2024-09-01 - Covenant CRC - Sermon Only - Joel Kok

 Mark 7:1-23

Transcript

Well, the gospel reading in the church's liturgy calendar is Mark chapter seven and we read the first 23 verses. So we invite you to turn to the gospel of Mark chapter seven. and we'll read verses 1 through 23. And just a little bit of context here. This is, well, all the gospel scenes are interesting. And part of the interest here is that Jesus has just been doing some remarkable things.

He has fed 5, 000 people with 12 baskets left over. He has walked on water and especially he's been healing all kinds of people and people are really seeking his healing. But that's made some other people jealous of him, some rival teachers, and that jealousy and rivalry is going to come out in our passage.

And so let's listen for our Lord speaking to us in all kinds of ways through this Gospel reading again beginning at Mark 7 verse 1. The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus. and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were unclean, that is, unwashed.

The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating their food with unclean hands?

He replied, 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. They worship me in vain. 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.

And he said to them, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and anyone who curses their father and mother must be put to death. But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, So, whatever help you might otherwise have received from me as Corban, that is a gift devoted to God, then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother.

Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean.

After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. Are you so dull? He asked, don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean for it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach and then out of his body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.

He went on. What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean, for from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. Well, all these evils come from inside and make a man unclean. This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. Well, friends, one Word of the Lord for us today is the word clean, which we just heard related more to being unclean in our reading, but the message is that through His Word, God is making us clean by Christ coming into our hearts through His Word. and working at cleansing that'll work from the inside and come out and how we live.

Now in the scriptures, and we'll explore this a little bit more, a little further soon in the scriptures, especially in the book of Leviticus, but elsewhere as well, when the Lord makes us clean, that's the Lord working to make us holy. So that's a major theme in the book of Leviticus. It's also a message that the apostle Peter passes on in a fulfilled way in Christ.

Because what both Leviticus and Peter are able to say is that our Lord works to make us clean. What our Lord is doing is making us holy as he is holy, which is the only true holiness that there is and that Christlike holiness which flows from being cleansed in Christ as he comes inside us. That Christ like holiness has a saving power because that cleansing in Christ that leads to a holiness like Christ that has so much power.

It leads to what the book of revelations calls even the healing of the nations. It's such a healing holiness that comes as Christ makes us holy as he is holy. So we're going to spend a little bit more time with the words clean and holy. We're going to connect them to some related words that we'll really need to hear, to hear those words.

And as we open ourselves to those words, that'll be the spirit opening us to Jesus to come inside us through his word and spirit. And again, the goal that our Lord will accomplish that we can participate in is to Is that he's going to be making us more and more clean like Jesus, holy like Jesus. Because that is the greatest gift of the gospel there is.

That we can become more and more like Christ. So as we look forward to our Lord working that in us, we can go back to the opening words in our gospel reading, which means we can turn to some teachers of the law, looking at some of the disciples. And what that shows us is that not all of the teachers or the disciples were doing the same thing.

But some of the teachers of the law look at some of the disciples of Jesus and they see that they're eating food with unclean hands, which Mark explains means their hands are unwashed. And most of us think, well, yeah, you should wash your hands before you eat. But Mark also indicates that this is part of a ceremonial washing that is tied to some traditions that have grown up among Jesus.

Jewish people. And so these, uh, Pharisees and teachers of the law, they're wanting to hold on to the tradition of their elders. And so they're kind of critiquing some of Jesus disciples and a gospel truth that Jesus wants us to receive here is that When we listen to the commands of God, and there are commands about washing and those kind of things, when we listen to the words of God, and there are words about clean and holiness and all that, when we listen to those biblical words and seek to live them out, it is inevitable that we're going to develop some habits that are going to become traditions.

And so as with everything else, traditions aren't all bad, but traditions can go bad. And that is what Jesus is warning us about is about how traditions can start to block the true commands and the word of God. And so that's Jesus telling us that to really hear the commands and the word of God, it's not like we can escape all kinds of traditions, but we can listen to them through Christ and in the light of his Holy Spirit.

And to see all these things interacting, what is clean, what is unclean, what, uh, does the words in Leviticus mean, and all that kind of thing, to see all of that being fulfilled and expanded in Christ and through His Holy Spirit, we can turn to one of the disciples in our passage here, and that is the disciple Peter.

Because it's kind of interesting that as we read about Peter and the other disciples in this reading here in Mark chapter 7, Jesus, who's been very, you know, confrontational to the teachers of the law and called them hypocrites, when he turns to his disciples, again, Jesus has these sharp words when they say, Jesus, what are you getting at with that parable about inside outside?

He says, are you so dull? And that's Jesus with these sharp words trying to wake them up and heal them. Because Peter and the other disciples, they just haven't been fully understanding what Jesus is doing with respect to the teachings that he is fulfilling. And so we see that in Mark 7. It's a major theme in the Gospel of Mark that the disciples are so often not really understanding what Jesus is saying and doing.

And interestingly, that lack of perfect understanding That continues even into the book of Acts, because when we get to the book of Acts, we're going to see Peter. Now he has been listening and learning from Jesus even after his resurrection. And he has, Peter has received the Holy Spirit in a way that has transformed him.

