Mark 7: Why Your Heart Matters More Than Rituals

Have you ever heard anyone say, and I’d be very surprised if you haven’t, “All religions are just different ways to the same God, to the same end?” Have you ever heard that? Have you ever been troubled by the same thought yourself? Have you ever wondered whether what I believe is an accident of where I was born, the country I was born in, my family, or are they really all just different ways to the same end? In my opinion, at least, it’s likely that people who make those claims that all religions are different pathways to the same end have probably never seriously studied the different religions. There are certain superficial similarities across many, many religions. If you only look at the surface, you can say, “Yeah, this looks the same. This looks the same.” We can think it’s all really the same. But when you get below the surface, you see there are quite a lot of differences. I would be surprised if people who make that claim have ever really seriously understood the nature of the Christian faith.

A couple of weeks ago, when Daniel was preaching in Mark chapter 6, we encountered people who encountered Jesus who had already made up their minds before they really heard him, what they would believe about him. Their worldview, their presuppositions said, “This man is the carpenter. We know him. We know where he grew up. We can’t believe that he’s anything more than that.” They were not prepared to consider the evidence that was right before their eyes to really understand who Jesus was. A similar process is going on, I think, for many who claim that all religions lead to the same goal.

Mark in his gospel confronts us time and time again with the words and the actions of Jesus in such a way that he demonstrates the uniqueness of Jesus. You can choose to believe what he says, what he does or not. But you don’t really have the option of saying, like many do, that Jesus is just another religious teacher. We saw an example just two weeks ago in the feeding of the 5,000. It’s not something that anybody can do. We saw it last week in the story of Jesus walking on the water and calming the storm. Clear signs out of the Old Testament that Jesus was none other than God. He even identified himself with the divine name. We’ll see it this week as Jesus engages with the religious leaders from Jerusalem.

The Traditions of the Elders

Unlike the previous sections in this book, Mark chapter 7 doesn’t seem to connect too strongly with what goes before. It is likely that it is still set in Galilee because in verse 24 it says then he left Galilee. But we’re not told clearly here. The passage starts, Mark 7 starts with, “one day some Pharisees and teachers of the law of religious law arrive from Jerusalem to see Jesus.” We’re not told explicitly why they came, although I think it becomes clear fairly soon. Note that Jerusalem to Galilee is probably a bit over 100 kilometers, at least a three-day journey. You’ve got this delegation of Pharisees and teachers of religious law who are hot-footing it on this three or four-day journey to see Jesus, and the first thing they do, it seems fairly clear, is they’re looking for grounds to criticize him or discredit him. Jesus has already upset the religious leaders several times by healing on the Sabbath, by claiming to forgive sins. They’re out to gather evidence. They’re out to try and find ways to bring him down.

It doesn’t take them long to find something. They criticized Jesus’ disciples, and by implication, Jesus, who is the rabbi, the teacher, for not following the ancient traditions in the matter of handwashing before eating. Now, that may not sound like a big deal to you and me, but it was a pretty big deal to them. I don’t want to go into great detail about this Jewish law of handwashing, but we need a little bit of detail to understand what’s going on. The Jews had very elaborate handwashing rituals which had little to do with actual hygiene and more to do with ritual or ceremonial purity or cleansing. This is not like you remember during COVID we had to sing “Happy Birthday” twice when you’re washing hands, right? That was so that you actually clean your hands well and get the germs off. This had nothing to do with hygiene, really. This had to do with how you held your hands and how you poured the water and in what order and how long and all this kind of detail. It was very ceremonial. As the passage says, they also had special ways of washing their hands after coming from the market and washing cups and jugs and kettles. These rules were just the tip of the iceberg of all the rules that had developed, and it became known as the traditions of the elders or the ancient traditions. There were many laws and restrictions covering almost every aspect of life that related to being ceremonially clean, and they came to be known as the oral law as opposed to the written law, which is recorded in the books of Moses, the Torah.

The Origin of Ceremonial Law

Where did all these laws come from? And why did they become important to the Jews? Most of them have their origins in the Torah, the books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus through to Deuteronomy. You’ll find when you read those books there are all kinds of rules and laws there, some of which seem quite strange to us. There are lists of food that you can eat and food that you can’t eat. Primarily, the difference is not primarily health; it’s one food makes you ceremonially unclean and the other doesn’t. There were all kinds of other things that made you unclean, ceremonially unclean. Some illnesses made you unclean. Some activities made you unclean. Touching a dead body, for example, or touching someone who was unclean would make you unclean. Uncleanness was very contagious. Once you were unclean, there were consequences to that. It often meant you had to isolate yourself from the community. It meant you could not join in the worship or other activities of the community. It was quite serious stuff. To make yourself clean again, you had to go through some kind of ritual, usually some kind of washing and very often offering some kind of sacrifice.

