Sermon Tone Analysis

Becoming Clean

Mark 7:14–23 (ESV)

14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.

18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?”

(Thus he declared all foods clean.)

20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Introduction

We keep on looking at the life of Jesus in the book of Mark.

We come to a controversy between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day about the clean laws, about the dietary laws, and all the various regulations that had to do with ritual purity.

On the surface as you look at this, it would be very easy to believe that this controversy is just simply irrelevant for us now, maybe some kind of an antiquarian interest, but surely nothing that’s really important for us to know about now.

If you would think that, I think you’d be wrong, because that’s a very superficial analysis.

This text is talking about matters that are profoundly relevant for living the human life in any culture, in any century.

jeremiah 17:9

Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV)

The heart is deceitful above all things,

and desperately sick;

who can understand it?

The subject over which Jesus and religious leaders in this passage are arguing are the Mosaic clean laws.

If you touched a dead body (animal or human being), if you had an infectious skin disease like boils or rashes or sores,

if you came into contact with mildew (your clothes, articles in your home, or even in your house itself),

if you had any kind of bodily discharge like diarrhea or

a hemorrhage of blood and pus,

or if you ate food made of animals that were designated as unclean (like the pig),

you were considered ritually impure, defiled, unclean.

What did it mean to be considered ritually impure, defiled, and unclean?

It meant you couldn’t go into the temple.

You couldn’t go in and worship God with the community.

You were unclean.

You were defiled.

You might say, “Well, what was that all about?

What’s with that?”

The answer is it’s not as weird as it sounds if you think about it.[1]

Think about it: Some people physically kneel.

For example, people physically fast.

Why?

Some people physically fast.

It’s an aid to developing inner spiritual hunger for God.

Why? It’s an aid for developing inner humility toward God or anyone.

So you physically kneel in order to develop the inner sense of humility.

In this case, what are all the washings?

What’s all the tremendous amount of effort to always be clean and free from dirt and free from disease and uncleanness?

It’s an aid, you see.

It’s a visual aid.

The ritual washing is a physical thing that enables you to develop the recognition that we’re spiritually and morally unclean, and we can’t just go into the presence of God unless there’s spiritual purification that goes on.

This isn’t as weird as you might think again.

For example, if you’re going to go see somebody who is really, really, really important to you,

you wash.

You floss.

Oh, yes, especially before that big date.

What are you doing?

You’re getting rid of the uncleanness, of course.

You don’t want a speck on you.

You don’t want to smell bad.

You scrub, and you floss.

God says, “It’s the same thing with me.”

Spiritually, morally, unless you’re clean, you can’t live in the presence of God, a holy God.

I want you to consider something.

Before we move on, we need to realize … In fact, I realized as I was studying this passage, it’s easy to miss this.

Jesus disagrees with the leaders of his day about the source of the uncleanness, and he disagrees with the leaders about what to do about the uncleanness.

The thing Jesus doesn't disagree with the leaders about is that we are unclean.

That is to say we are unclean before God.

We’re not fit for the presence of God.[2]

We All Have A Sense of Being Unlcean

We all have a kind of deep, profound, inescapable sense that if we were examined,

we wouldn’t pass.

If we were inspected, we’d be rejected.

We have a deep, profound sense we have to hide,

or we have to at least control what people know about us.

We have a deep sense that we aren’t acceptable.

In some way, we’re going to have to prove to ourselves and other people that we’re worthy or that we’re okay or that we’re lovable or that we’re valuable.

Somehow you’re not up to specs.

You call it complexes.

You say, “My parents didn’t love me enough.”

You psychologize it, but there it is.

We all have a sense that we’re unclean.

We’re covering.

We’re hiding.

We’re working like crazy to do something about it.

We all have a sense, even us, even now, that we’re unclean.[3]

The Jews of Jesus day had developed a very, very sophisticated external religious system to deal with the uncleanliness that they felt.

They have gone way beyond the Law of God.

They had adhered to the Law of God as much as was possible in the ceremonies and the rituals and the rites that God had ordained in the Levitical Law but they had added many others.

literally hundreds of other prescriptions to the things that were scriptural.

Out of that had come the notion that defilement was something outside of them.

They were under the illusion that on the inside they were good and godly.

You would have to say that’s what all Pharisees thought.

The Pharisee in Luke 18 who prays, thus with himself,

“I thank You that I’m not like other men, even like that wicked tax collector.

I tithe, I fast, I do all the right ceremonies and rituals.”

That was the illusion they lived under.

The Apostle Paul had the same illusion, according to Philippians 3, where he says that according to the Law, he was blameless, he was zealous, he was a Pharisee, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, kosher, kept all the traditions, all the prescriptions.

And he put that in the achievement column in his former unbelieving life.

That’s the way they thought.

And so, they thought because they were good on the inside and everybody who followed them bought in to that theology thought the same thing, and that was pervasive all over the land of Israel,

they all thought that they were basically good on the inside.

they were righteous on the inside,