Mark Study 31
The Prophet of Integrity
Mark Study #31 by Michael Spencer
Step into the study, pour yourself a cup of coffee, get comfortable and let's enjoy the Gospel of Mark.
Our scripture again this week is Mark 7:1-23. (Because of the size of this passage, I won't reprint it here, but I will be referencing the NIV text.)
The controversies of a past generation often seem beyond trivial to us. In my study of worship in my own Baptist tradition, I marvel at the wars that were fought over whether to sing hymns or only Psalms. Similar wars were fought over the use of organs in worship. As far off as this seems to our context, I'm sure our current squabbles over hymns versus choruses or hymnals versus overhead projections will be looked at in the future as just as puzzling. Mark 7 contains pronouncements and teaching from Jesus that refer to controversies that consumed early Christians as they struggled with their Jewish roots and culture. The remnants of this animosity and tension between Jews and Christians are everywhere in the New Testament. While scholars may see these issues as historically interesting, the Christian believes this is inspired scripture and we will be looking not so much at the issues of controversy as at the principles involved that may be applied to our experience. (For those truly interested in the issues of ritual cleanliness and the evolution of Christianity beyond its Jewish roots, I encourage more time in the scholarly commentaries than I will devote here.)
There is a pronounced change in the text at the beginning of chapter 7. The arrival of the Pharisees harkens back to chapters 2 and 3 and the controversy/conflict themes that held together much of that material. This section, however, is not merely the Pharisees challenging Jesus. As is evident in any red-letter Bible, this is primarily teaching and pronouncements by Jesus on subjects where he conflicted with the Jewish oral traditions held in such high regard by the Pharisees. Some have noted that this section precedes a "Gentile ministry" section in Mark, notable 7:24ff and 7:31ff. This may be significant, but more likely is that Mark's community of believers were in conflict over the issues of Jewish laws and observances and these sayings focused the teaching of Jesus on those issues. In this sense, I tend to think this section is driven less by the needs of the text and more by the needs and interests of the community of believers.
I am constantly concerned that we have remade Jesus into someone not quite recognizable to the Jewish culture in which he lived and taught. Recovering a vision of Jesus within Judaism is a worthy project, and consulting Bibliographies in that regard is a good use of time. The average Christian is not racially anti-semitic, but the average American's attitude towards the Judaism of Jesus' time is rarely one of respect, understanding or appreciation. The Pharisees are sometimes the "bad guys" within the gospels, but it will always help us to remember what a rebel Jesus was to the mainstream Judaism of his day. His challenge to the religious leaders came from within Judaism. Paul's proclamation of Jesus as Messiah came from within Judaism. The idea of Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism is an idea we are reading back into the scriptures. Even the division of "Old Testament" and "New Testament" resides on shaky foundations, as we are discovering what one God is doing in unfolding his one plan for all of history, a plan that centers on the one man and mediator, Jesus Christ.
The Pharisees were based in Jerusalem, so their presence in Galilee to observe Jesus is a signal that Jesus has made a larger than local impression in the culture. The scribes and other representatives of the religious establishment did exist in Galilee, but we have little evidence of leading Pharisees outside of Jerusalem. The Pharisees represent the highest aspirations of "Second Temple" Jewish piety. The laws and traditions advocated by the Pharisees were purposeful- they were meant to identify a people completely submitted to God's rule and God's law. One thing we have certainly learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the interest in ritual and tradition was not a signal for moral, ethical or religious phoniness. This was a sincere and intense concern; a way of living out a complete vision of God and his law in the midst of a multi-cultural and often hostile world, where competing "worldviews" were not only at the door, but in the house. We should remember that the intramural discussion of the role of laws and traditions within Christianity is not the same as the place of these same concerns had in Judaism as it faced the world.
Mark makes an extended aside in verses 4-5 which many scholars find puzzling. There is a textual problem here as well, but the best way to understand Mark's comments is that he is not trying to be overly comprehensive, but does become overly general! All Jews did not keep these traditions. In fact, there is some evidence that the ceremonial acts such as handwashing were more common among non-Palestinian Jews than among the average Jew in Palestine. The concern was not hygiene, but ceremonial cleanness, a major concern of the Mosaic law, though not specified in practice to the extent that had been developed over time in what Mark refers to as the tradition of the elders. It is commonly believed among scholars of Judaism that the kind of extensive handwashing described by Mark may have only occurred among certain Jews on certain feastdays. What we need to see in this aside is simply that Mark anticipated some of his Gentile readers would have little or no understanding of these customs. We also can see clearly that the Gospel has a writer whose voice we are hearing. For those who think the Gospels are tape recordings of events, this is a valuable reminder.
