Sermons
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Pentecost 15, September 1 - Mark 7:14–23
Other Lessons: Deuteronomy 4:1–2, 6–9 Psalm 119:129–136 Ephesians 6:10–20
Our Gospel text for today is a continuation of last week’s reading in which Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem concerning the disciples not washing at least their hands before eating. The implication here is that eating without washing (hands and all the utensils) makes one unclean before God because you could have accidentally touched something unclean on the streets or touched it somewhere unawares and become contaminated and be ceremonially unclean.
It's a continuation because Jesus only addressed one of the problems raised by the opponents, namely, that the disciples were not following the traditions and teachings of the elders. So Jesus chided them for misusing and abusing human traditions by elevating it above the word of God. As I mentioned last week, it is not human traditions or the things of man that Jesus disapproves, but it is using them above the word of God and using them as though they had the authority from God that he rebukes and rejects. Human traditions have its place and usefulness and benefits when used rightly, that is to say, when used to serve God and the things of God. Particularly in our Lutheran tradition, the things we do are supposed to elevate and accentuate the word of God and nothing else.
But there is still another issue that needs to be addressed, namely, the question of one’s worthiness and holiness and standing before God, which is the whole point about washing in the first place. Indeed, there is no need to follow the Jewish traditions of washing everything before washing since God did not command this kind of washing, but does this then mean that there is no need for washing or being clean before God, or that we are good enough to stand before God?
Our Gospel reading for today addresses this question. Jesus tells them very plainly this simple truth: “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” And then later the disciples asked him again because they were so entrenched in the old teachings of the Jews that they could not wrap their heads around what Jesus had said. So he tells them again very plainly, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.” Their misunderstanding about defilement probably came from a false reasoning. It is indeed true, at least in the Old Testament, that when a person contacts something unclean (such as a corpse or mold or an unclean animal), that person himself will be deemed “unclean”, and therefore unfit to be in the presence of God, until he cleanses himself. And so the reasoning then is that if you don’t touch any of these things and just in case you did, then the ceremonial washing will make you clean before God. It assumes that a person is clean in his neutral state or that the act of ceremonial washing will make you clean.
But Jesus tells us all the sad reality of our “neutral” state. Indeed, it is not what goes in that defiles a person, but what comes out of him, out of his heart. The real problem is your heart, no, not the muscle that pumps blood in your body, but the sinful and corrupted nature of your entire being. Because from it come all sorts of great and wonderful things! What comes out of it? Thus he says, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” And certainly this is not an exhaustive list, but we get the picture, the human heart is evil and sinful. Everything that you can possibly do against the 10 commandments are included. It starts from within, affecting your thoughts (being angry, lustful, resentful, covetous, etc), so that it also affects how you talk and how you act toward one another. Indeed, we don’t need Jesus telling us all of these things because we know it. Just look at your entire life. How many people you have hurt and deceived? How have you treated your parents? How often have you been angry and mad and bitter toward them and also your brothers and sisters and everyone else around you? How often you lusted and thought evil thoughts and said dirty things? How often you desired something that is not your and resented it?
What can you do about this sinful and evil heart? How do you clean your heart? Indeed what can you actually do? Can a dirty rag clean a dirty window or even clean itself? What can a sinful person, who is sinful from within, do, which is outward, to make him not sinful? Indeed, one may wonder about the Old Testament’s ceremonies and regulations and their effectiveness and usefulness in making one “clean”? Didn’t God give those complicated laws for the very purpose of purification and cleansing? Didn’t the Old Testament people become clean and holy through doing these rites and ceremonies and laws? Yes, it is true, they were made clean and holy and fit to stand before God, but only by a promise, by the word of God, not by the performance of it. Properly understood, it is not the avoidance of unclean things that makes one clean and holy, but it is to be in contact with holy things that makes one holy and clean. In other words, while to be unclean and to be clean are exact opposites, the way to become one of these are not. The OT ceremonies and rituals can make the people clean and holy only because God makes them so by a promise.
