Mark 7:1–23 — Beneath the Surface

This sermon is from Mark chapter 7 verses 1 through 23, and it is entitled "Beneath the Surface."

Mark 7:1–23

It was given to Ecclesia churches on Sunday, August 31st, 2025.

So by the time we get to Mark 7, Jesus is coming out of kind of a long stretch of time being relatively unbothered by the religious leaders.

He's been teaching in these out-of-the-way towns like Nazareth, in desolate areas with

gathered crowds, and even in gentile areas where the religious Pharisees and scribes were

seemingly uninterested in following him.

But now the Pharisees are back.

And so are some scribes from Jerusalem.

And they have questions for Jesus about his disciples, but really, they're accusations

wrapped in a covering of question.

So the Pharisees are going to accuse his disciples of being ritually unclean as they come to

the table to eat.

But we know from the last passage with the disciples that dirty hands are really the

least of their problems.

Instead, it's their hardened hearts that are the real issue for the disciples.

Jesus graciously doesn't call them out in front of the religious leaders, but he does

use this as an opportunity to shift the focus onto this mistaken belief that appearances

and rituals are what make you clean.

The Pharisees loved their religious practices and their pious and holy appearances, and

Jesus is going to dig deeper and expose a serious heart problem in these people.

And I believe God uses his word to expose some of those same issues in us that he wants

to work on. So here's what we're going to walk away with today, I hope, from this passage.

We're going to see that keeping up appearances doesn't fool God. He sees right through the

facade that we like to put up. Second, we're also going to see that going through the motions

doesn't please God because God is concerned with the heart. And ultimately, we should

come away from this teaching from Jesus with an uncomfortable but clear picture

of the problem we face with our own sinful hearts. But I promise it makes the

good news of what Jesus came to do so so good. So let's go ahead and dig in. This

is Mark chapter 7 and we're gonna start with verses 1 through 8. Now when the

Mark 7 · chapter mention

Pharisees gathered to him with some of the scribes who would come from Jerusalem

they saw, that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.

For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly,

holding to the tradition of the elders. And when they came from the marketplace,

they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe,

such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not walk according to the

tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" And he said to them,

"Well, did Isaiah prophesy of you, hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their

lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the

the commandments of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men."

So the initial accusation is about washing their hands, which we might be kind of tempted

to say, "Ew, yeah, you should wash your hands." But there's more happening here than meets

the eye because this isn't about physically dusty, dirty hands. It's about ritual purity.

They're not worried about germs here.

They're worried about the spiritual contamination of being around unholy things or people.

The Pharisees are under the impression that the disciples are actually making themselves

spiritually unclean by not washing their hands.

So we get to play this little game called Degrees of Separation, the Pharisee Edition.

We have to try to find out where did this idea of required ritual purity get started,

And how far have the Pharisees stretched it to get to where they are now?

So here are just a few Old Testament laws that were given to specific people under specific

situations.

In Exodus 30, we have the priests being told to wash themselves specifically before beginning

their service in the Tabernacle.

And then in Leviticus 15, all the people were told to wash after they had touched various

bodily fluids, which makes sense.

But what the Pharisees had done is to take those laws and say, "If this ritual washing

is good for the priests before they go into the temple, then why not also for me?

And why just before going to the temple?

Why not every time I come home from the market, for example?

After all, there were Gentiles there and they are so unholy.

And if we're supposed to wash after touching things like blood, then why not wash any time

I'm eating to wash off the unholy things that I might have touched?

We can rightly understand the Pharisees as a kind of spiritual hypochondriac, always

worried about becoming unholy from the outside.

And we've seen this kind of attitude, and Jesus has even used it before to make a point,

calling out their shaking of the dust of Gentile country off their feet.

He actually uses it as a judgment against them.

But this isn't a fear of germs or dirt.

It's more like a fear of having their reputation defiled.

This is one of those cultural differences that is kind of hard for us to grasp in the

West.

So let me give you an example that might make a little more sense.

There's like a scandal that goes public, a politician, a famous person, even a pastor.

There is almost this visible reaction in which everyone pulls back from that person.

People who were close friends with them will suddenly say they actually didn't know them

that well after all.

People who were their supporters are suddenly silent.

We kind of remove their name and their products and their books and their influence from our

as best we can, as if they will somehow contaminate us by just the association of their name.

This is really the Jewish understanding of impurity.

And you can see how it might make them hard to reach with the truth, because the truth

is that the impurity doesn't come from these external places and people.

The truth is far, far worse, actually.

Let me give you just a short story from a few years ago to kind of mull over and give

you a picture as we consider this problem of external appearances.

So a few years back, we bought our house and the market was such that we really didn't

have the power to ask for a lot of changes before we bought the place.

And one thing we chose not really to ask about was the deck out back.

It seemed at first glance sturdy enough, but we noticed that they had this like outdoor

or like a throw rug on the deck underneath their patio furniture.

And we didn't really think anything of it until we started looking at the deck from below after we bought the house.

The reason that they had put that nice new rug down in the first place was to cover up the truth

that the deck was rotting out and was structurally unsound.

And we ended up having to spend a good portion of our renovation budget just to get it rebuilt so that it was safe again.

These people are really in a similar situation, but they didn't know it.

Jesus calls these people "hypocrates," which has come to be like an offensive kind of word,

but what they meant by it was it's a stage role.