The primary purpose of the idea of ceremonial uncleanness for the Jews was not so much about hygiene. It was about reminding them that God, that Yahweh, was different. When God gave the law through Moses, the people had just come out of Egypt where they had spent 400 years observing and being influenced by the religious practice of Egypt. God was wanting to teach the people, “I’m not like the gods of Egypt. You don’t worship me in the same way that they were worshiped. I’m different. I’m holy. I’m separate.” They were just about to go, the Israelites were just about to go into Canaan where there were all kinds of religious practices. God had to make it clear, “You don’t worship me like the people in Canaan worship the gods of the Canaanites. I am different. I am holy and I want you to reflect my character.”

Many of these religious laws and the ceremonial laws were designed to remind them over and over again through the everyday events of life that God was different, that God was holy, and that they too had to be different. They needed to learn that God was not to be taken carelessly or casually. God could not be manipulated. It’s a lesson we still struggle with sometimes. God was not to be treated or worshiped like the other gods that they had encountered. He was different. They could not come to God on their terms. They had to come to God on his terms. The rhythms and the routines of life were shaped in such a way to remind them of these things. This is still true, although we are not affected by the ceremonial law, and we’ll come back to that. It’s still true for us that we are not free to determine the terms on which we come to God. We’re not free to negotiate with him. We come to God on his terms that he sets or we don’t come at all.

A Fence Around the Law

A lot had changed from the time the law was given until the time of Jesus. The traditions that the Jewish leaders were talking about were not the same as the laws found in the Old Testament. What had happened? It’s commendable from one point of view that the Jews, in their desire not to break the law, decided to take steps to really make it hard to break the law. They created new laws and new rules which they called a “fence around the law.” The idea is if the law says that you can’t ride your donkey faster than 15 kilometers an hour—that’s pretty fast for a donkey—but if you want to make sure you don’t break it, you set the speed limit at 10 kilometers an hour. If you don’t break that speed limit, you’ve got no way of breaking the proper limit. Around all the laws of the Old Testament, the Jews built hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other regulations and rules with the intent that it would stop them from breaking the law of God. It’s a good intent, but there were problems.

These rules covered every aspect of life. They covered Sabbath-keeping. For example, God said, “Keep the Sabbath day holy.” The Jews thought, “What does that mean? What can you do? What can’t you do? How far can you walk? What are the tasks that you can do?” They built all these extra rules to make sure they did not break the “keep the Sabbath day holy” law. These rules developed into a body of oral law that became known as the traditions of the elders, the ancient traditions that Mark refers to. They were written down some hundreds of years after the time of Jesus. During the time of Jesus, I wasn’t able to find out, but I’m not sure that the average man in the street took some of these laws very seriously, but the Pharisees and the teachers of religion certainly did. They took them very seriously indeed. In fact, without quite realizing it, they had become more concerned about their traditions and their customs than they were about the actual law and the intent of the law that God had given them. That’s why Jesus was so critical of them.

You Ignore God’s Law and Substitute Your Own Traditions

Judy read it so beautifully for us from verse 6. Jesus replied, “You hypocrites.” Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you. For he wrote:

“These people honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship is a farce,
    for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.
For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition.”
Mark 7:6-8

He gave them an example. He said, “You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition. For instance, Moses gave you this law from God: ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘Anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say it’s all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so, you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition. And this is only one example among many others.” Blind adherence to the oral law, the ancient traditions, had blinded them to the reality and purpose of God’s law and resulted in them actually breaking God’s law.

Two Serious Problems

There are two potentially very serious problems here. They’re problems not just for the Jewish leaders; they can be problems for us, too. The first is that we can allow our traditions, our customs, our preferred ways of doing things to become more important to us than what God says is most important.

The real danger here is that we think we are fulfilling God’s requirements for salvation, and really all we’re doing is keeping our own set of rules and standards. We can be very sincere and committed and be sincerely wrong like the Jews, because sincerity is no guarantee of truth. Let me give some examples. These may or may not ring any bells for you. We may become more concerned about being in church on Sunday than about living lives of integrity and honesty and love Monday to Saturday. We can be more concerned about our doctrinal correctness than we are about our relationships with each other. We can be more concerned about how our church looks than we are about the lost. When I was young, I think the world has grown out of some of these things, but good Christians didn’t go to the shops on Sunday because that was breaking the Sabbath. It might be a good idea, but it’s like a fence around the law. There were lots of things that good Christians didn’t do. Good Christian girls didn’t wear makeup. Good Christians didn’t play cards, at least in my community anyway. As for dancing, that was strictly off-limits. Oh, shock. You can see how easy it is to set up our own standards and our own expectations. By fulfilling those expectations, we actually think we’re doing what God wants us to do.

The second problem is that we can think, or we can potentially think, that we can achieve or earn our own salvation based on our performance, based on keeping these standards that we set up.

