sermonboy.com

Proper 17

Mark 7
14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’*
17 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18He said to them, ‘Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, 19since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’


I’m not sure what has happened to children’s books. When I was a wee lad, not more that four, my favourite books included anything by the good doctor: “Hop on Pop” or a book with the wonderfully descriptive title “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.” I was also a big fan of P.d. Eastman’s “Go Dogs Go,” which involves various types of dogs driving quickly punctuated by a rather vain dog repeatedly asking “Do you like my hat?” To this day, when stuck in traffic, I will mutter “Go Dogs Go.”

A quick browse through the children’s section of Indigo reveals that disturbing changes have happened in the world of those three or four. Move over “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” because young readers are reading Taro Gomi’s bestseller book “Everyone Poops.” This seems like an unlikely trend, but there’s Wayne Lynch’s award-winning book “The Scoop on Poop” and Susan Goodman’s best-selling book “The Truth about Poop.” I hate to say it, but poop is hot now. Who knew?

It seems that the range of things deemed suitable for publication has expanded in recent years. While we were locked in a world of coloured fish and dogs in cars, the world changed. It may simply be that some enterprising author spent a few hours with a three-year-old and discovered what they are truly interested in, but nonetheless, the world changed. Or did it? Maybe we’ve just come full circle: let me explain.

This week’s reading from Mark comes to us, along with all the readings week-by-week, from the authors of the New Common Lectionary. Wise men and woman set down a three-year cycle of readings to cover all the best bits and ensure that preachers preach from a variety of books, not simply our personal favourites. We get a helping of four readings per week, often eight or ten verses each, sometimes edited for sense or flow.

One of the first jobs of the preacher is to assess the “cut” of the reading (does the beginning and ending make sense) and decide if any edits are appropriate. If something is omitted from the reading (as is the case today), does the omission weaken or strengthen the overall meaning of the text? Today’s answer is definitely weakens, so I put the missing verses back in, which also happen to be the heart of the passage:

17 When Jesus had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18He said to them, ‘Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, 19since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles.

Obviously the Lectionary authors haven’t read “Everyone Poops,” for why else would they omit the part of the passage that gives the best explanation of what Jesus is on about. It is common literary device, to allow some group or person to ask for clarification, and then allow the teacher to simplify and restate. In that way, Mark makes the disciples look foolish rather than you and me. But the lectionary people didn’t like all that sewer talk, so out came the scissors. Eugene Peterson doesn’t share any qualms with them, so he paraphrases the passage in a way that will surely make his friends smile:

Jesus said, "Are you being willfully stupid? Don't you see that what you swallow can't contaminate you? It doesn't enter your heart but your stomach, works its way through the intestines, and is finally flushed."

Peterson read “Everyone Poops.”

The argument here is the classic Jesus vs. the Pharisees on the topic of religious practice. They notice, to their dismay, that the disciples of Jesus aren’t washing their hands before meals, an important facet of ritual purity. They question the teacher (again, quite appropriately) on the behaviour of the students (disciples) and ask ‘what on earth are you teaching them.’ Jesus turns this into a teaching moment.

The days are gone, he argues, when the people of Israel need to worry about all of the old laws. And just as Peter will later hear a voice from heaven that says “Peter, kill and eat,” (while dreaming of forbidden creatures), Jesus is making a case for the same radical shift. His argument is one sentence long: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

In other words, pious rituals matter less than pious actions or pious intent. Eating the wrong food won’t make you evil: but saying the wrong thing just might. Neither the hands nor the stomach are the seat of righteousness: it is the human heart. And the human heart is defined by choices: how we treat others (and what we do to ourselves).

Both Jesus and the Pharisees can agree on this much: The Law of Moses is primary, and their shared religion is an ethical religion. They simply disagree on the heart of the matter. For the Pharisees, the heart of the matter is what is commonly called “a fence around the law.” This means you go beyond the law in practice to further protect yourself from making a mistake. But for Jesus, this is too much. He wants to go in the opposite direction, with less law in order to emphasize some over others. When he blesses the statement 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind’ and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself’ we know he is refining rather than expanding.

Looking for the heart of the matter, he gives his disciples a new list of things to avoid, a new list that supercedes pious rituals:

21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

I’m a big fan of lists. They come in ten’s and seven’s and four’s, but this is a new list, a list that doesn’t come directly from Sinai or Moses summary of the Law. There is some crossover, of course, but this is exciting new stuff.

So theft, murder, adultery, envy, and slander all come from the world’s most famous top ten list. This is definitely the bottom, relational part of the Ten Commandments, because he doesn’t list keeping the Sabbath or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Still important, but this day Jesus is more interested in how people treat their neighbours than the upper group.

Taking the rest, we could add fornication to the adultery commandment, deceit to the slander command, and cross off wickedness, which seems like the whole point of the conversation. That leaves us with licentiousness, pride, folly and avarice. Licentiousness is a great word, meaning disregard for the accepted rules. I encourage you to scream that at the next idiot who rolls through a stop sign: “I abhor your licentiousness!” He will be impressed with your word power. As fun an addition to the list licentiousness is, it is still little more than a summary of the whole discussion. That leaves us with pride, folly and avarice.

Pride, folly and avarice: An interesting trio. We know that the disciples were frequently foolish, something we learn throughout the Gospels. Now whether they were really that foolish, or just set up as a literary device was I mentioned earlier, it’s hard to tell. They certainly made mistakes and had silly discussions, so we’ll assume it was helpful to remind them to avoid folly. But pride and avarice, that was completely different.

Avarice (meaning greed) was something the disciples were in no position to worry about. They began in poverty and entered an itinerant lifestyle where all their needs were met, sometimes in the most miraculous ways. Greed was hardly on their radar, except to agree with their teacher when they met tax collectors and rich young men. And pride, pride was something they may have flirted with when trying to decide who was first among the group, but by-in-large they seemed to live with humility, caught in the divine light of the Son of the Most High.

No, I’m pretty sure the warning about greed and pride were meant for another group of disciples, say ten, twelve, or even twenty centuries on. I’m pretty sure that the people Jesus had in mind are standing in pulpits and sitting in pews at this very minute. Take Jesus warning about greed and pride and stand it beside “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and you see that he perfectly anticipated our age. Jesus said “all these evil things (greed and pride) come from within, and they defile a person.”

We follow in the way of Jesus, a religion of the law and of the heart. He give his friends instruction on how to live well and warned them to avoid more than a few things that would damage the heart. He taught what it means love your neigbour, and expanded this to include being good to yourself: what to avoid and what to reduce in order to make the heart pure.

And I think that Jesus warning about folly was likely a reference to himself. It was God’s foolishness that God should enter the world as a most vulnerable way. It was God’s foolishness that God experience temptation and heartache and pain with us. It was God foolishness that God be willing to put on frail flesh and die at our hands, and it is God’s foolishness that the cross should reconcile us to God for all time. St Paul said, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” God is saving us, from ourselves, every day: thanks be to God.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 3:12 AM