Context No. 1129 of 4322 · Mark
Context · Reflection
Mark 7:1-5: in context
1Then the Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered together to him, having come from Jerusalem. 2Now when they saw some of his disciples eating bread with defiled, that is unwashed, hands, they found fault. 3(For the Pharisees and all the Jews don’t eat unless they wash their hands and forearms, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4They don’t eat when they come from the marketplace unless they bathe themselves, and there are many other things which they have received to hold to: washings of cups, pitchers, bronze vessels, and couches.) 5The Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why don’t your disciples walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with unwashed hands?”
The Pharisees and scribes come from Jerusalem and immediately find fault: some of Jesus' disciples are eating with unwashed hands. Mark pauses to explain to his readers the whole apparatus of ceremonial washing the Pharisees had built up, washing hands and forearms, bathing after the market, ritually cleansing cups and pots and vessels, holding to the tradition of the elders. Then the challenge: why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?
The complaint is telling, because it is not about God's law at all. The Pharisees do not accuse the disciples of breaking a command of God; they accuse them of breaking the tradition of the elders, the accumulated human rules that had grown up around the law over generations. And that is the danger this scene exposes: how easily human traditions get elevated to the status of God's commands, until people judge one another by rules God never gave. The washings were not in the law of Moses; they were the additions of the elders, and yet they had become the measure by which these teachers evaluated true religion, more visible to them than any question of the heart. It is a perennial temptation, to build a fence of human customs around the faith and then confuse keeping the fence with pleasing God, to be scandalized by the wrong fork while the heart goes unexamined. Jesus will go on to say exactly this, that they honor God with their lips while their hearts are far away, and that they have let go the commandment of God to hold to human tradition. The question is always whether we are measuring ourselves by God's actual word or by traditions we have made load-bearing.
Where have I made a human tradition into a test of true faith, judging others by rules God never gave, while my own heart goes unexamined?