All Saints Lutheran Church
Pastor Raita Neely
Deut. 4:1-2,6-9; James 1:17-27; Mk.7:1-8,14-15;21-23
August 31, 2003
"God's Law of Love!"

This morning I invite you to think of someone in your life who influenced you, especially when it came to thinking about what life in Christ looks like. Someone you would define as a "beautiful person" in your life. I don't mean someone who might win a beauty contest, but rather someone who loved you unconditionally, was a model for you for living fully. A person who taught you to love and have compassion, a person with a deep concern for peace and justice, a person who lived life more than skin deep, but whose whole life you admired and learned from. I hope each of you can think of someone like that who influenced your life.

Beauty can be skin deep and so can religion. Religion can be concerned only with externals, with form, ritual and tradition. The "tradition of the elders" that Jesus is referring to in the reading from Mark were the interpretations, rules and procedures that had grown up around the written law. They were the oral commentary on the written Torah, and application of it to real life situations.

Although the Pharisees in the New Testament come off rather poorly when used as a foil for Jesus, they actually were the "good guys." They were the sect of the common people. Their quest was to make the law of God practical, like daily bread, not cake for special occasions. They did their best to live morally and involve God in every detail of their lives - how and what they ate, whom they married, how they dressed and so on.

In their day, the Pharisees were much admired by the common people. Their zeal for traditional Jewish values, and their strict lifestyle, placed them on a pedestal of respect. In the New Testament we see that the Pharisees, who were the best Bible students of their generation, the best behaved, became the constant opponents of Jesus, and in the end, actually plotted Jesus' death. The Pharisees believed that both the written law and the oral traditions were gifts from God and of equal value. In our Gospel for this morning, they want to know if Jesus shares their views. The issue is not only the contrast between the commands of God and human traditions, but the relationship between inner motivation and outward behavior. Jesus accuses the Pharisees of elevating human tradition over express commands of God.


The Pharisees had come to Jesus on a "fact finding" mission, and they noticed that some of Jesus' disciples were eating their food without having washed their hands in the manner in which the Pharisees said people should. They believed that unless people washed in a particular way they were ritually unclean, that meant, unclean in the sight of God. so they asked Jesus, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" (v.5)

Jesus answered in what seems a surprising manner. He doesn't apologize for his disciples' failure to follow the prescribed ritual. Instead he says it's not the clean hands but the clean heart that matters. It is the clean heart that is the measure of true religion. Merely to follow a ritual because it has been handed down by a former generation, without giving heed to the will of God, is to practice a religion that is only skin deep.

It is easy to practice skin deep religion. It is to be concerned only with externals - to report to worship, follow the form, fold the hands and bow the head, sit quietly, pass the offering plate, say the creed, and miss the fact that God's Word comes to you in order to challenge you and change you into a new creature. Now I'm not suggesting that we abolish worship or the liturgy or the offering or the creed. We need all of these and they serve a far better purpose than the ancient rituals advocated by the Pharisees. But there must be something more. Without it, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, as quoted by Jesus, we worship in vain. We need a clean heart.

The problem with the Pharisees was that they had a pseudo holiness. We all know that rules made by people are more easily followed than the law that God gives us. With real effort, we can keep the rules we make, but to keep God's rules perfectly is impossible. So we want to use our rules as a standard for moral behavior and piety. We want a piety which is measurable, and it makes no difference who the judge is: our own conscience, other people, or God. But if all we have is the externally measurable, we have nothing more than a piety based on appearances. On the basis of such a piety, instead of being humble before God, we might even demand recognition from God for our good behavior. And that is exactly what had happened to the Pharisees. They were expecting praise from God because they kept the laws and tried to humble those who did not.

In other words, the Pharisees had some very troubling characteristics: they were arrogant, hypocritical, they had faith in their ideas and traditions about God instead of a relationship with the Living God, they were inclined to see what's wrong with everything, they craved recognition, they believed they were closer to God than others, they gloried in the past instead of seeking what God was doing right before their eyes, they were divisive, but would not take correction, they were bossy and intolerant, they lacked mercy and were suspicious of anything they had not thought up. They forgot that the only thing we have to boast about is God's love and mercy for us. As Jeremiah says, (9:23-25) "Thus saith the Lord, "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understand and knows Me, that I am the Lord..." The apostle Paul puts it this way, Let him who boasts boast in the Lord!" Our attitude is not "Look, I did it!" but rather, "God did it!"

Sometimes religion is only skin deep because people have failed to look inside.
"It is what comes out of a person that defiles, " said Jesus. "For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these things come from within and defile a person." (vv.20-23)

It is so easy to go from "fact finder" to "fault finder", as the Pharisees did. Instead of self-examination, of being sure that what they said they believed and what they did was consistent, they went looking for the faults of others. We should always remember that as human beings, we always see the speck in another's eye much quicker than the log that is in our own. The desert father Abbot Moses remarked, "They who are conscious of their own sins have no eyes for the sins of their neighbor." Our first plea is always, create in me a clean heart, O God.

Jesus tells us that God's commandment is fulfilled through love, love of God and of our neighbor. When our faith is more than skin deep, instead of sifting through to see who's on the inside and who is on the outside, we roll up our sleeves and become involved in the needs of others. As we heard from the letter to James, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and keep oneself unstained by the world." (v.27)

I am sure all of you have heard of the "buddy system" practiced at most camps where swimming is an option. The story is told that a young boy was at camp for the first time and the lifeguard told him, "You have a buddy. you swim by him, and when I blow a whistle, you show me that your buddy is with you by raising your hand. That way, nobody gets lost, nobody drowns." After he finished his instructions, the life guard asked, "Now, what does it mean to have a buddy?" The child answered, "A buddy is someone who drowns with you." That's what clean hearts produce: a buddy system in which we willingly give ourselves and our gifts to others, where we drown with them in their sorrows, where we empty our pockets, if need be, so that their stomachs and their hearts and their souls may be filled.

We can't make ourselves clean. Only God can. We can wash and even scrub away the dirt and shape up our lives to look good on the outside. But only God's water of cleansing and the blood of his only Son given for you and me can do the deep cleaning. But, there is a self-righteousness in humanity that does not want to die. There is something inside us that is not bothered when others are excluded, that in fact wants others excluded, that feels more special when we're on the inside and somebody else is not. The result is a false sense of superiority, fed by the intent to exclude others.

The Pharisees kept the traditions and didn't want to admit that they needed to repent. They didn't take in anything unclean, so they thought they were clean. Jesus said they were only fooling themselves, but not God.

Real religion is more than merely looking on the outside, at all the rituals and traditions. It is asking God for a clean heart. It is walking the talk, so that God can fashion us into people who are beautiful, people who are full of God's love to overflowing. People who follow Jesus and in the following and in the loving are made clean.

God is the giver of all life and also the giver of the law. God also gives us teachers and examples whom we can follow and emulate every day. It is in knowing and practicing God's ways that we become free to practice the discipline of the law, and as we do so, we discover that we also become free to love, and free to live life in an incredible way. Amen.