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The Good News of Jesus

03/15/2009 - Tradition!, Mark 7:1-13

Tradition. What comes to your mind when you think of the word "tradition?" Maybe you think of family traditions or church traditions. The dictionary defines tradition as "an inherited pattern of thought or action as in a religious practice or social custom."

I know what comes to my mind when I think of the word tradition. I think of one of my all time favorite movies Fiddler on the Roof and that opening scene where Tevye sings "Tradition, Tradition!" It goes like this.

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"And because of our traditions everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do." It's a great musical and it's a powerful window into role that tradition plays in the Jewish faith. It's a story about a poor, Jewish milkman named Tevye who is living in a small Russian village during the early 1900's right before the Russian revolution when everything in his world begins to change and life as he knows it becomes as shaky as a fiddler on the roof. And he tries to keep his balance by holding on to the traditions of his faith, but those traditions are being challenged by his very own children.

He and his wife, Golde, are raising five unmarried daughters when the oldest one, Tzeitel, challenges the tradition of entering into arranged marriage. She doesn't want to marry the wealthy butcher that the matchmaker has chosen. Instead she wants to marry the poor tailor that she loves. And that drives Tevye nuts because he doesn't understand what love has to do with it? So he gets into some heated arguments with Tzeitel and the tailor. And he wrestles with God over the issue. But eventually he gives in and allows them to marry because he doesn't really like the butcher anyway.

His second daughter, Hodel, falls in love with a young Jewish activist from the big city of Kiev and she challenges the tradition of getting her father's permission to marry. They don't even talk to Tevye about their relationship. They get engaged without telling him. They don't want his permission but they do want his blessing. And so once again he's hurt and he's angry and he can't understand why his daughters are doing this to him. But after agonizing over it he finally caves in and gives them not only his blessing, but his permission too.

Meanwhile, his third daughter, Chava, pushes him even further. She challenges the tradition of marrying a Jewish man. She falls in love with a Russian which is absolutely out of bounds. And when she asks her dad if she can marry the man, Tevye flips out. That's a line that he just can't cross. And so he tells Chava to not even speak to the guy again. But she does and eventually they elope and get married and Tevye is heartbroken and cries out to God saying, "What in the world did I do wrong?"

Fiddler on the Roof is a powerful window into some of the most deeply held traditions of the Jewish faith. And all throughout the story you can see how ingrained these traditions are in Tevye's soul and how agonizing it is for him each time a tradition is challenged, even though he has no idea where the traditions come from.

The traditions aren't bad. In fact, traditions can be good things. "Without tradition," Tevye says, "our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof." And that's true. Traditions give us a sense of security and stability and something to hold onto in a world that's changing so fast.

But when obeying human tradition causes us to disobey God and when man made traditions pre-empt the word of God that's where Jesus draws the line. And today he's going to confront some of the most deeply held traditions of his time and that will outrage the religious leaders of his day.

If you have your Bible turn with me to Mark 7:1-13 as we continue our series called The Good News of Jesus...As Told By Mark.

Look at Mark 7:1-2, (Blank Slide) The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and ²saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.

Now this isn't the first time a delegation has come from Jerusalem to check out Jesus. If you remember it happened in Mark 3 when a group of religious big wigs came down from denominational headquarters carrying an official statement on Jesus. And that statement was that Jesus is possessed by the devil and driving out demons by the power of the devil. "So stay clear of Jesus. He does not have our endorsement."

These religious leaders had also followed Jesus around and were ticked off that he wasn't fasting like they were and he didn't keep the Sabbath like they did. So they had been accumulating a list of grievances and today they're going to add another issue to that list.

Today the issue is hand washing. One of the traditions that every practicing Jew followed was the tradition of washing their hands before a meal. Now that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. In fact, it's good to wash our hands before we eat that's what our parents taught us. But this kind of hand washing wasn't just a matter of personal hygiene. This was ceremonial hand washing to cleanse themselves from any contact they may have had with a Gentile or anything else unclean. And it had to be practiced a certain way if you were going to please God. And if you messed up in this area you were in trouble.

