Fill in the blank

September 2, 2018

Perhaps you’ve heard something like this at some point:  Anyone who is BLANK or does BLANK can’t be a Christian or can’t go to heaven…and people fill these blanks with all sorts of things based on their beliefs or their preferred prejudices.  This is wrong because it leaves the impression that Christianity consists of a certain program of behavior and nothing more.  It overlooks how Christianity is more than morality; it’s spirituality.

Jesus brings the conversation swiftly around to the real issue in this morning's Gospel lesson.  He said “stop judging one another – don’t be concerned with morality alone!  Look beneath.  That’s where you can make something happen.  Get new hearts, clean hearts.  The disorder on the surface is because of the disorder within.”

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

in vain do they worship me,

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.