Sermon from 3rd September 2006
As many people are away and because children's church takes a break, we tend not to post sermons over the summer.
Now things are relatively "back to normal", we resume regular weekly postings.
Our Vicar, Cameron Barker, introduced a new series of study - from Mark's gospel. Here is his sermon, based on the reading from Mark 7: 1-8.
Apologies to members of the medical profession present – & anyone facing surgery; but here’s a list of 5 things that you’d least want to hear whilst on an operating table.
- First & most obvious: anything at all; but if you did, then
- That heart’s beating is putting me off: can’t we stop it?
- I wish I hadn’t forgotten my glasses;
- At least that scalpel is sharp: don’t worry about the rust;
- And; better save that stuff. We’ll need it for the autopsy.
My point is that the best jokes are usually the ones that need the least explanation – because people ‘get’ them without needing to be told any more. Unfortunately, the same thing can’t be said of today’s Bible passage – which really does need quite a lot of explanation!
The good news is that Mark, the author of the gospel that we’re starting to look at in this new series, knew that. As we heard, he at least tried to explain these foreign Jewish religious practices. He needed to explain them because most of his original readers were non-Jewish. But Mark wrote for people in the middle of the First Century – who were more familiar with such practices than we are. We’re going to have to work much harder today to understand what this story’s really about. In the end, though, exactly the same point needs to hit us between the eyes too.
The choice of medical jokes wasn’t a coincidence. As we will see, this is a heart issue – so much so that one writer entitled his commentary ‘does Jesus need to give you a heart attack?’! It’ll take us a while to get to that question, and we’ll have to work on past today’s reading too. But 1st we need at least a brief introduction to this gospel, seeing as how we haven’t been following it so far this year.
So: just about all scholars today are agreed that Mark was the first to write down the story about Jesus – some time around 55 AD. It’s also not controversial to say that Mark himself probably wasn’t a disciple of Jesus. He was close to the action he wrote about, though. The early church in Jerusalem met in Mark’s mother’s house. It may well have been that Jesus ate the Last Supper there too. Mark also appears *as 1 of Paul’s travelling companions *in the book of Acts. Mark & Paul didn’t always see eye to eye, though! But Mark stayed a close friend of Simon Peter; & it’s likely that Peter himself was the main source for Mark’s book.
Mark was probably living in Rome by this stage, so that’s most likely where he wrote his gospel. He did aim his account specifically at a Roman, so non-Jewish, audience – & that’s clear from his very first sentence. Romans were people who liked getting straight to the point, as Mark did: ‘This is the Good News / The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. That’s how Mark began, in 1:1; & he then carried on writing in a way designed to hold a Roman’s attention. Your average Roman liked a short, action story, so Mark’s the shortest of the gospels. E.g. he recorded no less than 18 miracle stories about what Jesus did – as against just 4 full-blown parables that he taught.
In that sense, today’s reading isn’t an average sample of Mark. As we’ll see in the coming weeks, Mark usually told stories that spoke for themselves, & then let them do that. But today we have at least been introduced to 1 of the key themes in this gospel. It isn’t always in the foreground, but this is an important feature of Mark. It’s the ever-growing conflict between Jesus & the religious leaders of his day – which, in the end, directly resulted in Jesus’ death.
Jesus’ death is of course another major theme in Mark, as it is in all 4 gospels. Mark, though, spent about a 3rd of his book writing about the last week of Jesus’ life. He began building up to that from the middle of chap. 8 – so we’ll be getting to it quite shortly in our series. What we need to be aware of today is the role that this conflict would go on to play in Jesus’ death. So, it will help to know now that this wasn’t the first time in Mark that the Pharisees & teachers of the law had come to check Jesus out. It also happened earlier in Mark’s story, & with pretty much the same result.
The Pharisees & teachers of the law heard about what Jesus was doing – & so they came from Jerusalem to see it for themselves. It must be said that they appeared to have come with the intention of finding fault. What Jesus was reported to be doing and saying fundamentally challenged their religious system. It was quite different to the very tight laws they insisted people live by. Jesus was about God doing new, different, and exciting things in the here & now – showing people what God’s kingdom looked and felt like. Of course these leaders couldn’t challenge Jesus directly about that. Instead, they found fault with his disciples – for whom he was responsible as their leader.