And still, even all those amazing things are happened. He's still not quite getting what Jesus says. He hasn't quite got. Um, In verse 19 of our reading, Peter still hasn't quite understood that the Lord Jesus has made all food clean so that he can help them participate in making all people clean. And we see this in Acts 10 and 11, where again, by Acts 10 and 11, Peter, who's been a, a good disciple in all kinds of ways from the beginning, now it's even more amazing, he's been proclaiming Jesus as the Christ to his fellow Jews.

He's been going to some of the main enemies of the Jews, the Samaritans, and helping them receive the Holy Spirit. So it's just wonderful what our Lord is doing through Peter already. But then, one day when Peter goes up on a housetop to pray, He winds up so much needing a cleansing vision and word from the Lord so that he can participate in all that Jesus is doing through his spirit.

So maybe you remember in this story, what happens is as Peter goes up to pray, he winds up getting a message from our Lord, a message that he never expected, and that at first he just can't accept. Because in this message, in this vision, our Lord says to Peter, He shows him all kinds of animals, and He says, Peter, I want you to eat all these animals.

I want you to eat all the food that's available in the world. And for Peter, so much of that food is unclean. And that's not just a tradition. That is a word from God in the book of Leviticus and elsewhere. So in response to that word, eat all this different kind of food, Peter calls on the word, eat. of God.

He says, by no means, Lord, I have never eaten that kind of unclean food. I'm not going to eat that kind of common unclean food. And then our Lord reveals, well, you know what, Peter, in the one story, I've taken us further in regard to how these covenants at work. And that's where Jesus in effect repeats what Mark told us in Mark seven, he says, I have made all food clean because that's part of me making all people clean.

By removing a barrier that would prevent Jews and Gentiles from coming together to get cleansed and made holy in Christ. And that experience that Peter gets in Acts 10 and lives out in Acts 11, that is such a major event. It's like a second Pentecost. And it's so important that Jesus says this to Peter three times, which in the Bible means in the most powerful way possible, Because Jesus is just insisting and transforming Peter to be able to participate into this cleansing of all food as a way to cleanse all people in Christ and thank God.

Peter listens not only to the Word of God in the Bible, but to how it's fulfilled in Christ and made part of his life through the Holy Spirit. Amen. And so Peter winds up participating in our Lord bringing Gentiles, non Jews, and Jews together in the one family of faith. And what that does then is alerts us, is Peter, who meant well, he's allowing some traditions at first to kind of block him.

to how our Lord Jesus is fulfilling the word of God and bringing it to him in a renewed way through his Holy Spirit. And that's what we want to be aware of today. That is we've come to listen to the word of God this morning. Inevitably we come out of various traditions and again, those traditions aren't all bad, but they can become blockages to what our Lord is saying to us.

Through fulfillment in Christ, and through the gift of His Holy Spirit. And at this point, it's kind of interesting, and I think it's revealing. At this point, we here who are a bunch of, I think we're all Gentiles, I'd love to hear any people from Jewish background this morning, but, um, we can read a story like this about, you know, what's clean and unclean in Leviticus and things like that, and we can kind of feel like, well, that's a little bit of a distant story.

I mean, no one has come up to me and said, Pastor, am I allowed to eat pork and ham and that kind of, you know. These things can just seem like distant, ancient stuff. But if, again, we listen to Jesus and his spirit. Our Lord continues to speak to us in those words about cleanliness and food and all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

And the Lord signals that in our reading, when after he gets into a dispute with the Pharisees and the teacher of the law, he calls the crowd. He calls all of us together and he says, listen to me, which is amazing. That's what the Lord says in Deuteronomy six, Shema, listen to me, Jesus is saying, in effect, I'm the Lord.

Listen to me. And then he shifts from, well, what sort of ceremonial cleaning can you do? What kind of food can you eat? He shifts it to looking at our hearts, what's going on inside us and how it comes outside us. And Jesus, again, is speaking to all of us and he's connecting us to ancient words that he fulfills and then brings into our life through his spirit.

And for us to receive that connection. One person who can help us here as always, we can learn so much from a fellow disciple in our own time. And the fellow disciple we're going to listen to this morning is a woman named Jennifer Rosner who has this book called finding Messiah, a journey into the Jewishness of the gospel, which is a lesson we all need for the rest of our lives.

The Jewishness of the gospel. And here I can share that Jennifer Rosner, she was on Justin Bailey's podcast, and another professor, and he talked to her. And in her book, she tells a fascinating story about how she was raised as a Jew. And then when she was at a college in California, she experienced the Holy Spirit, she became a Christian in this kind of church called the Vineyard Church, which emphasizes the Holy Spirit.

And when she first became a Christian, she thought, well, I'm not a Jew anymore. And she kind of thought, even I can't be a Jew. But then as she continued to listen to the word of God, and as she continued to worship, and see. some good sides of the tradition of Christian liturgy coming out of some Jewish and biblical practices connected to them.

