“Hear me, all of you, and understand: 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” Mark 7:14
I’m sure I have said this before but by agreeing with the Pharisees on the purpose of the Old Testament, we can and do easily fall into the same sin they were guilty of. The Old Testament was grace not a magic formula for making God happy.
Yeah so there :p !
Are the dietary laws of the Pharisees really all that strange? I don’t think so. Everywhere you look today someone is starting some new diet. The literature and Facebook posts are a constant barrage of get-thin-quick schemes and exercise regimes. People who dare to eat what has always been considered traditional food, like bread are social outcasts. The culture of Organic-Natural-GMO-free is very similar to a cult. I think you are far more likely to be confronted by someone about your eating habits than your spiritual condition. Or more likely in a gutless, ‘accepting’ society, you will be simply avoided and shunned. I don’t think we have any leg to stand on in looking down on the religious leaders Jesus dealt with.
This shirt says ” I am better than you because I run, and I like abusing scripture.”
But there is a hint of reason in our quest for the perfect diet. We understand that eating properly is a good, it is not the good but it is good. There are benefits to putting the right things in your body. The God of the universe obviously understands this. He created the world, he knows it contains many perils to man. In the beginning he put us in a safe place, the garden. But we grasped for more than we could handle as we grasped for the fruit. Even then God blessed his people by giving them rules on what is safe to eat, rules about cleanliness. Seriously we are going to mock ancient Jews for believing that demons are present on your hands if you don’t wash them? Can you think of another way to express the nature of harmful germs to an ancient people? And so the Old Testament ceremonial laws on cleanliness also double as good rules of hygiene. There is real external defilement. Not washing your hands can kill you, eating shellfish can kill you, eating pork can kill you, this is a dangerous world. The Old Testament wasn’t an arbitrary system of rules to prove how spiritual you were it was a gift from God to people without microscopes, antibiotics, refrigeration and plumbing. We do follow most of these practices, certainly in spirit. We go to the bathroom outside the camp (Deuteronomy 23:12,13), we wash our hands, we cook our meat properly. But modern methods have allowed us to use pipes to take care of waste, soap instead of ceremonial water, and many ways of making meat safe while it still has the blood in it (Genesis 9:4).
The Pharisees thought the point was to prove who had the cleanest hands, when really the point was that the God of the Universe came down to bless them. There he was standing in front of them and they are trying to prove their hands are cleaner. What fools. But we follow right on their footsteps by agreeing with them that the Old Testament was a bunch of rules or formulas. Then we pride ourselves on ‘seeing’ this and look down on people who do not. We think Jesus just brought a better set of rules and “look at me I know Jesus better than you”. No doubt we would criticize Jesus if he stood before us today, for his strict adherence to the rules of morality, “you legalist” or for his free spirit, a “little too free don’t you think?”. Just like the critics of Jesus day;
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon. ’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners! ’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” Matthew 11:18,19
And so the words of Jesus are a parable. Those with the Spirit of understanding can understand and those without will simply be lost in darkness. The point, Jesus says, is about the source of the defilement, the evil. It is within not without. It’s a wonderful parallelism, which would have been beautiful poetry on the lips of our Lord. The contrast of in and out. It’s not that evil contained within is ok, so don’t let it out. The point is that evil is within, it doesn’t happen by eating non-organic GMOs.
We come from a rich tradition of people who understood Jesus’ parables. The Puritan Protestant tradition was one that chased moral purity rather than external purity. They had a wonderful concept of virtue as a muscle that must be constantly trained and exercised. Think about physical training and exercise today, only with your moral faculties. It’s not just something that happens, it comes by work. There is a sense in which what you put into your mind can contaminate you, Jesus also said ““The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness” Matthew 6:22. So be careful what ideas you put into your mind, even more careful than you are with your calorie-counting diet. Put his words in your heart, before the Natural News blogs or whatever other food cult publication. God is so gracious he knows that the physical is easier for us to understand, so he uses it constantly as a metaphor for the spiritual realities. We know about physical danger from food, or laziness, the same things apply to laziness of the soul. We can develop a taste for junk food that makes us sick, just like we can develop a taste for sin, a tastes for bad music, bad ideas, evil movies.
Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. Ephesians 5:6-12
So be careful about what you put into your mind, because if you think obesity is bad, you haven’t seen obesity of the heart.
Map from 1960’s edition of Puritan author John Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s Progress. Spiral reminiscent of Dante. Life is about the journey to virtue, or death.