September 1, 2024, What Is Purity of Heart? Mark 7:1-23 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ September 1, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

to listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is below:

To the people in our gospel reading – the Pharisees, Jesus, Jewish people in the first century – what did it mean to be defiled, or unclean? To be unclean meant to be unacceptable to God, not pure enough to approach him or even to be part of the assembly of his people for worship. Uncleanness isolated people. We might use different words to describe it: guilt, sin, shame, badness, but we understand the idea. Lots of things could make you unclean, according to the Law of Moses. But some of the most common, day-to-day restrictions were the dietary rules. Jews in ancient Israel, and orthodox Jews today, follow a strict set of regulations about food and drink. Failing to keep Kosher, according to the Law of Moses, would separate you from God and it would separate you from your fellow Jews, because it would make you unclean, just like failing to observe the ceremonial washing of hands and hundreds and hundreds of other rules and regulations.

This was a part of Jewish life, something every one of his disciples would have learned from infancy. But on this day that we read about, Jesus says something that shocks everybody. “Why are your disciples making themselves unclean by eating with unwashed hands?” The Pharisees want to know. And Jesus answers them, “Listen to me, nothing can make a person unclean from the outside.”

As usual, as soon as the confused disciples got Jesus to themselves, they asked him to explain. He gave them a graphic explanation, which was basically a description of how the digestive system works. “Can’t you see, then,” Jesus told them, “that nothing you eat can possibly make you unclean.” And Mark adds this little side note for the reader – “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

Now, that was mind-boggling for the disciples and for all Jews, because they had all grown up carefully and rigorously keeping themselves clean and pure, keeping themselves acceptable to God, by observing all the regulations for butchering and for food preparation; and for what foods couldn’t be eaten in combination with what other foods, like beef with dairy products; and for what foods could never be eaten at all, ever, like lobster and shrimp.

If you remember, Peter once had a vision of all kinds of unclean animals lowered down from heaven in a big sheet. And a voice from heaven said to him, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.” But Peter said, “No way! I have never in my life eaten anything unclean.” Peter and the disciples had been raised to keep the Law, absolutely. For Jesus to suddenly declare that any and all foods were clean was mind-boggling.

But for us, not so much. We try to eat healthy, and a lot of people, especially Americans, kind of obsess about weight, sometimes to the point of making it a moral issue rather than just a health issue. But there isn’t any food that we avoid eating because we believe it separates us from God. Saying that all foods are clean was a huge revelation to the disciples. It presented a sea-change for Jewish people who lived by the Law. But it isn’t astonishing or earth-shattering or life-changing for us. Because that just isn’t a part of our culture, or our religion.

So, is there anything astonishing or earth-shattering or life-changing for us in this teaching? Is there anything outside of ourselves that we believe can make us unacceptable to God, or bad, or guilty, or shameful?

I think there are a lot of things that we think of that way. As an obvious one, just right off the top of my head, there is pornography. For most of us, certain classes of drugs: illegal drugs, or even legal drugs, misused. For some very conservative people, maybe drinking or smoking. Does what Jesus said apply to these kinds of things, things we pretty much all agree are bad for us? And what does it mean if it does apply? Can we take Jesus’ words to mean that watching pornography or snorting cocaine or drinking to excess doesn’t make us unclean – indeed that those things can’t make us unclean? Is Jesus really saying that nothing – including things we know are truly dangerous – have any power to do that? And if he actually is saying that, well, what does that mean?

First and foremost, Jesus does truly mean that there is no thing that has the power to make us sinful people from the outside – and that is because our sin is already right here, inside us. Sin is a matter of the heart. It’s not some external force that we can avoid by living a pure life: by keeping our noses clean, as they say. You can ask any person who has committed themselves to live as a monastic, a nun or a monk or a hermit. They can tell you. You can’t avoid sin by hiding away in a cell; you can’t avoid sin by separating yourself from the world; you absolutely can’t – because you will always bring it with you.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that there is nothing coming into the body from outside that can hurt you. Loads of things can harm us, depending on who we are and what our weaknesses are. We can be harmed terribly by drug or alcohol use. But we can also be destroyed by having too much wealth. There’s an expression, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Paul put it this way: all things are clean – but not all things are helpful. That’s a matter for wisdom and discernment. But not purity.

I think the second lesson we can learn from what Jesus taught his disciples is that we are not in any position to judge another person to be unclean. Jesus is very clear about that, in a lot of places. He taught: don’t judge one another, or you will be judged. He said: why are you bothered by that speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, when look, there’s a giant plank in your own eye? He said: let the one of you who is without sin be the first one to cast the stone.

It’s pretty easy for us to judge what’s going on outside of a person. The Pharisees looked at the disciples eating without washing their hands and they said, “Those men are unclean.” We might do much the same thing in our modern way. “Those neighborhood teens are no good, with all their drinking and drugs and who knows what else.” But we can only see the outside. And only God knows what is going on in a person’s heart.

But I think maybe the most important thing we can learn from what Jesus says here is this. Uncleanness, being defiled: that was all about separation, all about isolation. It was all about not being worthy enough to draw near to God – not being pure enough to come into the Temple, not being good enough to stand in the midst of the congregation, not being clean enough to be in communion with other people.

And to be good enough to be in communion with God and his people, that was important enough to follow any and every rule and regulation. It was worth any amount of care and self-restraint to be sure you were worthy, to be allowed in, and not kept out. But here came Jesus, blowing it all out of the water with one little teaching. “There’s not a single thing in all of creation that can make you unclean from the outside. Your uncleanness is already in your heart, and that’s where every kind of impurity comes from.”

Which kind of sounds like bad news, but in reality it is the best news. We are, every one of us, sinful. But what we are not is separated from God. That’s the very reason Jesus came to dwell among us. “I am certain,” Paul wrote, “that nothing can separate us from the love of God: neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future,neither the world above nor the world below—there is nothing in all of creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing – nothing – can separate us from God. Not our uncleanness. Not our unworthiness. Not even the gigantic mess that our life sometimes seems to be. Nothing will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which belongs to us through Jesus.

Un-isolating us is the very reason Jesus came. He didn’t come to make sure we followed every single one of the rules and regs. He didn’t come to make sure we go to church on Sunday and give money to charities and stop smoking. He came to do something so much more radical. He came to make the love of God visible and touchable and hearable to us. He came to pay off the impossible debt of our sin. He came to storm the gates of death and open them forever. He came to cut out our hard, greedy, fearful little hearts and to replace them with tender hearts, hearts of flesh, hearts imprinted with his new law, which is all summed up in one word: love.

He came to give us his very self: his own flesh to eat and his own blood to drink, so that we can be clean and acceptable and beloved children of the Father.

Let us pray:

Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us. Cast us not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from us. Restore to us the joy of your salvation, and uphold us with a willing spirit. Amen