Mark 7:1–8, 14–15, 21–23

The Pharisees and some of the experts in the law came from Jerusalem and gathered around Jesus. ²They saw some of his disciples eating bread with unclean (that is, unwashed) hands. ³In fact, the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they scrub their hands with a fist, holding to the tradition of the elders. ⁴When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions they adhere to, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, kettles, and dining couches. ⁵The Pharisees and the experts in the law asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders? Instead they eat bread with unclean hands.” ⁶He answered them, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites. As it is written: These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. ⁷They worship me in vain, teaching human rules as if they were doctrines. ⁸“You abandon God’s commandment but hold to human tradition like the washing of pitchers and cups, and you do many other such things.”

¹⁴He called the crowd to him again and said, “Everyone, listen to me and understand. ¹⁵There is nothing outside of a man that can make him unclean by going into him. But the things that come out of a man are what make a man unclean. ¹⁶If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear!”

²¹In fact, from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, ²²adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. ²³All these evil things proceed from within and make a person unclean.” (EHV)

The Pharisees and some of the experts in the law came from Jerusalem and gathered around Jesus…. Whenever that happens trouble is brewing. The Pharisees loved the outward trappings of religion—especially keeping their traditions and rules—Law. But Jesus came to preach the Gospel, the truth that we are saved by faith alone in Him. That’s because, as Scripture clearly teaches, we are corrupt by nature and can’t keep God’s commandments. For that reason, we need a Savior from our sins, not a lawgiver or motivational speaker.

Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees gets right to The Heart of the Matter, the central doctrine of Scripture, namely that Justification is by Faith alone. That’s The Heart of the Matter, 1. because that teaching starts with the true condition of our hearts. And it’s The Heart of the Matter, 2. because the Gospel is the only thing that can change the heart and make it new.

The Natural Sinful Heart—Helpless to Do Good and Be Saved

The doctrine of justification by faith always came to a head when Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees. The Pharisees wrongly believed they were basically “good” people. They considered their puny “religious” deeds as good works that earned “brownie points” with God. On this day, they were nitpicking Jesus’ disciples for not checking the boxes on their “brownie point” score card. They were like the people in California during Covid who outlawed walking on the beach or surfing or playing outdoors and then sent the police out into the water to capture the lonely surfer or who called the cops on someone using a playground alone with their children, or who walked up to strangers to harangue them for not wearing a mask while walking alone on a sidewalk.

That’s what the Pharisees were like. They were self-appointed “morality police.” In their ever-watchful gaze, they had seen Jesus’ disciples going to eat without stopping at one of the ceremonial hand lavatories. Only priests were required to do this in the Old Testament as part of religious ceremonies. But now it had become a tradition which the Pharisees expected everyone to follow.

There’s nothing wrong with washing your hands. Yet, in their minds, this man-made tradition actually made their hands holy. But no man-made ceremony can do that, not even one instituted with the best of intentions!

We, too, have some historical, man-made religious customs and ceremonies that we follow. Many of them are meaningful and good, and that’s why we preserve them. But our Lutheran Confessions rightly condemn teaching that they are absolutely necessary, or that doing them makes us right with God. The fact is, there’s nothing we could everdo that would make us right with God. Only God can do that!  Jesus and all the prophets and apostles teach in Scripture that we are by nature so soaked and steeped in inherited sin; that we are incapable without faith of producing even so much as one good work. For that reason, our salvation depends entirely, 100% on Jesus alone.  

Sin is not some airborne disease that we can hope to wash off our hands or kill with hand sanitizer. It’s not some foodborne disease that we can avoid by only eating kosher food. Sin is inborn. We get it from mommy and daddy, like fetal alcohol syndrome. Inherited sin is what makes us die just like our parents.

Paul Harvey, the radio broadcaster, once gave a famous monologue, titled “If I were the devil.” He said, “If I were the Devil … I would … take over the United States. … I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” …  To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around…. If I were the devil, I’d fill T.V. with dirt[y] movies. … I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. Paul Harvey, Good Day.”

I don’t think there’s anyone here today who disagrees with Paul Harvey, and I bet we all wish he’d still be the guy people around the country heard on their radios at noon. “It’s all happened, just as Paul Harvey predicted. That’s why our country’s such a mess.” But is that really the cause—or the effect?