But why is this important, why should you care about these OT stuff? Because eternal condemnation and eternal damnation and eternal hell are real, for the people of old and for us as well. Physical death is an indication that something is wrong with life itself. But it doesn’t end there. There are serious consequences to every sin and every evil, including the ones in your hearts and in mine. Sin and death go hand in hand, that is to say, sin will be judged and punished under the wrath of God because he is just. It will be eternal death, which sounds oxymoronic, until you understand that true death is not merely the cessation of being, but separation from the life that comes from God.
This is why the ceremonies in the OT are so important because through them God makes the people clean and holy and therefore have life in him. But you don’t see this kind of thing in the New Testament because something has changed fundamentally in how God deals with people.
The New Testament no longer talks about these Old Testament things not because God no longer requires a sinner to be cleansed and be made holy, but because now God actually came in the midst of his people to make them holy. Instead of through the OT laws and rituals and ceremonies, through which the sinner can come into contact with the holy and be made holy, now God himself comes and makes contact with his people. This is an amazing thing because in the Old Testament, God is so absolutely holy that a sinner seeing him directly will die, but now he comes to be with us. This is the amazing thing, that God dies for the sinners, and washes us clean with his blood.
This is what truly cleanses and purifies all sins and thereby have life. Again, the question for us sinners is how or what can we do to eradicate sin? What can we do to our hearts, not the organ, but our nature, our very being? We need to be washed and cleansed and we are. What can we do to have life? We heard him say it a couple weeks ago, namely, we need to have his true flesh and his true blood, and we have it.
Therefore we must always examine ourselves so that we have right view of who we are, SO THAT, we may also then see our savior always. The healthy have no need of a physician. But we are not healthy, we have a very broken and sick and dying heart. So to lose sight of him is a great danger to us. So, go to Jesus, he offers you the perfect solution to sin and death – the forgiveness of sins. Learn from this that this is your highest treasure because it is true life. Go to him often and hear these words: “Your sins are forgiven. You are washed. You are clean. I give you peace.”
Other Lessons: Deuteronomy 4:1–2, 6–9 Psalm 119:129–136 Ephesians 6:10–20
Our Gospel text for today is a continuation of last week’s reading in which Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem concerning the disciples not washing at least their hands before eating. The implication here is that eating without washing (hands and all the utensils) makes one unclean before God because you could have accidentally touched something unclean on the streets or touched it somewhere unawares and become contaminated and be ceremonially unclean.
It's a continuation because Jesus only addressed one of the problems raised by the opponents, namely, that the disciples were not following the traditions and teachings of the elders. So Jesus chided them for misusing and abusing human traditions by elevating it above the word of God. As I mentioned last week, it is not human traditions or the things of man that Jesus disapproves, but it is using them above the word of God and using them as though they had the authority from God that he rebukes and rejects. Human traditions have its place and usefulness and benefits when used rightly, that is to say, when used to serve God and the things of God. Particularly in our Lutheran tradition, the things we do are supposed to elevate and accentuate the word of God and nothing else.
But there is still another issue that needs to be addressed, namely, the question of one’s worthiness and holiness and standing before God, which is the whole point about washing in the first place. Indeed, there is no need to follow the Jewish traditions of washing everything before washing since God did not command this kind of washing, but does this then mean that there is no need for washing or being clean before God, or that we are good enough to stand before God?
Our Gospel reading for today addresses this question. Jesus tells them very plainly this simple truth: “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” And then later the disciples asked him again because they were so entrenched in the old teachings of the Jews that they could not wrap their heads around what Jesus had said. So he tells them again very plainly, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.” Their misunderstanding about defilement probably came from a false reasoning. It is indeed true, at least in the Old Testament, that when a person contacts something unclean (such as a corpse or mold or an unclean animal), that person himself will be deemed “unclean”, and therefore unfit to be in the presence of God, until he cleanses himself. And so the reasoning then is that if you don’t touch any of these things and just in case you did, then the ceremonial washing will make you clean before God. It assumes that a person is clean in his neutral state or that the act of ceremonial washing will make you clean.
