Daily Devotion – August 23, 2021 – Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
7:1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him,
7:2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
7:3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing traditions of elders;
7:4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)
7:5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
7:6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
7:7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
7:8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
7:14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
7:15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
7:21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,
7:22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
7:23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Here come Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem to gather around Jesus, amid the other crowds who came for healings as well as his disciples. These Pharisees and scribes don’t want “law-abiding Jews” following Jesus instead of going to their local synagogues or the Temple. They look for clues that he is not living a godly life, since people are calling him godly or even “the Son of God,” and they would love to unmask Jesus as just another false prophet who ought to be cast out of Jewish religious life. In this story, the clue they find to Jesus’s ungodliness is his disciples’ failure to obey religious customs like washing hands before eating. Any detail to build their case is what they are after.

Jesus teaches that God is a loving parent who gives many good gifts. Jesus teaches that a good relationship between a human being and this loving God is love and gratitude and belief that God is bringing about a new day, a Kingdom of God on earth among people who live their lives for one another. For Jesus, everything is about our relationship with God and one another.

Jesus was a savior sent from God. Washing hands before eating seems to have very little to do with that fact. Obedience to all the rules and codes is less important to Jesus than believing in God and serving one another in love. In the last part of this passage Jesus may have named all those sins that come from within people because he wanted the scribes and Pharisees to recognize that they were elevating their envy, their deceit, their greed above their relationship to their God. Jesus’s ministry and his followers’ lives of faith don’t come from the holy table manners they perform. The scribes’ and Pharisees’ mission built on distrust and tearing down comes from inside their hearts, and it will destroy them from the inside out. Any non-Jew, or any person using manners and customs of cultures other than the Jewish culture, would be as welcome as any other person in this Kingdom of God, this holy community.
Everyone is a beloved child of God, Jesus’s beloved parent. And that beloved parent does not keep a record of wrongs or missteps. Missteps are just not interesting to God. God pays attention to his children’s love of God and one another and does everything possible to help that love thrive. It’s as simple as that, perhaps: do what helps love of God and neighbor thrive.

Gracious God, help us to see where love is thriving and do what keeps that going. Everywhere. Amen.