Jesus' answer to the question of the Pharisees takes up verses 6-23. It is divided into three parts: First, a prophetic citation illustrating how ritual replaces reality; second, a condemnation of the hypocrisy of some of the religious leaders and third, a reinterpretation of the meaning of "unclean." If the Pharisees represented "second temple" piety, Jesus sounds out the response of prophetic warnings about that piety. Jesus cites Isaiah 29:13, a well known summary criticism of the tendency of the religious establishment to use the rituals of worship to hide the social and ethical abuses of the time. We read similar things in the pre-exilic prophets: Amos 5:21-26, Isaiah 1:10-17 and Jeremiah 7:21-24. Jesus plainly puts himself in the stream of this prophetic critique, but is there more? I think there is and it is related to Jesus' central proclamation of the reality of the Kingdom. We must ask, how do these laws and traditions relate to the Kingdom Jesus is proclaiming and demonstrating? The answer may be related to Jesus candid and controversial acceptance of those who were considered outsiders and "sinners" according to the ritual system. The Kingdom is bringing in a new reality, a reality to which the Old Covenant laws pointed, but which only Jesus completely reveals. These rituals easily mask God's concern for the sinner by emphasizing one kind of sinner over another, rather than teaching the sinfulness of all. In this way, they came to teach a sort of "backwards righteousness," a rightness with God based on the performance of ritual. And this easily acquired righteousness plays out on the stage of human applause, rather than before the eye of God.
Jesus' second critique rings with the same edge you hear in Matthew 23. This specific example deals with what can happen when religious ritual combines with human selfishness and depravity. No commandment was held in higher regard by the rabbis than "Honor your Father and Mother." We have a difficult time appreciating the social significance of this commandment, but it provided for the care of the elderly and a basic measure of human decency in a cruel world. Anyone reading the Old Testament law has to be surprised at the extent to which punishment was prescribed to the person who mistreated or even verbal abused parents. (Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Leviticus 20:9) No one who openly refused to provide for his parents would have been considered anything but the lowest sort of scoundrel. Yet Jesus says that the corrupt religious elite had found a way to fulfill the letter of the law and excuse themselves from providing for their family. By declaring their resources entirely devoted to God, a sort of "spiritual bankruptcy' was proclaimed and the hypocrite could go about his business without giving his parents even a crust of bread. Jesus points out that this system shows exactly where the real "authority" lies; not in the Word of God, but in self-serving abuse of traditions. We can see that Jesus is not condemning the proper religious use of a ritual, but is pointing out the rank hypocrisy that results when human depravity meets external observance. "And you do many things like that." The catalog of potential abuses of external ritual is endless.
If the first two sections were conflicts with the abuse of ritual, the final section of Jesus' response goes to a much deeper level-a direct challenge to the entire notion of what it means to be "unclean." After an announcement to the crowd (vs 14-15) Jesus goes into a house with his disciples for a further explanation. Mark makes sure the reader gets the intended conclusion in verse 19, as he inserts a note of application declaring all foods clean. The issue of adherence to Jewish dietary laws was troublesome for the early church. Passages such as Acts 10:9ff, 15:28-29, Romans 14:14-15, Colossians 2:20-23 just begin to hint at the extent to which this remained an issue in a Christianity born in Judaism but commissioned to go into all the world. Mark's reading of Jesus on this is clear! But this is a stupendous break with centuries of Judaism that used dietary laws as a way of obeying God and marking out those who feared and obeyed him. Consider, for instance, the way Daniel 1 deals with this same issue. It is the Jewish young men's refusal to eat the unclean food that is the essence of their obedience. We can begin to see just what a large step away from traditional Judaism this was taking and why the religious leaders were inclined to believe Jesus was dangerous.
The basic insight here is that food can in no way render a person "unclean." The meaning of "unclean" is important to remember. This refers to a person's ability to join in with the community of God's people in worship. Those who are unclean- and virtually everyone was at some point- were excluded from worship and normal community life until prescribed time had passed or proper sacrifice was made. It is probably simple for New Testament Christians to see that these kinds of laws were pictures of the spiritual realities of sin and holiness. God was teaching, repeatedly and personally, that sinful man is unacceptable as he is without sacrifice and cleansing. The detail and comprehensiveness of these laws showed that sin covers all of life and we cannot simply approach God based on our own perception of what is significant and insignificant moral failures. It is God who holds us accountable; it is God's moral universe we live in and it is God who tells us our problem is our own sinfulness. But these conclusions were not obvious before Jesus made them obvious in passages such as we have today. Man's legalistic and self-justifying behavior takes any sort of religion and turns it into a system that externalizes relationship with God and allows man to pronounce himself pure in his own eyes. That is no less true now in Christianity than it was in the Judaism of Jesus' time. It is this aspect of ritual Judaism that Jesus confronts. He is not debunking the Old Testament laws, but announcing the truth they were meant to teach. "Are you so dull?" is not a rhetorical question. There has always been this level of truth, Jesus is saying. The prophets pointed to it but He is announcing it in unmistakable terms.
