Mark 7:1-13
August 25, 2024
One of the great joys of marriage is you become a member of another family. And when you join another family you also become a part of their traditions. When Sue and I were married I learned that one of the traditions in her family was a large family dinner after church on Sunday afternoons. Sue grew up with this tradition, it continued when she returned to her home area after college to live, and I got to experience this tradition when we were living near her family when we were first married. I thoroughly enjoyed getting together with her family every Sunday for a big family meal, because that was not a tradition in my home growing up. At my home, my mother often declared that Sunday was “leftover day,” meaning it was her day to rest, so she was not going to fix a large dinner as she had done on the other 6 days of the week. Therefore, we often had some kind of meat or casserole for dinner that was leftover from earlier in the week. If my sister and I had a friend who invited us over for dinner on a Sunday after church, my parents usually said, “Sure, go ahead;” but in Sue’s home getting together for dinner on a Sunday with family after church was a tradition, so you did not miss the family dinner.
Traditions can be a lot of fun, they are important to many people, but sometimes we can take our traditions a little too far. We often see this at Christmas time. In some homes the star on top of the Christmas tree is always the last ornament to go on the tree. You cannot put the star on the tree before any other ornaments, because it’s tradition. Some families open presents on Christmas Eve, others on Christmas Day because of traditions. While most families enjoy being together at Christmas, some people will insist that if the family is not together, it’s just not Christmas. “We always celebrate Christmas together, that’s our tradition.” We all know that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of our Savior, Jesus, but for some people the tradition of family has become the focus of the holiday, and in some cases even more important than the real meaning of the holiday.
We see the impact of traditions in our Gospel lesson for today, especially as it concerns cleanliness and holiness. In the Old Testament God gave a series of ceremonial laws to the Jews, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Israel, to prepare them for the coming of the Savior from their bloodline. These ceremonial laws were also designed to set them apart from other nations. Among all of these ceremonial laws were a series of washings that you had to perform.
But in the New Testament, the religious leaders, known as Pharisees, decided that these ceremonial laws were not enough to keep the Jews pure and holy before God. So they added additional washings and laws that they said Jews must follow in order to please God. This was not about sanitation from germs. Instead it was a series of rituals designed to sanitize them from other people. One of the rituals or traditions involved washing their hands when they came home from the market just in case they happened to brush up against a Gentile or if they touched something that a Gentile also touched. These rules and traditions not only defined them as a religious community, but by following them they considered themselves to be set apart from sinners, outcasts, and the rest of the Gentile world and had thus earned God’s favor and a place in heaven.
Many years later, in the 1500s, this cleansing tradition continued in the form of beating your body and denying it any type of comfort as a way to make amends for your sinful life. As a monk, Martin Luther would often beat himself for each sin that he confessed and then would beat himself some more for sins he could not remember. We still see this today as many different religions try to set themselves apart from our sinful world by doing things or refraining from things to make them appear more clean or holy than others. We see this in some Catholics who refuse to eat meat on Fridays. Some religions insist that women do not wear make-up or they must cover their heads. And sometimes we even do things like this when we avoid certain people because we do not want their reputation to be associated with us.
But Jesus did not agree with these “cleansing” traditions of the Pharisees. When Jesus and His disciples sat down to eat, they did not wash their hands, plates, cups, or anything according to the ceremonial washing traditions that had been developed. So the Pharisees criticized Jesus by asking Him publicly, “Why don’t you live according to the traditions of the elders?” Jesus answered them by quoting from our Old Testament lesson in Isaiah 29 saying, “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. Their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” For Jesus it came down to one point: “Where does it say in the Word of God that I have to wash according to a tradition that you have made up in order to be holy and acceptable in the eyes of God?” In other words, these traditions being handed down by the religious leaders were not in the Bible, following them would not get you into heaven, but the Pharisees were teaching them as though they were in the Bible.
Jesus even points out the hypocrisy of one of their traditions in our Gospel lesson that involved dedicating your life savings to God, called “Corban” in verse 11. Now that sounds very honorable, but the problem was that if your parents were sick and needed some kind of financial assistance, the Pharisees taught that you could not use your money to help them if you had already dedicated it to God and the temple. So Jesus simply says, “That is not Scriptural. Whatever happened to the 4th Commandment – Honor your mother and father?”
The bottom line is that traditions are fine and good, but we need to be careful in distinguishing between what is tradition and what is commanded by God. Martin Luther learned that beating yourself for your sins does not make you holy and acceptable in God’s eyes. The only thing that makes you holy, clean, and righteous before God is faith in His Son, Jesus. It is only because of Jesus’ work – His death and resurrection – that we are acceptable to God.
What’s really interesting is that after Jesus denounced these ceremonial washings, He instituted Baptism that would do the very thing the Pharisees were attempting. Jesus told His disciples to make disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And Peter said later that this baptism, which means “to cleanse,” would give the forgiveness of sins. So whatever tradition a church has concerning baptism – pouring water on someone’s head or immersing their whole body in the water; baptizing young children or baptizing adults, you can always take comfort that through the water and God’s Word spoken over you, God promises that the blood and righteousness of Jesus are applied to you, free of charge, and as a result you are clean, holy, and acceptable to God and eternal life is yours.
Every church has traditions, but I pray that the traditions of Holy Cross would always be recognized by people as being in accordance with the commands of God. In particular, the command of God who tells us to love the Lord your God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself. This, above all else, is what should define our church family.
And the one place where I see this tradition being carried out on a daily basis is in our Open Arms Child Development Center. Every day children, parents, grandparents, family members, and neighbors come through the doors of this place, and they are welcomed and loved as though they are members of this family by every teacher and staff member – not because it’s easy and not because of some great financial reward that we give them, they do it because God first loved them. It’s easy to embrace many of our family traditions, but it is much more difficult to actually embrace and live out the defining principles of our faith – that being to love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. May the God who cleanses each one of us with His unconditional love give us the strength and courage to live our lives according to His commands.