Look at verses 3-4, (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. ⁴When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)

Ceremonial hand washing was a tradition of the elders. The elders mentioned here refer to the great legal experts who over the last three or four hundred years before Jesus kept adding more rules and regulations and rituals to the Jewish faith and had essentially built a religion out of it and hand washing was everyday part of that religion. But it's not mentioned at all in the Scriptures.

Yet over the centuries it became more and more elaborate and took on a life of its own. Before every meal your hands had to be free from dirt, sand, mortar, gravel or any other substance. The water used to wash your hands had to come from special stone jars that couldn't be used for anything else. In fact, if a person was dying of thirst they couldn't drink from the water that was used for hand washing. It's interesting that the water Jesus turned into wine in John 2 came from water jars that were used for ceremonial washing!

Your hands had to be washed with the finger tips pointing upward and the amount of water, at least 1 1/2 egg shells full, had to run down at as far as your wrist. Then you would take the fist from one hand and cleanse the palm of the other and vice versa. And then after that your finger tips had to be pointed downwards and the same amount of water was poured over them again running from your wrists and down off your finger tips. And after all that had been done your hands were now ceremonially clean and you could eat your meal.

But if you didn't do that then you were considered unclean in the sight of God. And if you ate a meal with unclean hands then you were open to attack by a demon called Shibta, the demon of dirty hands. In fact, there was a saying that, "Shibta is an evil spirit which sits upon men's hands in the night and if any touch his food with unwashed hands Shibta sits upon that food and there is danger in it." Sounds gross!

But Jesus and his disciples practiced none of it. They didn't wash their hands before they ate, at least not all the time. They didn't take baths when they came from the marketplace. They didn't wash cups and pitchers and kettles the way tradition demanded. And it doesn't sound like they were all that worried about Shibta either. And the Pharisees were taking notes and adding all that to their growing list of grievances against Jesus.

Look at verse 5, So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?" He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: "'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. ⁷They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.' ⁸You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions."

I don't get the impression Jesus is real happy with these guys, do you? Instead, he is fed up with their hypocrisy. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law had gotten it all wrong. They had reduced a dynamic relationship with the living God to a never ending list of rules and regulations and rituals. That's called "religion." And the prophet Isaiah warned Israel about it 600 years earlier, but nothing had changed.

"What you practice has nothing to do with your heart," Jesus says. "It's all about obeying man made rules. So you wash your dishes and you wash your pots and you wash your hands and you do everything you can on the outside to stay clean, but on the inside where it counts your hearts are dirty because there's no love there. What about the greatest commandment to love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind? What about loving your neighbor as yourself? Where does that fit into your religion?"

It's so easy for any of us to reduce our relationship with God to keeping a list of rules or practicing a set of rituals. And we decide which ones are important to us and which ones we like to keep so then we can judge everybody else by our list. And that's how spiritual pride develops. And the things on the list can be good things. We can go to church, we can sing songs, we read our Bibles, we can pray, we can give, we can fast, we can even preach sermons, but at the same time our hearts can be filled with anger and bitterness and pride and lust and hatred and greed. And if we're not careful we can become as judgmental as the Pharisees. And Jesus calls that hypocrisy.

The word hypocrisy or hypocrite comes from the Greek word hypokrites which literally means "one who puts the mask on." It was a term used in the Greek theater of actors who put masks over their face to play a part. And Jesus says to the Pharisees, "You've got masks on. You're play acting. You do all these outward things to pretend that you're devoted to God, but inside your hearts are far from him."

And it's so easy for us to put masks on too and try to pretend that we're something that we're not especially when it comes to our relationship with God. But Jesus sees behind the masks and looks right into our hearts. You search much deeper within through the way things appear. You're looking into my heart. And what's he looking for in our hearts? He's looking for humility and brokenness and a heart that's soft and teachable and open to him.

The longer we walk with Jesus the more broken and humble he wants us to become. I've always been impressed with the way the apostle Paul refers to himself in the New Testament. When he first becomes a Christ follower he calls himself in 1 Corinthians 15:9 the least of the all the apostles. He's an apostle, but he's the least of the bunch. Then a number of years later in Ephesians 3:8 he calls himself the least of all God's people. He's part of God's family, but he's like the black sheep. And then near the end of his life in 1 Timothy 1:16 he refers to himself as the worst of all sinners. That's the sign of person who has grown in grace to realize how needy he is. That's a heart that's humble and broken and soft. No mask there.

