradition without bothering to understand what evoked them. Many do not realize that their own traditions will be just as easily ridiculed by those who may live centuries later in a different culture. In bridging the contexts we should reflect on our own pious concerns that may contravene God’s will expressed in the love for parents and neighbor. Such reflection poses hazards. One who questions sacred cows will usually meet with the same fate as Jesus.
The purity system of the Pharisees was based on the assumption that God lives in the temple and that the biblical laws provided guidelines for how the priests were to approach the holy God and perform their duties. Their application of these laws to life in general made it possible even for those who were not priests to have access to God outside the sacred temple precincts. Obeying their requirements was not easy but was possible. But Jesus made God accessible to everyone, even those who did not practice pharisaic purity. One did not have to be a priest or pretend to be a priest. Being inside the temple has nothing to do with access to God. What matters is what comes from inside of you.
Contemporary Significance
IN INTERPRETING THIS passage we should be careful not to belittle first-century Judaism as a dead letter, awash in legalism, when our own Christianity can be just as dead and just as legalistic.25 Christians also add traditions to the essentials of the faith, apply them legalistically, and treat them as if they have been ordained forever by God. They feel no less troubled or angry than the Pharisees did in Jesus’ day when anyone challenges or undermines them. We will look at the contemporary significance of the concern for purity, the problem of establishing boundaries, and the danger of hypocrisy.
(1) Most Christians today do not believe that food is subject to religious defilement. Many eat pork sausage and cheeseburgers (a forbidden mixture of meat and dairy foods) without any moral qualms and may only worry about high cholesterol, chemical additives, and the destruction of rain forests to raise cattle to stock fast-food restaurants. Yet the issue of impurity, so vital to the Pharisees, is not irrelevant to contemporary life. Purity has to do with the way one orders and classifies persons, things, and times. Purity regulations label persons, objects, and places as pure or polluted, fit or unfit, as susceptible to impurity or as a cause of impurity.26
While many today may not think that they worry about such notions, the basic idea behind purity laws is one with which everyone is familiar: “A place for everything and everything in its place.”27 We judge something “impure” when it seems out of place. Impurity arises when “the wrong thing appears in the wrong place at the wrong time.”28 For example, many enjoy firecrackers exploding on the Fourth of July. These same people, however, would regard setting off firecrackers during the Lord’s Supper as reprehensible. We therefore have clear ideas about what is pure and impure, whether we are fully conscious of them or not. The universal aversion to dirt, disease, and death governs these concerns. What one regards as “dirt” can take many forms. The danger lurks that one can develop a defensive religious posture, as the Pharisees of Jesus’ day did, and become all-consumed in keeping out the dirt.
Many engage in heated religious arguments over what they regard to be life and death issues that to the outside world and to the average Christian are much ado about nothing. The root issue has to do with what one considers proper or pure (which becomes one’s sacred tradition) and improper or impure. Jonathan Swift satirized this pettiness in the Lilliputians’ war over whether an egg should be cracked at the big end or at the little end.29 Garrison Keillor does the same when he describes his religious heritage. He says in his Lake Wobegon Days that he came from an “exclusive” group that believed in keeping itself pure of false doctrine by avoiding association with the impure: “We made sure that any who fellowshipped with us were straight on all the details of the Faith.” Unfortunately, he writes, the firebrand founders “turned their guns on each other.”
‘Scholarly to the core and perfect literalists every one, they set to arguing over points that, to any outsider, would have seemed very minor indeed but which to them were crucial to the Faith, including the question: if Believer A is associated with Believer B who has somehow associated himself with C who holds a False Doctrine, must D break off association with A, even though A does not hold the Doctrine, to avoid the taint?
The correct answer is: Yes. Some…, however, felt that D should only speak with A and urge him to breakoff with B. The [ones] who felt otherwise promptly broke off with them.30
Many may recognize this caricature in their own religious traditions. It results in a church devoted to turning Christianity into an unassailable fortress by building impregnable walls to keep the pure in and the impure out. The concern for purity directly affects evangelism. This closed system, more often than not, shuts one off from fellow human beings and from real fellowship with God. Roy Pearson comments that God meant for the church to get mixed up in messes and with people who have messed up their lives.
