Garbage Out, Garbage In

Scripture — Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. 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.”

Devotion

Yesterday, we talked about how the epistle of James calls us to be “doers of the word and not merely hearers.” In case we thought that such a clear call to action was only a strange idea that James had, we have today’s Gospel lesson to remind us otherwise.

This moment of teaching follows some very famous stories in Mark 6: Jesus’s unsuccessful visit to Nazareth (Mark 6:1-6a), his sending out of the Twelve (6:6b-13), the death of John the Baptist (6:14-29), the feeding of the five thousand (6:30-44), and Jesus’s walking on the water (6:45-52). After the experience on the water, Jesus and his entourage moor their boat in Gennesaret (6:53-56) and Jesus begins walking through villages healing.

Against this backdrop, some scribes and Pharisees, who appear to be following Jesus as he travels, weigh in with a critique of Jesus’s disciples for not washing their hands before they eat. This is not merely a washing for sanitation—an act we all probably thought a great deal more about during the recent pandemic—but a ritual preparation for eating, as Mark explains in a helpful aside. Jesus has been seen to observe other Jewish traditions, to be sure, but he takes the opportunity of this question to critique this one and to make a larger point about the life of faith. What good is it—spiritually, not pandemic-wise, I mean—if you wash your hands if you’re not also washing your heart?

This can be a hard word to hear, especially if you, like me, have been around for a good many decades and if you spent your youth, as I did, in a Christian subculture where you were frequently reminded of the ways the world might corrupt you. Read good Christian books, you may have been told; watch good Christian movies; hang out with good Christian people. If you find things in the culture around you that don’t seem like good Christian things, say so. Loudly.

This story turns that teaching from my youth on its head, though. As in another famous statement by Jesus about specks and logs (Matthew 7:3-5), we’re asked by Jesus to start from the inside out, not the outside in. (It’s essentially the opposite of that old adage about computer coding, “Garbage in, garbage out.”) Ultimately, what surrounds us is not anywhere near as dangerous to our faithfulness as what we find within us.

And (this is my extrapolation now, not a direct summary of the Scripture passage) when we do read good Christian books and hang out with good Christian people, when we gather for worship or study or fellowship, we don’t do so to hide from the world—but to strengthen our hearts, to grow in grace and holiness, so that what comes out of us will not defile us (or, for that matter, anyone else.) We gather as Christians not to hide from the world in the Word, but to be doers of that Word and not hearers only—in offices and on street corners, in schools and at coffeeshops, and even in Internet comment boxes—so that Jesus’s Kingdom may advance.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project’s online commentary. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Which Virtues?