About a decade before Paul Harvey spoke these words in 1964, a radio preacher, Donald Grey Barnhouse, of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his national CBS radio audience a different take on what it would look like if Satan took control of a city. He said, ‘If I were the devil, I’d see to it that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday … where Christ is not preached.”

That is exactly what the devil was trying to do through the Pharisees—to fill the synagogues with people who carefully followed outward rules and ceremonies that would lull them into thinking they are good and don’t need a Savior. But outward righteousness is not what Jesus came to teach! His words that day went straight to the problem—The Heart of the Matter: “From within, out of people’s hearts”—our hearts included—“come evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, ²²adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. ²³All these evil things proceed from within and make a person unclean.”

No matter how dirty, corrupt, and contemptible our world gets and people act, we don’t catch sin from others! Sin comes from our own hearts. We were born dirty, corrupt and contemptible ourselves. Want to find the source of our world’s problems? Look inside your very own heart.  That’s what Jesus teaches.

Out of people’s heartscome evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, ²²adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. It’s because of this universal condition that we need police and armies and courts. Since the fall into sin, crime and war have become the normal state of affairs. It’s because of mankind’s inborn sin that we all—even we who are already Christians—need to keep hearing God’s Law—His honest judgment of our human condition. We need to hear that on our own we are helpless to change and do right.

Yet that’s precisely what all man-made religions deny. The Pharisees believed they were able to do outward deeds that could earn them a place in heaven. They were more religious than you could ever hope to be—but it didn’t get them any closer to God! Muslims are really religious too, rolling out their rugs and bowing toward Mecca three times a day. Japanese Buddhists are law-abiding. So are a lot of good old-fashioned Americans—upstanding and righteous in their own eyes. ‘I weed my yard, I don’t litter, I try to be a nice neighbor and I even sometimes go to church—at least a couple times a year.’ Whether a person is “all in” on trying to earn heaven, or only half-hearted about it, it doesn’t work either way! There is nothing good we can do that will bring us closer to God!

Forty years ago, when I was a teenager, a young, single pastor we knew was learning how to duck hunt. He gifted us some duck that my mom was going to cook for Thanksgiving dinner. But when mom thawed them out the day before the holiday, she realized that they were rotten—unusable. While this pastor had learned how to shoot duck, he hadn’t learned how to clean them by thoroughly removing all the innards. Mom had to scramble to come up with a new dinner plan. The whole duck was rotten because the insides hadn’t been cleaned. That’s what we are like without Jesus! Have you tried to live a day without sin? Have you struggled to put an end to your pet sin? You can’t, can you!? And Jesus says it comes from the inside, not the outside.

The Changed Heart—Cleaned and Empowered by Jesus

But God can turn us into tasty ducks! First, He has to thoroughly and properly clean us from the inside out. And that’s what Jesus does. That’s why Jesus came! Only Jesus could do it. God expects perfection, so Jesus gave it to Him. He kept all God’s commands in thought, word and deed—perfectly, just as God expects. He did it for you, in your place, because you couldn’t. Then He thoroughly washed and cleaned you up by baptism. Jesus hosed us down and washed us clean from the inside out. What gave baptism it’s miraculous cleaning power? His atoning blood, shed on the cross as the payment for our sins, and given to us through faith. The Apostle John summarized how it all fits together in his first epistle. “This is love for God: that we keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, ⁴ because everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith. ⁵ Who is the one who overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. ⁶ This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. He did not come by the water alone but by the water and by the blood. The Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. ⁷ In fact, there are three that testify: ⁸ the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one” (1 John 5:3–8).

Yes, we are by nature born rotten on the inside. But now, through faith in Jesus, God has made us pristine, clean, shiny, sparkling, baptized children of God! He changes our heart—gives us a new heart. Yes, we still sin. But God has declared us to be His holy saints. Only Jesus can cleanse us! And He has! Now, because of His cleansing, we actually want to strive and struggle to match our cleansed souls and changed hearts with new, clean, holy lives that bring glory to God—not by doing fake, outward, so called “good deeds” like the Pharisees, but real ones—living our lives for God and our neighbors! That will remain a struggle till the day we die—most assuredly. But that fight shows we’re alive in Christ; It’s proof we’ve been gutted and given a new heart. That’s The Heart of the Matter—saved by grace alone through faith alone—justified—we are free and eager to live a new life with God. May that beautiful Good News continue to empower our new hearts by the Spirit, the water, and the blood. Amen.