What wound up happening to her is she found out she could be a Jew and a follower of Jesus. And Jesus emphasized that so much that the Spirit led her to write this book again, finding Messiah, which of course is the Hebrew word for Christ, the Anointed One. the king. And again, she's helping all of us to take this journey into the Jewishness of the gospel, which is again, a message we need to hear because one of the sad and bad sides of the Christian tradition in which we're raised is that not only have we neglected much of the Jewishness of the gospel, it has been one of the darkest sides of the Christian tradition, the way we treated Jews, which includes Criticizing them with little understanding.

Persecuting them. Making their lives miserable in all kinds of ways. And to get just one little taste of that, I can share a quote that Jennifer Rosner puts right at the beginning of her Bible. I mean, not her Bible, her book. Because as she was seeking to be a Jewish person who followed Jesus as the Messiah, she had to deal with all kinds of messages.

And here's a message that she got from someone who in many ways is a very good church father, someone who was devoted to Jesus enough to die for him as a martyr. But here's what a church father named Ignatius of Antioch said almost 2000 years ago. Ignatius of Antioch wrote this. It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice the gospel.

Judaism. How do you think that sounded to Jewish people thinking about Christ way back in his day? How do you think it sounds to Jewish people thinking about Christ today? So friends, let's listen to those words one more time. Let's imagine what we don't have to imagine. Jesus hears those words. How would the sound of Peter Who never stopped being a Jew, even as he connected to Gentiles.

Paul, who could always say, I'm a Jew, as he connected to Gentiles. Well, here's what Ignatius says to anybody who will listen to him. It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism. So again, that came about in the second century of the Christian tradition. And it became a tradition that was so terrible.

It was a contributor to even the Holocaust. Because when the Nazi Germans decided we're going to get rid of all the Jews, we're going to kill them. One major resource they had was quotations from Christian teachers, including Martin Luther, that they could quote at great length and say, the Jews are monstrous.

We need to get rid of these people. And so that's the kind of tradition that, you know, I don't think many of us would say, well, why? I want to kill all Jews, but how many of us are emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus? How many of us are exploring the Jewishness of the gospel? And what I would say is Jesus himself is fulfilling further.

Mark seven, Jesus himself, by his spirit is saying to us, These are aspects of the gospel that you can study and ponder and learn from for the rest of your life. And that doesn't mean we throw away the whole Christian tradition. It means we look for Jesus to illumine us to live out that tradition in a healthy way rather than a hate filled way.

And how is that going to happen? How is Jesus going to make words like clean and unclean and holy? How is he going to make them more and more alive in us? Well, he's going to do that becoming inside us. And so that's one more word that we can look at today. We've looked at clean, unclean holiness tradition.

Well, another word that we can look at is heart because Jesus in our passage, when he talks about the heart, He's talking about the whole human heart. He's not just talking about a bunch of bad Pharisees back in the day, and they weren't all bad, by the way. He's not just talking about people in his time.

He's talking about every human heart in the fallen human family. And that's where we get all these words about evil thoughts come out, and that leads to evil deeds, immorality, hatred, all kinds of bad things happen. So you know what we need? To overcome that? We need Jesus, of course. And we need Him by His Holy Spirit to come inside us.

And we need Him to cleanse us. We need Him to make us clean. And do you know how Jesus makes us clean? I can share that, of course, like you, I had read this Bible passage before, but it took on a new life for me when Jesus was making the word clean come alive for me through His Spirit. Here's a little passage from 1 John 1.

And I'll just say, the point here is that Jesus is making us clean by his blood. In 1 John 1 we read that if we say we have fellowship with God, and yet we walk in darkness, then we lie. Then we are hypocrites because we're not practicing the truth. But if we walk in the light as Jesus is in the light.

Then we have fellowship with one another. There's this one family of faith that we can all be together. And even when we're different, all kinds of ways, then we have fellowship with one another. And how can that happen? First John says it's because the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all our sin. Now, how do we get the blood of Jesus coming into our hearts to cleanse us?

through the words that we're hearing right now, we're going to drink the blood of Jesus in the sacrament in just a bit. And all of this will be happening because the Holy Spirit is going to flow in us like a stream of water that Jesus says, as we drink it in, it becomes a fountain and flows out of us.

That's the kind of thing that Jesus is doing to help us navigate through our tradition. Out of the bad and sad, into the good, into the healing. And that is what Jesus is doing right now. We can be grateful that through his word, through his spirit, through his body, and his blood, he's making us clean, he's making us holy, and ultimately, as Hebrews adds, and as other passages say, as he makes us clean, as he makes us holy, he brings us all together because that's how he's going to make us perfect.

That's what our Lord is up to right now. And that's what we can participate in through his word and spirit. So let's join in prayer about that.

Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for making all food clean so that we could participate with you in making all people clean, including ourselves, as we receive your blood, as we drink in your spirit, and have it flow into our hearts and then out of our hearts in a way that can bring healing even to all the nations that you have in mind for the new creation you're bringing.

We're so grateful to participate that in, in that Lord Jesus. And so we can pray with trust that you'll continue to make us clean, you'll continue to make us holy and you'll bring us together in a way that makes us perfect. We thank you for this. We pray for this Lord Jesus in your name, amen.