You Are Defiled by What Comes from Your Heart

Verse 14, Jesus called the crowd to come here and listen. He said, “All of you listen.” He said, “It’s not what goes into your body that defiles you. You are defiled by what comes from your heart.” He was using that to summarize really all of the ceremonial law, which often had to do with food laws, things that they ate. I don’t know about the crowd; I suspect they didn’t really understand. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t understand. But even Jesus’ disciples seemed not to understand what he was saying. When they get into a house, it says in verse 17, “Jesus went into a house to get away from the crowd. And his disciples asked him what he meant by the parable he just used.” Which parable? That short one-line parable in verse 15 where he said, “It’s not what goes into your body that defiles you. You’re defiled by what comes out from your heart.”

Again, Jesus was being very, very radical here. A well-known commentator, William Barclay, commented that this passage was one of the most revolutionary passages in the New Testament because in one sentence Jesus had completely reinterpreted much of what the Jews then and still believe makes them right with God: all the requirements of the ceremonial law. Jesus explains it’s not what you eat. It’s not how you wash your hands. It’s none of those things that make you clean or unclean before God. It’s what comes out of your heart. Jesus gives them a fairly nasty list. Can I use the word nasty? Let me read it to you. This is what comes out of the heart: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these vile things come from within, and they are what defile you.

What Does It Mean?

What does it mean? Firstly, what doesn’t it mean? It doesn’t mean that any ritual or tradition cannot be helpful. Our rituals and traditions can be helpful as long as we recognize that we are not saved by performing our rituals. While it does mean that what you eat or drink or smoke or inject may not make you unacceptable to God, it doesn’t mean that what we do to our bodies doesn’t matter. There were groups of Roman philosophers who decided that the body didn’t really matter. It was separate to spirit. You could do what you like with the body and it didn’t affect your spiritual side, your salvation. Paul dealt with them in Romans, and I’m not going to take that up again, but it’s certainly not true. There are things that we can do to ourselves that can be very damaging and unhelpful to our spiritual growth.

Another thing that this means is it means that in our natural condition, we are all defiled before God and unacceptable. That’s hard news. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” Jesus is saying, “It’s out of the human heart that all this wickedness comes.” That’s what defiles us. In our natural condition, that’s what our heart is like. Unless something is done about our heart, we cannot be made acceptable to God. This parable also means that we are not put right with God by keeping our rituals. We’re not put right with God by being baptized, by coming to church, by being confirmed. Any of those things, they don’t make us right with God. They’re all rituals, which can be helpful, but they don’t make us right with God. We are all defiled by nature. Our hearts are wicked. We are all sinners. There’s nothing we can do about it, which is why we need Jesus.

We Don’t Need Religion, We Need Jesus

We don’t need religion. We don’t need ritual. It can be helpful, but we don’t need it. We need Jesus. You see, religion is about human attempts to please or appease whichever god or gods you happen to believe in.

Christianity is about what God, the true God, has done through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in order to bring us home to himself. Nothing else works. That’s why all religions are not the same. That’s why we call the Christian message good news, because it’s not about what we must do. It’s about what God has done.

The Good News of What God Has Done

Some of you will know I lived and worked in the Muslim world for a dozen years or so. I’ve had many Muslim friends, some of whose piety and sincerity and commitment I’ve admired and respected. But there’s a problem, because within Islam there is no power to change the human heart. There are only rules to enforce behavior. Our own government has the same ideas. It thinks it can control hate by controlling hate speech. Now, controlling hate speech might be a good thing to do, but it doesn’t change what goes on in the heart. Hatred comes from the heart. No government, no rule or law can change that. No religion in the world can change the human heart, but God can.

God Can Change the Human Heart

When we come to Jesus in genuine repentance and faith, which are the terms that he has set, he does. He does it in two ways. First of all, he starts a work of change in us to make us more like Jesus. It takes our entire lives, that process. We don’t become perfect or complete in this life. But Jesus promises to bring to completion that task, that work, when Jesus returns. But in the meantime, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. His sinlessness covers our sinfulness, so that the sinfulness of our natural human heart is covered by the sinlessness of Christ. It is Christ’s righteousness, not our performance, that makes us right with God.

Sadly, there are many who make up their own versions of Christianity, accepting parts of the Bible that they agree with and like, rejecting other parts that they don’t like. Some don’t like the idea that we cannot save ourselves. Some don’t like the idea that we’re all sinners from birth. They think that God will accept them because they are nice people or because they haven’t done anything really bad or because they’re better than anyone else that they know. It’s a dangerous game. Making up our own rules and standards won’t help us, no matter how well we keep them. Like the Jews, being outwardly religious will not help. Religion, human effort, doesn’t work and it won’t save you. It’s what God says that matters. We need God to change our hearts.