The longer we walk Jesus the more in touch he wants us to become to our sin and the need for his grace in our lives. He doesn't want us to live in hypocrisy. He wants us to live with integrity. The word integrity comes from the Latin word integer which means "one." And when there's integrity in our lives there is oneness. We are what we say. We are what we believe. We are what we sing. There's a wholeness to our lives. That's what Jesus is looking for. Integrity is the opposite of hypocrisy.

So Jesus goes on to give them an example of how their traditions have pre-empted Scripture and kept them from loving people. Look at verse 9, (Blank Slide) And he continued, "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! ¹⁰For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.' ¹¹But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God), ¹²then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. ¹³Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that."

Jesus says, "I can point out a lot of ways that your traditions keep you from serving God, but let me give you just one example." And he goes on to talk about this man made tradition called Corban that kept them from obeying the fifth commandment that God had given to honor your father and your mother. And that's an important one.

But the way we honor our father and mother changes as we go through life. As children we honor our parents by obeying them. We listen to what they tell us and we do what they say because that's how we learn to obey authority of all kinds. Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 6:1. We won't get anywhere in life, or at least not very far, if we don't learn how to obey authority and that's something we need to learn in the home as children growing up.

And when we're grown up and on our own we honor our parents by respecting them. Leviticus 19:3 says, Each of you must respect your mother and your father. The word for respect there is the same word that is used for respecting God. We respect our parents by appreciating them and communicating with them and speaking well of them and including them in our life. For some of us that's easy to do. And for others of us that's hard. And I understand that. There are no perfect parents out there. But remember somebody changed your diaper and fed you and took care of you when you couldn't take care of yourself and that someone deserves your respect.

And later in life when our parents grow old and can't take care of themselves anymore honoring them means that we make sure that they are cared for financially. In 1 Timothy 5:8 Paul writes, Anyone who does not provide for relatives, and especially for immediate family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. That passage is written in the context of widows and the elderly.

In a culture where there was no social security or health insurance or pension plans or 401(k)s it was the children's responsibility to care for their aging parents financially. But the Pharisees had developed a loophole to the fifth commandment called Corban. The word "Corban" means a gift that is dedicated to God.

And Corban started out as a good idea like most customs and traditions do. If a man owned two acres of ground and only needed one acre to live off of he could dedicate all the produce from the second acre to God. So the second acre became Corban, God's property, and all the produce from it went to the Temple in Jerusalem. And it couldn't be taken back.

But let's say one day the man's aging father comes to him for help. The field he owns is wiped out by a frost and he needs some financial assistance from his son. And the son wants to help his dad by giving him some produce from that second acre. But the Pharisees step in and say, "No. You can't do that. That second field is Corban and that produce is committed to the Temple. You'll have to find some other way to provide for your parents." So the poor Dad walks away empty handed because the tradition of Corban has trumped the fifth commandment. And Jesus says, "That's wrong!"

Or let's say a child doesn't want to help his aging parents financially and when he sees them in need he invites a Pharisee over and says, "Pronounce 'Corban' over this property or over these resources so my parents can't get to them." And they do it. They dedicate the property to God so the parents can't be helped by it. And Jesus is incensed by it all. "That's wrong too! You put your tradition over the word of God and neglect the needs of people. And you do a lot of things like that."

In this passage Jesus is going to head to head with the religion of his day. He's saying things to the Pharisees that nobody had the guts to say. What he's offering is radically different from what they're offering the people. He's attacking a man made system that puts rules and regulations, customs and traditions above relationships, above love for God and love for neighbor. That's what's most important. It was then and it still is today.

When the music fades
And all is stripped away
And I simply come
Longing just to bring
Something that's of worth
That will bless your heart.
I'll bring you more than a song
For a song in itself is not what you have required
You search much deeper within
Through the way things appear
You're looking into my heart
I'm coming back to the heart of worship
And it's all about you, all about you, Jesus
I'm sorry, Lord, for the thing I've made it
When it's all about You, all about you, Jesus

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.