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In Mark 7, we find some of the most revolutionary teachings in the New Testament. With prophetic insight, Jesus spoke out against the external practices that had been adopted and endorsed as the essence of religious worship.
By word and example, Jesus nullified the system of cultic purity which was based on a concept of what was “clean and unclean.”
Tragically, the people had lost sight of the hope and freedom which the Mosaic covenant offered to them. Subject to the oppressive leadership of the scribes and Pharisees, they labored under an intolerable weight of rules and regulations.
The essential difference between the teachings of Jesus and the mentality of the Pharisees is made clear in this passage. The Pharisees were a lay group who, historically, stood in opposition to the Jewish priestly class. The name “Pharisee” means “separate”; by their fanaticism for ritual and law, the Pharisees had set themselves apart from the rest of society. For many, in their isolation, their attitude became one of comparison and inflated superiority.
Adherence to the law and tradition was meticulous. Every letter of the law was compulsively obeyed. The pitfall was that what began historically as a sincere effort to renew Judaic faith resulted in an obsessive exaggeration of law. Ironically, the law itself became an obstacle to inner renewal. So much happened externally that nothing took place interiorly. Gradually external practices of the law began to be used as an escape from the deeper obligation and summons of God’s command to love:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words … in your heart. (Deuteronomy 6:5-6)
Appalled by these excessive practices, Jesus did not spare the Pharisees. He severely condemned the hypocrisy perpetrated by these excesses. Hypocrisy is the wearing of a mask, and the Pharisees were wearing masks to play roles of people they wanted to be. This was totally unacceptable to Jesus. Many of the Pharisees, motivated by self-interest and the desire to make a good impression, abused their religious authority and manipulated the sincerity of the people to serve their own advancement. In this passage, Jesus harshly criticized and accused the Pharisees of hypocrisy in two separate situations: the compulsiveness of ritual cleansing, and the clever deception of practices like corban.
The heated exchange began when the Pharisees challenged Jesus because his disciples did not observe the tradition of washing their hands before eating. Jesus and the disciples were confronted with longstanding traditions that had taken on the force of law. Orally handed down from generation to generation, these rigid traditions, known as the Halakak, were an elaborate body of rules and regulations intended to govern every conceivable action and circumstance.
The directives regulating the ceremonial cleansing of hands and vessels reached absurd proportions. Hands had to be cleansed in a particular manner, and the specific methods for cleansing vessels were determined by the shape, the material, and the function of the container.
Angered by the Pharisees’ efforts to impose their sterile customs on his disciples, Jesus lashed out and called them hypocrites. He pierced the protective shield of their self-righteousness by presenting them with the contradictory and contemptible reality of their situation. The accusation that centuries earlier Isaiah had leveled at Israel, Jesus now applied to the Pharisees:
This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.
With unerring accuracy and biting sarcasm, Jesus delivered judgment: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!”
His second charge involved a concrete example of their dubious ingenuity. It addressed the unjust and popular practice of corban. Originally, corban was a practice of offering one’s gifts to God. The gifts were called corban. By the time of Jesus, the practice of corban had fallen into abuse. The Pharisees used it to serve their own interests and to escape real obligations, even to the point of neglecting the care of their aging parents.
Whatever was proclaimed corban could not legally be used for other purposes; it belonged to God. A son might say, “I cannot help you because all my money is promised to God.” With this formal assertion, the money was no longer available for the care of his parents, even if later he were to retract his promise.
Once again Jesus called on their deeper tradition to witness in the case against the Pharisees. He confronted them with the fundamental teaching of Moses: “Honor your father and your mother” and “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.”
But Jesus was not yet finished. He went on to say that this was only one case among many in which they had justified their behavior and indulged their need for prestige and control. The price they had paid for this blatant abuse of God’s law was the negation of their own innermost spirit: God’s word for them had become null and void. A phenomenal tragedy—they were spiritually blind leaders!
Jesus, moved with compassion, turned to address all the people, inviting them to listen and understand. The invitation to “all of you” indicated the universality of Jesus’ message and the death of spiritual elitism. The instruction to “understand” signified the importance of the message that followed: Nothing that goes into a persoon from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a person that make him unclean. The message was not only important; it was surprising and new!
In one radical declaration, Jesus effectively shattered the rigid moral and ethical structure which was based on distinction of cleanness and uncleanness. Things in themselves were declared neither clean nor unclean, neither good nor bad. By this declaration Jesus rejected superfluous externals. Traditions, prescriptions, rules, and rituals should not substitute for religious experience.
Much to Jesus’ chagrin, the disciples did not understand this teaching. He took them aside and privately explained it further. The core of his message was that we must discover the ultimate rule of love within ourselves. In the end, we must go beyond external rules. Jesus calls on each person to enter the depths of his or her own heart and consciousness and discover there the authentic truth that goes beyond the strictures of the law. The spiritual quality, the “cleanness” of any outward expression—by word or action—is in proportion to that person’s attentiveness to God’s Spirit within him.