What separates us from God dwells in our hearts. Evil entered the universe from the heart of a rebellious being. Every kind of evil and every sort of multiplied immorality, comes out of the depraved and sinful human heart. Our problem is not failure to observe religious rules, stepping over the line of a religious requirement or practicing the wrong ritual at the wrong time. Our problem is we are guilty rebels with hearts that do not love and will not obey. This is the Kingdom application I had in mind earlier. This is why the tax collectors and the prostitutes would enter the Kingdom before the religious leaders- and often did! Because they were not encumbered with the deception that religion made them good and a lack of religion made them bad. They simply knew they were sinners in their hearts. Read Luke 18:9-14 to get the point in a story that puts the entire issue in perspective.
The applications of this teaching are extremely obvious and I will not labor through them here. I do believe, however, it is worth noting that Jesus here stakes the Christian worldview at quite a different place than modern secular psychology. In my opinion, nothing threatens the modern church like the displacement of the Biblical worldview by the "therapeutic" alternative. This psychologically dominated outlook dominates the media, particularly through those talk shows hosts and so-called experts who are gurus of the "self-help" culture. This worldview refuses to live in a universe with absolute moral truths. The only "truths" are personal pain and suffering. "Evil" is subjective, external, environmental, social and political but NEVER a matter of personal responsibility. We are "good people" doing "bad things" and the answer is more education, more programs, more classes, more government, more sharing our pain. The idea of fallen and sinful human nature is about the only thing this worldview would call evil. Christianity alone gains the venom of the therapeutic culture because of its insistence that evil acts come from evil persons. That riots are caused by rioters as Cal Thomas said. When the church loses this- and we practically have- we really have no basis to help anyone. When we tell the addict he is a victim, tell the thief he is a casualty of capitalism and tell the criminal he is simply ignorant, we take away human dignity and pull out the foundation for any meaningful change.
I would close on the note that Jesus could utter every word of this warning today and it would all apply. Our religious rituals may not be the same, but we trust in them just as much. Our tendency to mask the reality of God with the hypocrisy of conformity is just as real. Our focus on externals is just as shallow. The evils we have done to others with a cover of religion are just as heinous. We need Jesus to be a prophet to us as he is a prophet to these Pharisees. Our judgment on these Jews often masks our own desire to stand above someone as if we get it right. The point is still that we are all "unclean" and admitting that is the beginning of the journey into the Kingdom.
Questions
What current controversies in Christianity will seem trivial to Christians in the future?
Why should we seek to understand controversies in the early church that no longer concern us?
Some Christian groups believe we should continue to keep the Old Testament dietary laws. What would be your response to this?
Michael say he believes chapter 7:1-23 is driven more by the needs of the community than the needs of the text. Assume he's wrong. How does this section fit into Mark's major issue: Who is Jesus?
How do Christians show a lack of respect and appreciation for Judaism? What might a jewish person hear in a Christian Bible study or church service that would be needlessly offensive?
We see the Pharisees as the Bad guys in much of the Gospel story. Look at Jesus from their point of view for a moment. Why would they have been so concerned with him?
Michael questions whether Jesus or Paul would have seen Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism. What do you think? What happens when we see the Old and New Testaments as relating to two different religions?
How might the Jesus of many American Christians be unfamiliar to those who knew him in 1st century Israel?
Mark explains Jewish customs to his Gentile readers. What might we need to explain about Christian worship and practice to a typical modern pagan?
Jesus often puts himself in the mantle of the Old Testament prophets. How can studying the prophets help us understand Jesus more? Where are our prophets today?
Michael believes Jesus' answer to the Pharisees in this chapter is related to his Kingdom message earlier in the Gospel. How might they be related?
What does Michael mean when he says religious ritual tends to create "backwards righteousness?"
Can you think of any parallels between the misuse of vows to God Jesus criticizes in chapter 7 and behavior Christians engage in today? How do we sometimes abuse our families in the name of our Christian commitment?
Michael says Jesus is not condemning all religious ritual. Do you agree or disagree?
How are dietary laws viewed in Daniel 1? What is the basis of Jesus' objection? Are there any parallels today?
Should we ever call someone bad?
How does the Therapeutic worldview threaten the church's ability to help people? Who and where in our culture is this worldview propagated?
Why are Jesus' words about the source of evil so timely and relevant today?
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