It is a fact too long neglected that the church has in common with the chimney sweep that it cannot do its job in comfortable surroundings or with clean hands. In this sense, cleanliness is not next to godliness: dirt is. Dirt, pain, sorrow, prejudice, injustice, and treachery.31
Jesus is like those who want to run the church for those who do not yet attend. How do we include them into the family rather than exclude them? His teaching had a direct impact on Christian missionary practice when Paul advised the Corinthians to eat whatever was set before them (1 Cor. 10:27) and told the Romans “that no food is unclean in itself” (Rom. 14:14). Quit judging others (14:4, 10, 13). Quit putting stumbling blocks in their way (14:13). Learn to live in harmony (15:5) and build up one another (14:19) rather than walls of separation. We can imagine how we would respond if guests turn up their noses at the food we offered them because it somehow did not meet their religious standards. What if their rejection of our food also implied that we were somehow impure, somehow untouchable? It would hardly dispose us to hear their message. In applying this passage, we should ask ourselves, “Are there subtle and not so subtle ways in which we communicate to others that they are ‘dirty’ and unfit for contact with us? How does it hinder our ability to evangelize them?”
The issues at stake in this passage also have to do with question of religious identity. It raises the question: What is appropriate to mark us off as the people of God from others who are not, and what is inappropriate? A danger lurks in drawing no boundaries at all so that we have no identity over against pagan culture. Purity concerns are boundary markers. One can see from Jesus’ reproach of the Pharisees’ tradition, however, that boundaries drawn too tightly choke out love. Worldliness excludes God from our lives, but we must be careful not to exclude the worldly from the love of God. One writer confesses:
God does not always respect the boundaries we create and carefully protect. Drawing lines in the theological sand may serve our purposes; separating good guys from bad guys and can be helpful, because it is hard to know that you’re on the inside unless you know who is on the outside. But God has a studied disregard for anxieties of this sort. Prodigal grace keeps spilling over into alien territory.32
Jesus continues to cross boundaries in the very next episode in Mark, where he extends grace to a pagan, Syrophoenician woman.
The Pharisees believed that others would know they were God’s people by their purity: washing hands, cups, pots, eating kosher, keeping the Sabbath. Paul understood the tenor of Jesus’ teaching when he asserted: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). Christians today sing, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Christians do not always live that way, but the inner purity of heart that radiates love and morality should make them stand out amid a wicked and perverse generation.
Jesus accused the Pharisees of being hypocrites in this passage. The Pharisees did not corner the market on hypocrisy, and hypocrites continue to plague the church. Jesus was not against the overt act of doing God’s will, but he refused to cotton to any attempt to reckon something as moral and pleasing to God that was not a true expression of character—either make the tree good and the fruit good, or make the tree bad and the fruit bad (Matt. 12:33).
The most infamous hypocrites are those who try to cloak the evil within them with a show of external piety. Judas best fits that category of hypocrite in the Gospel. He comes to Gethsemane with a show of affection and honor, but it is all a sordid ploy to capture his Master. Other hypocrites deceive themselves as much as others. The scrupulous Pharisees best fit this category. When Jesus calls them hypocrites, he reveals how easily sincerity and a desire to do precisely what God commands can go astray and ignore what God requires. The Pharisees’ lip service and religious gestures fool others and themselves into thinking that they are pious.
It is so easy for religious people to obey all the regulations and believe all the correct doctrines in a perfunctory way, but their heart is not in it. They may also concentrate on executing religious actions that certify their external purity while totally neglecting issues of inner purity. Hypocrites may fool themselves that they have done all that God requires by doing this or that with the greatest of care. They play by the rules but allow them to run roughshod over others. How many times do Christians ignore the vices in the list and concentrate on minor pieties? They wind up with a religion that affects only the hands but that never touches the heart. The church needs reminding again that it can be correct in outward form and theology but not have the spirit of Christ. Goodness comes from inner purity, a life transformed within, rather than from the pure observance of rules and doctrine.