The fault they found with Jesus’ disciples in Mark 7 had nothing to do with hygiene! This wasn’t about whether the Pharisees thought that their hands were clean enough to eat with. It was about whether Jesus’ disciples were being good enough Jews. If they were, they would have washed their hands in the right ritual way before they ate – which they obviously didn’t. Now if you’re wondering which book in the OT will tell you how to do that, don’t bother: it’s not in there! None of these practices that Mark mentioned in vs. 3 and 4 are from the OT. They’d been developed over time, and were part of Jewish tradition in Jesus’ day.
That kind of thing does happen, of course – in any religion. Practices develop over time, and become part of the way that things are done. I wonder if saying grace before we eat is a modern Christian equivalent of this ritual washing. There’s good reason in the Bible for us to do it: Jesus gave thanks for his food & drink. But what’s our motivation for doing it? Is it a genuine sign of how thankful we are to God for what he’s given us? Or is it just something that we do because that’s our time-honoured religious tradition?
That’s a question it’s worth asking ourselves, because the answer does matter! These traditions were really important for the Pharisees – and they all had historical roots. What Jesus questioned, though, was what their motivation was. Was it about honouring and obeying God – or just about keeping up the traditions? Jesus was in no doubt about the answer to that question; & he left the Pharisees in no doubt about his view either! Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he told them in v 6, ‘You’re hypocrites’! Jesus accused the Pharisees of playing a role rather than being the real deal. With their mouths & their actions they seemed to honour God – but in reality their hearts were far away from him.
Going now beyond our reading Jesus gave a very specific example of what he meant. He showed how it’s possible to set aside God’s commands by sticking to traditions. In God’s law there is an absolute duty to honour our parents. In Jesus’ time there was a religious tradition that allowed people off that hook in a particular way. If people told their parents that they’d promised an amount of money to God, they didn’t have to give any to their parents. Was that how God wanted people to behave? Absolutely not, as anyone whose heart was for God would know. So this religious tradition in effect allowed people to disobey God.
Going back to the business of ritual washing, Jesus didn’t say it was in itself a way of disobeying God. What Jesus questioned was the Pharisees’ underlying assumption for insisting on people doing it. The Pharisees believed that not washing properly made people unclean before God. There’s a story about a rabbi who was excommunicated for persistently not washing in the right way. But, as Jesus explained later in this chapter, external things can’t & don’t make people unclean, though. What matters much more to God is what’s on the inside. That’s what really makes us unclean – or shows that we are: what’s on the inside.
It’s a whole different way of looking at life & humanity that Jesus introduced. For the Pharisees & traditional Judaism it was about avoiding anything or anyone who could make you unclean. The assumption was that if you did the right things – in the 1001 ways set down in all the regulations – people could keep themselves in God’s good books. But of course we can’t – ever! God sees everything about us; even the bits we’d rather he didn’t! We can’t hide anything from God. He knows even the thoughts of our hearts; and as Jesus pointed out, those are the problem, usually!
If you’ll allow some toilet humour, whatever goes into us from the outside comes out again in some way. That can’t make us unclean, or clean before God. What does make us unclean before God is what’s inside us to start off with. That’s the problem, & that’s where the problem works out from – the inside. In vs. 21 Jesus spelled it all out. It’s on the inside that we have the idea to do things that make us unclean before God. It’s on the inside that we excuse our-selves in advance for taking what’s not ours; or having an affair; or being greedy – or whatever else on this list is our own particular failing. And even if we don’t act on those thoughts, let’s at least be honest about having them.
That’s what makes us unclean before God – the reality of what we’d really like to do. God knows what we’re like: he made us; and in his son he has experienced the invitation to sin that we receive every day. God knows that we each have a heart-problem – so that’s why he came to give us the heart attack that we need! Way back in OT God said that one day he’d give people new hearts – hearts that are for him, rather than for sin. Jesus came to show how it was possible to live with this new heart. Then he died to give a new heart to whoever will accept God’s offer of one.
So, do you need Jesus to give you a heart attack? What is on your inside? Forget for a moment about the outside: even if you behave very well, that’s not fooling God! Do you need a new, God-given, God-focused heart? It is on offer today: you only have to ask. Maybe you’ve received a new heart already. Well, you need to go on bringing it to God each day for him to renew your motivation. Living the Christian life really isn’t about doing the right thing. That is important, of course. But what’s more important is having the right reason to do the right thing. So that’s what any Christian needs to be honest with themselves about, day in & day out. It’s the state of our heart that interests God – & God alone can put that right. So let’s pray that he will …
Now things are relatively "back to normal", we resume regular weekly postings.
