Mark 7

The scene is set with care. The Pharisees, and certain of the scribes, which came from Jerusalem (v. 1) - this is no chance encounter but a delegation from the capital, come to scrutinize the Galilean teacher. What they catch is small: some of His disciples eating with unwashen hands (v. 2), and at this they found fault. Mark, writing for readers outside Judea, pauses to explain the custom - the washing of hands, of cups and pots and vessels, kept oft and after the market, all holding the tradition of the elders (vv. 3-4).

It is important to see clearly what is and is not at stake. The Law of Moses commanded ritual washings for the priests and for certain defilements, but the elaborate hand-washing the Pharisees pressed on everyone was not the written Law itself; it was the tradition built up around it over generations - a hedge of human rules meant to guard the Law, which had quietly come to carry the same weight as the Law.

The disciples had broken no commandment of God. They had broken a custom of men. And the accusers cannot tell the difference - which is exactly the confusion Jesus is about to expose.

Jesus does not argue about hand-washing. He reaches back six centuries to Isaiah and lays the prophet's words over these men like a verdict: Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men (vv. 6-7). The diagnosis cuts to the root. The trouble is not that they worship too little but that their worship has come loose from the heart - all lips and no love, the outward forms intact while the inward devotion has drained away.

And He names the mechanism by which it happened: they are teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Human rules have been elevated to the rank of divine command, until keeping the customs of the elders feels like serving God while the heart drifts further off. This is the peril of every religion of the surface. A person can be scrupulous about visible observance - the washings, the forms, the things others can see and approve - and be, all the while, far from the God those forms were meant to honor.

Isaiah saw it in his day; Jesus sees it in His; and the word is meant to search every age, including the reader's own.

Then Jesus turns the charge from drift to outright displacement: For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men… Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition (vv. 8-9). The words are heavy with irony - full well, He says, you have become expert at it. It is one thing for tradition to drift alongside the command of God; it is another to use tradition to set the command aside. And that, Jesus says, is precisely what they have learned to do.

The deepest danger of a man-made religious system is not that it adds harmless extras, but that the extras can grow strong enough to overrule the very word they claim to serve. A rule invented to protect obedience becomes, in time, a way around obedience. Notice the possessive, too: your own tradition. What had begun as reverence for God's Law has curved back on itself, until what is really being kept is not God's command but their own custom, their own authority, their own way.

They are not honoring God with these traditions; they are honoring themselves - and calling it devotion.

Jesus does not leave the charge in the abstract; He gives a single, devastating example. Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother - one of the Ten Commandments, with the support of aging parents plainly in view (v. 10). But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift… he shall be free (v. 11). The maneuver was this: a man could declare the resources that might have helped his parents to be Corban - dedicated to God - and so escape the duty to support them, all under a cloak of piety.

The vow sounded devout; in practice it let a son rob his own father and mother while looking holy doing it. Jesus draws the conclusion without flinching: ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; making the word of God of none effect through your tradition (vv. 12-13). There is the whole indictment in one phrase. A tradition that overrides the plain command of God does not merely add to the word - it cancels it, makes it of none effect, empties it of force.

And the example is no accident. Of all the commandments, He chooses the one about honoring parents, where the loophole's cruelty is unmistakable: a religion of forms had found a way to be unloving and call it worship.

Having answered the leaders, Jesus turns to the crowd and lifts the matter to a principle everyone must grasp: Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man (vv. 14-15). The summons is emphatic - every one of you - and the saying is meant to overturn an assumption as old as it was deep.

The whole instinct behind the purity customs was that defilement comes from outside: from contact with the wrong thing, the unwashed hand, the unclean food, the world pressing in. Keep the outside out, the thinking went, and you stay clean. Jesus reverses the flow. The real danger is already within, and it comes out. What touches a person from outside cannot reach the place where defilement actually lives; what defiles rises from the heart and shows itself in what the person does and says.

He adds the call that always marks a teaching meant to be pondered, not merely heard: If any man have ears to hear, let him hear (v. 16). This is a saying to chew on, because it relocates the entire battle. The line we are tempted to police is the line between ourselves and the world; the line that matters runs straight through the human heart.

Even the disciples find the saying hard, and ask Him about it privately, drawing a gentle rebuke: Are ye so without understanding also? (v. 18). Then He explains the mechanism plainly. Food entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught (v. 19) - it passes through the body and out again, never touching the moral center where a person is truly defiled or kept clean. The body processes food; the heart is left untouched by it.

And Mark, watching from years later, sees the implication of what Jesus has just said and states it in a brief aside: this teaching is purging all meats. If nothing that enters from outside can defile the heart, then the long distinction between clean and unclean foods has reached its purpose and its end; the question of what a person eats has been settled by the One who made the heart the true measure. The note is reported simply, as a consequence of Jesus' words.

The weight of the passage does not rest on diet at all. It rests on the relocation of defilement - from the plate to the heart, from what goes in to what comes out - and the freeing of the conscience from fear of the outside so that it can attend to the danger within.

Then Jesus names what does defile, and the list is long and unsparing: That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness (vv. 20-22). Notice where He locates the source: within, out of the heart of men. And notice the order - it begins with evil thoughts, the hidden interior springs, before it ever reaches the visible acts.

The catalog moves from things the world readily condemns (murders, thefts, adulteries) to things it often excuses or admires (covetousness, pride, an evil eye), as if to say the rot is wider and more respectable than we like to think. These are productions of the heart, things it generates and sends forth. And He closes by repeating the verdict so it cannot be missed: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man (v. 23).

