As I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this space, I’ve been journeying through the Gospel of Mark this year, both with my church and with select authors/commentaries. Along this journey I’ve been trying to stay open to whatever God desires to say through this study and meditation.
Sometimes the thoughts that come from this are larger ones. Such as the pardigm shifting inviation to see the Gospel of Mark as a parallel portrait of creation/new creation, hearing in its opening words (the beginning of the Gospel of Christ Jesus) not just the beginning of the story of Jesus (as in a biography), and not just the culmination of the story of Israel (as in a narrative), but as the beginning of a new reality. The unfolding story is not simply about a Jesus in history, but about the life of its readers now occupying space in this inaugerated new resurrection reality. In this sense reading the Gospel According to Mark also becomes our own biography, adopting ourselves into this same patterned way of being and existing and learning how to see the world through this lens.
And sometimes the reflections are small. As it is with this mornings reading from Chapter 7.
The focus point of this morning was the familiar verse, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (7:15) For so much of my life this verse has simply stood as an invitation into a form of Christian liberty, typically over and against the constraints of religious tradition. A tradition that of course gets framed within those bad and angry pharisees. The larger discussion about the ways in which we have turned the Pharisees into an unfortunate stereotype within streams of Christianity aside, trying to cut through the noise of that familiarity can be difficult, but there was a note from my commentary that helped reframe this verse in a fresh light.
This comes from the the climatic point of the larger discourse in this chapter regarding God’s Word and Tradition, which is found in 7:20-23
“And he (Jesus) said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
As my commentary (by James Edwards) points out, there is an intentional literary quality and structure to the way the author compiles this list that opens up a window into Jesus’ central point in verse 15, that “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
To back up slightly first, the initial concern is the Pharisees noting that the disciples of Jesus were “eating with defiled hands.” Why does this matter? Because in the Tradition of the Judeans this represented a condition of impurity, and purity laws are intrinsically attached to the greater concern for idolatry. Within the larger framework of this Tradition lies the story of exile and promise, and thus any and all appeals to Tradition are not to rules but to the hope of being set apart for the sake of God’s expected renewal of a creation enslaved to Sin and Death, the source of the sin pollution that purity laws look to remove.
Readers of the Gospel according to Mark will notice once again the patterned movement from outside the house (with the crowd) and inside the house (with the disciples), a movement that is gradually blurding the lines between the two as the Gospel goes along. The house in Mark is temple imagery, thus this isn’t just about eating food with unwashed hands but about the larger portrait of the new creation reality being brought about “in Christ,” something that is renewing the whole of creation.
The transition from crowd (7:1;14) to house comes in verse 17, once agian asking this particular audience (the disciples) whether they understand the point. Which is where Jesus adds this climatic and informing explanation in verses 20-23, reflected through the following dynamics Mark’s literary/narative device:
- The list is broken into two collections of words, both bound together by the unique use of the word poneria (Greek, translated as evil or wickedness)
- The first 5 words are deliberately represented in the plural, indicating their external quality- they come from or happen on the outside- fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice
- The second collection of words are deliberately reprsented in the singular, indicating that they are reflecting what is birthed on the inside- deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
To grasp how the ancient audience would have heard this in its second temple Judean context, all of the words presented in the plural would have been attached to matters of the Tradition. There are two possible ways of reading the emphasis to this end. Either it could read as the following: For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: Fornication? Theft? Murder? Adultery? Avarice? All of these things are rooted within, in the wickedness of the heart, such as deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
Or, it could read from the opposite direction: For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: Fornication? Theft? Murder? Adultery? Avarice? The reason why these things matter within the Tradition is because they breed the wickedness of the heart within- deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
Noting this literary device is more than just semantics. What becomes clear is, Jesus is not dismantling the relevance of Tradition in favour of some form of “Christian liberty.” Instead Jesus is explaining what the Tradition upholds- the story of God’s acting in the world. This is what understanding ANE purity laws opens up for modern readers. Where we might tend towards reading Law as legalism, a set of rules we must follow to be considered righteous and therefore on the inside, what purity laws actually indicate is a conception of two different realities- one enslaved to Sin and Death, the other liberated by Life and Transformation. Further, in the crass imagery of verse 19, depicting food as something that goes into our stomachs and out into the sewers, the brief interjection by the author’s own voice (a rarity in Mark) is not rendering the concern for idolatry as wrong or insignificant, the author is rather proclaiming the nature of God’s Kingdom having arrived in Jesus. If the accusation of the Pharisees’ concern is that they “are making void the word of God through their tradition,” (verse 13), the point of that accusation directly relates not to the undermining of the story this Tradition upholds, but rather the imagination its fulfillment demands. The word of God is made void. Meaning, it has been demonstrated to be proven false. What is this word? In Mark the word is the proclomation that underlines the Gospel or good news (1:1). For Mark, “the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near” (1:15) is the context for everything that follows, and it is marked by this movement of transformation out into the whole of creation. If this is, indeed the reality Mark’s audience occupies, the emphasis on this transforming work moves from the inside out. If we want to imagine a different reality, we begin by imagining a heart that is being renewed by the spirit.
Instead of being pulled out of a world in which we find these (plural) external realities, as was the case with the creation and formulation of Israel, the call is this movement into the world where God’s fulfillment is witnessed to through the transformation of the heart (understood as the seat of ther person). For any faithful Torah adherent this would have confjured up a recasting of the original creation story in Genesis 1-4 in light of the beginning of the good news, a new creation story. The question becomes, does our recontextualizing of the word of God believe this to be true or not. If not we are still occupying space outside of the garden. If so, we are occupying space in the new creation. Two different ways of seeing the world, two different ways of being in the world.
The Stories of my Life 