Our Vicar, Cameron Barker, introduced a new series of study - from Mark's gospel. Here is his sermon, based on the reading from Mark 7: 1-8.
Apologies to members of the medical profession present – & anyone facing surgery; but here’s a list of 5 things that you’d least want to hear whilst on an operating table.
- First & most obvious: anything at all; but if you did, then
- That heart’s beating is putting me off: can’t we stop it?
- I wish I hadn’t forgotten my glasses;
- At least that scalpel is sharp: don’t worry about the rust;
- And; better save that stuff. We’ll need it for the autopsy.
My point is that the best jokes are usually the ones that need the least explanation – because people ‘get’ them without needing to be told any more. Unfortunately, the same thing can’t be said of today’s Bible passage – which really does need quite a lot of explanation!
The good news is that Mark, the author of the gospel that we’re starting to look at in this new series, knew that. As we heard, he at least tried to explain these foreign Jewish religious practices. He needed to explain them because most of his original readers were non-Jewish. But Mark wrote for people in the middle of the First Century – who were more familiar with such practices than we are. We’re going to have to work much harder today to understand what this story’s really about. In the end, though, exactly the same point needs to hit us between the eyes too.
The choice of medical jokes wasn’t a coincidence. As we will see, this is a heart issue – so much so that one writer entitled his commentary ‘does Jesus need to give you a heart attack?’! It’ll take us a while to get to that question, and we’ll have to work on past today’s reading too. But 1st we need at least a brief introduction to this gospel, seeing as how we haven’t been following it so far this year.
So: just about all scholars today are agreed that Mark was the first to write down the story about Jesus – some time around 55 AD. It’s also not controversial to say that Mark himself probably wasn’t a disciple of Jesus. He was close to the action he wrote about, though. The early church in Jerusalem met in Mark’s mother’s house. It may well have been that Jesus ate the Last Supper there too. Mark also appears *as 1 of Paul’s travelling companions *in the book of Acts. Mark & Paul didn’t always see eye to eye, though! But Mark stayed a close friend of Simon Peter; & it’s likely that Peter himself was the main source for Mark’s book.
Mark was probably living in Rome by this stage, so that’s most likely where he wrote his gospel. He did aim his account specifically at a Roman, so non-Jewish, audience – & that’s clear from his very first sentence. Romans were people who liked getting straight to the point, as Mark did: ‘This is the Good News / The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. That’s how Mark began, in 1:1; & he then carried on writing in a way designed to hold a Roman’s attention. Your average Roman liked a short, action story, so Mark’s the shortest of the gospels. E.g. he recorded no less than 18 miracle stories about what Jesus did – as against just 4 full-blown parables that he taught.
In that sense, today’s reading isn’t an average sample of Mark. As we’ll see in the coming weeks, Mark usually told stories that spoke for themselves, & then let them do that. But today we have at least been introduced to 1 of the key themes in this gospel. It isn’t always in the foreground, but this is an important feature of Mark. It’s the ever-growing conflict between Jesus & the religious leaders of his day – which, in the end, directly resulted in Jesus’ death.
Jesus’ death is of course another major theme in Mark, as it is in all 4 gospels. Mark, though, spent about a 3rd of his book writing about the last week of Jesus’ life. He began building up to that from the middle of chap. 8 – so we’ll be getting to it quite shortly in our series. What we need to be aware of today is the role that this conflict would go on to play in Jesus’ death. So, it will help to know now that this wasn’t the first time in Mark that the Pharisees & teachers of the law had come to check Jesus out. It also happened earlier in Mark’s story, & with pretty much the same result.
The Pharisees & teachers of the law heard about what Jesus was doing – & so they came from Jerusalem to see it for themselves. It must be said that they appeared to have come with the intention of finding fault. What Jesus was reported to be doing and saying fundamentally challenged their religious system. It was quite different to the very tight laws they insisted people live by. Jesus was about God doing new, different, and exciting things in the here & now – showing people what God’s kingdom looked and felt like. Of course these leaders couldn’t challenge Jesus directly about that. Instead, they found fault with his disciples – for whom he was responsible as their leader.