But Jesus tells us all the sad reality of our “neutral” state. Indeed, it is not what goes in that defiles a person, but what comes out of him, out of his heart. The real problem is your heart, no, not the muscle that pumps blood in your body, but the sinful and corrupted nature of your entire being. Because from it come all sorts of great and wonderful things! What comes out of it? Thus he says, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” And certainly this is not an exhaustive list, but we get the picture, the human heart is evil and sinful. Everything that you can possibly do against the 10 commandments are included. It starts from within, affecting your thoughts (being angry, lustful, resentful, covetous, etc), so that it also affects how you talk and how you act toward one another. Indeed, we don’t need Jesus telling us all of these things because we know it. Just look at your entire life. How many people you have hurt and deceived? How have you treated your parents? How often have you been angry and mad and bitter toward them and also your brothers and sisters and everyone else around you? How often you lusted and thought evil thoughts and said dirty things? How often you desired something that is not your and resented it?
What can you do about this sinful and evil heart? How do you clean your heart? Indeed what can you actually do? Can a dirty rag clean a dirty window or even clean itself? What can a sinful person, who is sinful from within, do, which is outward, to make him not sinful? Indeed, one may wonder about the Old Testament’s ceremonies and regulations and their effectiveness and usefulness in making one “clean”? Didn’t God give those complicated laws for the very purpose of purification and cleansing? Didn’t the Old Testament people become clean and holy through doing these rites and ceremonies and laws? Yes, it is true, they were made clean and holy and fit to stand before God, but only by a promise, by the word of God, not by the performance of it. Properly understood, it is not the avoidance of unclean things that makes one clean and holy, but it is to be in contact with holy things that makes one holy and clean. In other words, while to be unclean and to be clean are exact opposites, the way to become one of these are not. The OT ceremonies and rituals can make the people clean and holy only because God makes them so by a promise.
But why is this important, why should you care about these OT stuff? Because eternal condemnation and eternal damnation and eternal hell are real, for the people of old and for us as well. Physical death is an indication that something is wrong with life itself. But it doesn’t end there. There are serious consequences to every sin and every evil, including the ones in your hearts and in mine. Sin and death go hand in hand, that is to say, sin will be judged and punished under the wrath of God because he is just. It will be eternal death, which sounds oxymoronic, until you understand that true death is not merely the cessation of being, but separation from the life that comes from God.
This is why the ceremonies in the OT are so important because through them God makes the people clean and holy and therefore have life in him. But you don’t see this kind of thing in the New Testament because something has changed fundamentally in how God deals with people.
The New Testament no longer talks about these Old Testament things not because God no longer requires a sinner to be cleansed and be made holy, but because now God actually came in the midst of his people to make them holy. Instead of through the OT laws and rituals and ceremonies, through which the sinner can come into contact with the holy and be made holy, now God himself comes and makes contact with his people. This is an amazing thing because in the Old Testament, God is so absolutely holy that a sinner seeing him directly will die, but now he comes to be with us. This is the amazing thing, that God dies for the sinners, and washes us clean with his blood.
This is what truly cleanses and purifies all sins and thereby have life. Again, the question for us sinners is how or what can we do to eradicate sin? What can we do to our hearts, not the organ, but our nature, our very being? We need to be washed and cleansed and we are. What can we do to have life? We heard him say it a couple weeks ago, namely, we need to have his true flesh and his true blood, and we have it.
Therefore we must always examine ourselves so that we have right view of who we are, SO THAT, we may also then see our savior always. The healthy have no need of a physician. But we are not healthy, we have a very broken and sick and dying heart. So to lose sight of him is a great danger to us. So, go to Jesus, he offers you the perfect solution to sin and death – the forgiveness of sins. Learn from this that this is your highest treasure because it is true life. Go to him often and hear these words: “Your sins are forgiven. You are washed. You are clean. I give you peace.”