It is a sobering anatomy of the human condition. The trouble is in us, in the very organ from which our words and deeds flow. And that is a problem no hand-washing can touch - which is exactly why it needs the kind of help only One can give.

Jesus leaves Galilee and goes north into the borders of Tyre and Sidon (v. 24) - pagan territory, beyond the bounds of Israel. He seeks privacy: He entered into an house, and would have no man know it. But, as so often in Mark, he could not be hid. His fame outruns Him even here, and need finds Him out. A certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet (v. 25).

Everything about her marks her as an outsider to the covenant promises of Israel: Mark calls her a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation (v. 26) - a Gentile woman of the coastal region, with no claim of descent from Abraham, no share in the Law, none of the standing that the men questioning Jesus in the previous scene took for granted. And yet she does the one thing they did not: she falls at His feet.

Where the religious insiders came to find fault, this religious outsider comes to beseech. She has nothing to bring but her need and her trust, and she brings them to the right place - the feet of Jesus. It is a quiet rebuke to the whole logic of insider and outsider that the chapter has been dismantling: the one with no credentials comes nearest, because she comes in faith.

Jesus' first answer sounds, at first hearing, like a closed door: Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs (v. 27). The image draws on the order of God's plan - the gospel coming first to Israel, the covenant people, the children - before it goes out to the nations. But the words must be read with care, for Jesus is not demeaning this woman; He is drawing out her faith.

Notice the crucial word first. He does not say the dogs are never fed; He says the children are filled first. The very form of the saying leaves the door ajar - if there is a first, there is also a next. And the word He chooses for “dogs” is not the term for the wild, scavenging dogs of the street but a tender diminutive - the little dogs, the household pets that live in the house and belong to the family's life.

He is not casting her out into the street; He is, as it were, placing her under the table, inside the home. The hard saying is a test that is also an invitation, and a woman of faith will hear the opening in it. Jesus, who knows the heart, is giving her the chance to show what is in hers - and she rises to it instantly.

Her reply is one of the most remarkable answers anyone gives Jesus in the Gospels: Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs (v. 28). She does not argue with the order He has named; she accepts it. She does not take offense; she takes the very image He has offered and turns it, gently and brilliantly, into the ground of her hope. Yes, Lord - she grants it all: the children are first, she is not one of them, she has no claim.

And then: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs. She asks for no place at the table; she asks only for what falls from it - and she has understood something profound about the One she is speaking to. She knows that the abundance of Jesus is so great that even His crumbs are enough; that to be fed from His overflow is to be fed indeed. There is no pride in her, and no despair either - only a humble, quick, daring faith that will not be turned away and will not overreach.

She takes the lowest place and finds it is near enough to Him. And Jesus, who had drawn this out of her, honors it at once: For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter (v. 29). It is her word of faith that He commends - for this saying - and the deliverance is already done. She comes home to find the devil gone out, and her daughter laid upon the bed (v. 30), at peace.

Jesus comes back toward the sea of Galilee, through the region of Decapolis, and there they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him (vv. 31-32). The man cannot hear, and his tongue is bound so that he cannot speak plainly - two locked doors that shut him out of the ordinary commerce of human life, unable to receive a word or to send one.

He does not come on his own; he is brought, carried into Jesus' presence by others who plead on his behalf. That detail is worth pausing on: again and again in this Gospel, those who cannot come to Jesus are brought by the faith of friends - the paralytic let down through the roof, the sick laid in the streets, and now this man led by hands not his own. The compassion of the community becomes the bridge across which mercy travels.

And what they ask is simple and trusting: only that Jesus would put his hand upon him. They have no theory of how He works; they know only that His touch is enough, and they bring their friend to it.

What follows is unusually tender and personal. He took him aside from the multitude (v. 33) - away from the press of the crowd, the staring eyes, into a private space where this one man could be the whole of Jesus' attention. Then comes a sequence of intimate gestures, each one suited to a man who cannot hear a word: He put his fingers into his ears, touching the very organs that were closed; He spit, and touched his tongue, reaching to the bound member that could not speak.

To a deaf man, words of explanation would be useless; so Jesus speaks in the only language the man can receive - touch, gesture, presence - signing to him, as it were, what He is about to do. He meets the man precisely in his limitation, communicating through the senses still open to him. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed (v. 34). The upward look shows where the power comes from; the sigh is no sound of weariness or frustration but a deep, wordless groan of compassion - the inward ache of One who feels the weight of a creation bound by such suffering, and who is moved to the depths by this man's silence and isolation.

The healing has not yet been spoken, and already we have seen the heart from which it comes.

Then Jesus speaks the word, and Mark, as he loves to do, preserves the very syllables in the language Jesus spoke: Ephphatha, that is, Be opened (v. 34). One word, and the locked doors swing wide: straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain (v. 35). The double cure answers the double affliction exactly - the ears that could not hear are opened; the tongue that could not speak is loosed; and the man who had lived in silence now hears the world and speaks plain. It is done straightway, instantly, completely, at a word.

Then comes a familiar note in Mark: Jesus charged them that they should tell no man (v. 36) - the same restraint He shows elsewhere, guarding against a fame built on wonders rather than understanding. But the joy cannot be contained: the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it. And the crowd's response becomes the chapter's closing verdict and its highest praise: they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak (v. 37).

It is an unconscious echo of the very first verdict ever spoken over the works of creation, when God saw all that He had made and it was good - and now, over the works of this Healer, the people say the same: he hath done all things well.