Tradition, the Heart, and the Word of God

Mark 7 opens with a delegation. Pharisees and some teachers of the law have come down from Jerusalem, and that detail matters. Earlier confrontations in Mark were with local religious leaders in Galilee. Now the capital is paying attention. What they notice is not a miracle or a claim to forgive sins but a matter of table practice: some of Jesus's disciples are eating with hands that are, in Mark's word, defiled, meaning ceremonially unwashed.

Mark stops to explain for his readers, probably Gentiles in Rome, what this means. The Pharisees and all the Jews, he says, do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders, and they observe many other traditions concerning the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. The phrase tradition of the elders refers to the oral law, a large body of interpretation and application that had grown up around the written law of Moses and that the Pharisees regarded as authoritative. The hand-washing in question was not the priestly washing required in Exodus 30 for service at the altar. It was an extension of that principle to ordinary meals in ordinary homes, so that every table might be treated as holy. The intent was devout. It was also, importantly, not commanded in Scripture.

The question put to Jesus is therefore not why do your disciples have poor hygiene but why do they not live according to the tradition of the elders. It is a question about authority. Whose rules govern the people of God?

Jesus answers in three movements. First, he quotes Isaiah 29:13. Isaiah had denounced a people who honored God with their lips while their hearts were far from him, and whose worship consisted of rules taught by men. Jesus applies this directly: you hypocrites, he says, Isaiah was prophesying about you. The charge is not that they are irreligious but that their religion has come loose from its center. The word hypocrite, which originally meant a stage actor, fits. The outward performance is excellent. The heart is elsewhere.

Second, he turns from the general to the specific. You have let go of the commands of God, he says, and are holding on to human traditions. Then he gives a case study. Moses said to honor your father and mother, and anyone who curses father or mother is to be put to death; Jesus is citing Exodus 20:12 and Exodus 21:17. But you, he says, permit a man to say to his parents that whatever help they might have received from him is Corban. The word is Hebrew and means a gift, something devoted to God. Once property was declared Corban, the tradition held that it could not be used for any other purpose, even to support one's parents, and the vow could not be revoked. So a man could keep his wealth, look devout, and leave his parents in want, all while technically honoring a vow. Jesus's verdict is severe. You nullify the word of God by your tradition, and you do many things like that.

It is worth pausing over the logic. Jesus is not against tradition as such. He kept the Passover, attended synagogue, and observed the festivals. What he condemns is tradition that has become a substitute for, or a means of evading, the plain command of God. The fence around the law had grown taller than the law. A practice designed to protect holiness had become a way to avoid love.

Third, he turns to the crowd, and here the passage becomes something larger than a dispute about washing. Listen to me, everyone, and understand this, he says. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. This is a saying that overturns the entire framework in which the original question was asked. The question assumed that impurity comes from outside, through contact, through food, through unwashed hands. Jesus says that impurity comes from inside, and that no amount of external management can address it.

The disciples, as usual in Mark, do not understand. In the house they ask him about the parable, and Jesus expresses some exasperation: are you so dull? Then he explains. Food does not go into the heart but into the stomach and then out of the body. It cannot touch the moral center of a person. Mark adds a parenthesis, in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean, that is the evangelist's own comment, written with the hindsight of the early church, which had by then worked through the question of whether Gentile believers must keep the food laws. Peter's vision in Acts 10 and the council in Acts 15 stand behind that parenthesis. Mark is telling his readers that the seed of that whole development was planted here.

Then Jesus gives the list. Out of the heart come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. Thirteen items, a mix of actions and attitudes, some public and some entirely interior. All these evils come from inside and defile a person. The word heart in Scripture does not mean the emotions only. It means the center of the person, the seat of thought, will, and desire. Jesus is saying that the real problem of humanity is not what we touch but what we are.

What does this passage teach, taken as a whole? Several things. It teaches that the word of God stands above every human tradition, however ancient or well-intended, and that when the two conflict, the tradition must yield. It teaches that outward religion, however meticulous, is not the same as devotion, and can even become a mask for its absence. It teaches that the source of defilement is internal, which means the solution must be internal too. And it prepares the way for the gospel's answer to that need: not a better set of washings but a new heart, which is what the prophets had promised and what Jesus came to give.

For Protestant readers there is a particular resonance. The Reformation began, in part, as a protest against traditions that had grown up around the gospel and obscured it. But no tradition, including the Reformed ones, is immune. Every church accumulates practices and expectations that begin as fences and can end as Corban. The test Jesus applies is simple and searching: does this practice serve the plain command of God, or does it give me a spiritual-sounding way to avoid it?

Consider the following as you close. Which traditions in your own church or family have quietly acquired the authority that belongs only to Scripture? Where have you attended to what goes into your life, the media, the food, the associations, while neglecting what comes out of your heart in speech and desire? And if the problem is inside, and only God can clean a heart, what would it mean this week to stop washing your hands and to ask him for the deeper work instead?