The fault they found with Jesus’ disciples in Mark 7 had nothing to do with hygiene! This wasn’t about whether the Pharisees thought that their hands were clean enough to eat with. It was about whether Jesus’ disciples were being good enough Jews. If they were, they would have washed their hands in the right ritual way before they ate – which they obviously didn’t. Now if you’re wondering which book in the OT will tell you how to do that, don’t bother: it’s not in there! None of these practices that Mark mentioned in vs. 3 and 4 are from the OT. They’d been developed over time, and were part of Jewish tradition in Jesus’ day.
That kind of thing does happen, of course – in any religion. Practices develop over time, and become part of the way that things are done. I wonder if saying grace before we eat is a modern Christian equivalent of this ritual washing. There’s good reason in the Bible for us to do it: Jesus gave thanks for his food & drink. But what’s our motivation for doing it? Is it a genuine sign of how thankful we are to God for what he’s given us? Or is it just something that we do because that’s our time-honoured religious tradition?
That’s a question it’s worth asking ourselves, because the answer does matter! These traditions were really important for the Pharisees – and they all had historical roots. What Jesus questioned, though, was what their motivation was. Was it about honouring and obeying God – or just about keeping up the traditions? Jesus was in no doubt about the answer to that question; & he left the Pharisees in no doubt about his view either! Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he told them in v 6, ‘You’re hypocrites’! Jesus accused the Pharisees of playing a role rather than being the real deal. With their mouths & their actions they seemed to honour God – but in reality their hearts were far away from him.
Going now beyond our reading Jesus gave a very specific example of what he meant. He showed how it’s possible to set aside God’s commands by sticking to traditions. In God’s law there is an absolute duty to honour our parents. In Jesus’ time there was a religious tradition that allowed people off that hook in a particular way. If people told their parents that they’d promised an amount of money to God, they didn’t have to give any to their parents. Was that how God wanted people to behave? Absolutely not, as anyone whose heart was for God would know. So this religious tradition in effect allowed people to disobey God.
Going back to the business of ritual washing, Jesus didn’t say it was in itself a way of disobeying God. What Jesus questioned was the Pharisees’ underlying assumption for insisting on people doing it. The Pharisees believed that not washing properly made people unclean before God. There’s a story about a rabbi who was excommunicated for persistently not washing in the right way. But, as Jesus explained later in this chapter, external things can’t & don’t make people unclean, though. What matters much more to God is what’s on the inside. That’s what really makes us unclean – or shows that we are: what’s on the inside.
It’s a whole different way of looking at life & humanity that Jesus introduced. For the Pharisees & traditional Judaism it was about avoiding anything or anyone who could make you unclean. The assumption was that if you did the right things – in the 1001 ways set down in all the regulations – people could keep themselves in God’s good books. But of course we can’t – ever! God sees everything about us; even the bits we’d rather he didn’t! We can’t hide anything from God. He knows even the thoughts of our hearts; and as Jesus pointed out, those are the problem, usually!
If you’ll allow some toilet humour, whatever goes into us from the outside comes out again in some way. That can’t make us unclean, or clean before God. What does make us unclean before God is what’s inside us to start off with. That’s the problem, & that’s where the problem works out from – the inside. In vs. 21 Jesus spelled it all out. It’s on the inside that we have the idea to do things that make us unclean before God. It’s on the inside that we excuse our-selves in advance for taking what’s not ours; or having an affair; or being greedy – or whatever else on this list is our own particular failing. And even if we don’t act on those thoughts, let’s at least be honest about having them.
That’s what makes us unclean before God – the reality of what we’d really like to do. God knows what we’re like: he made us; and in his son he has experienced the invitation to sin that we receive every day. God knows that we each have a heart-problem – so that’s why he came to give us the heart attack that we need! Way back in OT God said that one day he’d give people new hearts – hearts that are for him, rather than for sin. Jesus came to show how it was possible to live with this new heart. Then he died to give a new heart to whoever will accept God’s offer of one.
So, do you need Jesus to give you a heart attack? What is on your inside? Forget for a moment about the outside: even if you behave very well, that’s not fooling God! Do you need a new, God-given, God-focused heart? It is on offer today: you only have to ask. Maybe you’ve received a new heart already. Well, you need to go on bringing it to God each day for him to renew your motivation. Living the Christian life really isn’t about doing the right thing. That is important, of course. But what’s more important is having the right reason to do the right thing. So that’s what any Christian needs to be honest with themselves about, day in & day out. It’s the state of our heart that interests God – & God alone can put that right. So let’s pray that he will …
posted by Parish Administrator at 1:22 pm
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