Mark 7:14-23
September 1, 2024
When I was in college I went to a movie one night with a group of friends and the theater was packed. The lights were dimmed as we thought the movie was about to begin, but nothing happened. After staring at a blank screen for a while, we starting having conversations with people around us as apparently the theater was having some difficulties with the projector and couldn’t get it to work. After about 20 minutes the theater turned the lights back on as they continued to work on the projector. About this time we also noticed that it was getting rather warm in the theater as the air conditioning seemed to stop working. But then the lights were turned down again as we thought the movie was about to begin. However, nothing happened. About this time we had finished all of our popcorn and other refreshments when all of a sudden we heard a young child cry out to his mother, “I want to see the movie.” Everyone in theater could hear that the child was frustrated and no matter what his mother told him the child just kept whining and then started crying. However, everyone seemed to be pretty understanding as the boy’s mother was trying her best to calm her son down, and then all of a sudden a man in the theater shouted, “I think he’s saying what we’re all thinking.” We all laughed, because he was right. The child was the only one who truly expressed how he felt. We all wanted to see the movie and we were all hot and frustrated. Finally, after another 15 minutes the movie started, the air conditioning came back on, and we all enjoyed the movie.
I’m sure we have all been in situations like that when something didn’t work or we were stuck in traffic on the highway and we got frustrated, because we couldn’t do anything about it. What’s interesting in those situations is that most people are pretty good at hiding their emotions. For most of us in that theater or for most people when something doesn’t work as planned, or for most people who come to worship on Sunday morning, they look like everything is fine and maybe it is, but whenever you see a crowd of people who appear to be fine, you know that every one of them, every one of us, is dealing with sin in our lives. There are a lot of struggles, temptations, uncertainties, fears, and failures that most people do a pretty good job of hiding every day.
If there is one thing you can say about people, it’s that we are very talented when it comes to putting on a happy face and responding to the question, “How are you?” by saying, “I’m fine,” even if we just finished slamming our finger in a car door. We can fake it. We can look great on the outside, even as our lives are falling apart. We can hide behind things so that people out there don’t know what’s going on in here.
How often do we read about a Hollywood actor or professional athlete who overdosed on drugs, because life really wasn’t all that great for them? How often do we see couples who look so happy, like everything is going well, suddenly tell us that they are getting divorced, because they have been unhappy for years? We are very good at hiding, aren’t we? People can have new cars and great homes, but are hiding the debt it took to get those things. God calls us to faith and to follow Him, but some people hide behind excuses of being too busy or focused on other things to answer that call.
In our Gospel lesson for today we see the religious leaders of Jesus’ day hiding behind man made traditions in order to avoid following the Word of God. This story is actually a continuation of last Sunday’s Gospel lesson in which the Pharisees taught that all Jews should follow a strict diet and a series of ceremonial washings as a way to set them apart from all other people and to make them holy, pure, and acceptable before God. And Jesus explained to them that a failure to follow dietary laws or ceremonial washings is not what makes a person unclean. It is what is on the inside of a person that comes out of him/her that defiles them. He said, “Your rules and ceremonies are not in accordance with God’s Word, so stop hiding behind them as a way to avoid examining the struggles, temptations, and fears that lie in your heart in order to justify your sinful behavior.”
Sadly, though, we sometimes do the same thing. Rather than confront our own struggles, sins, and the places we fall short with God’s Word, we like to find comfort in our own ideas or we justify our behavior by using the standards of our world. For example, you can be a lawful citizen according to the state of North Carolina and never love your neighbor, even though God commands us to love our neighbors. You can abuse your body and not get arrested, even though God says that our bodies are His temple. You can even be a member of a church, and still be a spiritual mess. In fact, sometimes we may try to hide behind the traditions of the church or what we feel comfortable doing, rather than praying that God would help us to be the church that follows His lead in sacrificing for others and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
There is an old comic strip that showed a group of cows grazing in a pasture one day when a large, shiny, tanker truck drove by them and printed on the side of the truck in big letters were the words, “Grade A Milk: Homogenized, Pasteurized, Vitamin D Fortified, Calcium Enriched.” One cow turned to another and said, “Kind of makes you feel a bit inadequate, doesn’t it?” The point of that comic strip is that even the best work produced by cows simply doesn’t measure up to the requirements needed to support healthy human life. So the milk has to be pasteurized, fortified with vitamins and calcium, and homogenized in order for it to support good health.
This very same truth applies to us. We cannot produce on our own in any way what is necessary for us to be spiritually healthy. Why? Because if we look deep inside of us, we’ll be shocked by the darkness and moral corruption that lives there in our hearts. Jesus even gives us a list of things in Mark 7 that we will find in our hearts. “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Jesus tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that perfection is God’s standard for eternal life. The problem, though, is that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing just fine, we don’t need the church, we don’t need Jesus, there is nothing wrong with us.
While we all have different struggles, the truth is every one of us struggles with sin, selfishness, and foolish decisions. That’s why we begin our Sunday worship services with a time of confession. God wants us to bring all of our struggles and sins to Him, because His Word tells us that, “If we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confession is so important, because Satan loves people who hide. He wants nothing more than for you to be alone, for you to overlook sins, or to be too busy or too ashamed to be in community with other Christians; because when he has you isolated, he can walk all over you, or he may convince you that you are better than others, or that God could never love you and you don’t deserve to be with those Christians in worship.
But God doesn’t hide – not from Satan, not from you, not from anyone. He doesn’t say one thing and do another. Instead, He sees all of us, people who are arrogant, hurting, selfish, or lost, and He says, “I love you,” and He dies for your sins. He says, “I will give you hope,” and He rises from the dead. He says, “I am preparing a place for you,” and He ascends into heaven so He can come back someday and take you there to be with Him forever.
We don’t have to wonder where we can go for help or if God loves us. We know the answer to all of our sins is not found in any man made rules or traditions. It is found in Jesus. He is our help, our hope, and our life. So if you are trying to hide something from God or from others today, know this – God sees your heart, He knows the truth, and no matter what, you are loved and forgiven, and that will never change.
