Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Pharisees: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 7:1-13)

Are we guilty of giving up the power of the kingdom and replacing it with rules?  Is there a reason Jesus talks so much about the Pharisees?  We seem most likely to become like them.  We need to examine our “traditions” (spoken and unspoken) to make sure they do not contradict the gospel.

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)—then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:1-13, ESV)

Jesus has been doing incredible miracles, something that should have alerted the Pharisees that the kingdom was among them.  But the Pharisees are now actively looking for infractions of the traditional interpretations of the law on Jesus’ part to accuse him and diminish his popularity with the people.  When they observe that his disciples do not wash their hands ceremonially before eating in accord with the “tradition of the elders,” they challenge him.

Jesus, on the other hand, accuses them of hypocrisy.  They are claiming and practicing outwardly what they consider obedience to God, but inside they are not really worshiping Him.  And they are the ones prescribing what true worship should look like (commandments of men) but the result is they violate true worship.

The example Jesus uses is described well in the ESV Study Bible note: Part of honoring father and mother is to care for them, both financially and personally, in their old age. However, Jewish tradition allowed that funds originally dedicated to the care of parents could be declared Corban(Hebrew/Aramaic for legally “dedicated to God”; cf. Lev. 1:2; 2:1; etc.), meaning that the person would no longer be required to do anything for … father or mother. These funds could now be given to the temple, if so desired.”

Jesus claims there are many such situations in which the Pharisees have adopted customs supposed to help them be obedient to the Law of Moses but that actually end up contradicting it.  We have already seen their use of Sabbath law to prevent “labor” that would otherwise work against God’s law of loving people (when the disciples picked grain when hungry and when the man needed healing on the Sabbath).

Jesus’ willingness to take it right back to the Pharisees, something that no one in that day would have dared do, pits him in a fierce battle with them that the people generally see as Jesus winning but that is leading to a showdown with the authorities that will end in Jesus’ death.

We must be careful not to adopt traditions or practices that enable us to violate the law of God.  If we require, for example, that a person wear fine clothes in order to be spiritually correct in worship at church, we run the risk of keeping people who need the Lord but who lack such clothing from feeling welcome in God’s presence.  And even worse, when we preach against unbelievers and their lifestyles as though they are the enemy, we alienate the very people Christ came to seek and to save.  Besides, we are usually railing against outsiders as a way of avoiding dealing with sin in our own midst.  Like the Pharisees, we declare our superiority to sinners in order to avoid looking at our own hypocrisy.