So it's a stage term where someone who plays a role doesn't play it particularly well or authentically.

And so these people are obsessed with keeping up appearances, with putting on the right

garments and eating the right food and washing frequently in the, frankly, dirty water of

a ritual bath.

And they keep up appearances of someone who is holy, but inside Jesus says, quoting Isaiah

29, "Their hearts are far from God."

So they play the part, but the most foundational thing in their spiritual health is rotten

to the core because it's all an act.

It's a performance covering for a heart that isn't on a firm foundation at all.

And the uncomfortable truth for these people and actually for us is that no amount of external

polishing can cure the awful condition of a heart that is far from God.

No matter how feverishly you try to keep up appearances, you try to keep people fooled,

perform for the right people, hide your mistakes, God is not fooled, and he sees when your heart

is far from him. And it's interesting that God immediately follows this accusation in Isaiah

29 with a comment about worship. We had a good conversation this week around our

family table this week about worship and the songs that we sing and how the two

are connected. And the short version of that conversation is that worship is not

a kind of music, it's not a genre. It isn't a church service. Worship, defined

most plainly, is giving God the recognition and honor that He is due. And

lives. We worship God when we choose to obey what He commands because Jesus said,

"If you love me, you'll do what I command." We worship God when we recognize Jesus as Lord and

choose to live our lives for His glory because He is worthy of that. We worship God when we sing

songs together that proclaim His goodness, His worthiness, that tell stories about what He has done.

for each of those things though, where those true expressions of worship begin. They begin

with the heart. And without the heart, God tells Isaiah their worship is meaningless.

The truth is that people are usually very easily fooled. You can very convincingly play the part

of a good Christian and probably fool most people that you come into contact with.

but looking righteous in front of people doesn't make you righteous before God.

Just like with those 12 men in the boat, Jesus is after your heart, all of it.

How you try to polish the outward appearance, if you're not actively moving closer to Jesus,

you're not fixing what's really broken. So let's look at the next few verses where Jesus

really digs into this a bit further, going beyond just keeping up appearances but into this

going through the motions. This is verses 9 through 13. And he said to them, "You have a fine way of

rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, "Honor your

father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die." But you say,

If a man tells his father or his mother, "Whatever you would have gained from me is Corbin,

that is, given to God," then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother,

thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things

you do. So there's a problem with just trying to keep up appearances, but there's also a problem

with going through the motions, particularly when the motions are keeping up traditions instead of

holding up the word of God. Again, if the heart is what God is after, he's not going to be pleased

with someone just going through the motions. And the Pharisees' primary struggle is their desire

to add things to the law to give them more motions to go through to keep up appearances. However,

However, in doing that, they have also introduced so much of man's ideas and preferences and

corruption.

And that eventually is going to come out in practice.

That's what they've done here.

Let me explain one such practice that Jesus is referring to here called "Corbin."

This comes from the Hebrew word for "offering."

And it looked something like this.

So God's law commanded people to honor their father and mother, and in first century Jewish

culture that usually meant providing for them financially in their old age.

There was no social security.

Families usually lived together with multiple generations.

And the only real retirement plan for most people was the expectation that their children

would provide for them when they couldn't provide for themselves.

However, oral tradition had given way to a new kind of tradition.

And it was one that instead of benefiting your parents in their old age, benefited the temple

and sometimes themselves with a catch.

So Corbin was the practice of dedicating something that you owned, a house, some money, some

property to God, i.e. the temple, after you died.

So this was a tradition introduced by men, and people would take advantage of it to kind

of weasel their way out of caring for their parents because while you were living, you

retained ownership and use of this thing that you had promised to God, but nobody else could

take it from you.

It was like a deferred gift.

So I'll give you a quick modern day example of something similar that I saw play out in

a nonprofit and I'll keep it anonymous. This was a situation in which this nonprofit had a donor

who had promised a lot of money to them to complete this building project that was ongoing.

However, it wasn't all to be paid out at once so that this donor could continue earning money

off of that money. So what would happen is he would cut checks from the account a few times a

year as the building progressed, then the 2008 financial crisis happened and all of his other

accounts I'm sure took a hit. And so what happened is he stopped writing the checks because the money

was still his and the nonprofit was left on the hook for finishing this building. See he wanted to

be recognized as generous and have you know things in this building named after him and get recognition

but also wanted to keep control of the money for his own wealth as long as he could.

So it was a nice gesture on the surface, but it turns out the heart behind it maybe wasn't

so generous as we thought it was. And the Pharisees were kind of in the same situation.

And Jesus says they did many such things. They were really good at forming their own traditions,

practices, rules, and these things always made them look very good, yet their heart really wasn't

in pleasing God, the problem of the heart, again, hearts that were far from God.

So here's the truth about going through the religious motions and relying on the strength

of human traditions.

It won't give you an ounce of the cure that your heart needs.

The very best that human tradition can ever do is show you how insufficient it is.

That is the best case scenario.

For any human-based tradition or practice is that it points you to your need for something

nobody but Jesus can provide.

Because he is the one who can give you the life that you seek.

There are so many places that we are tempted to turn that aren't Jesus.

There's the temptation to keep up this false appearance.

the temptation to go through man-made motions, but the heart is the issue.

Let's see how Jesus closes out this passage. This is verses 14 through 23.

"And he called the people to him again and said to them,

'Hear me, all of you, and understand.

There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him,

but the things that come out of a person are what defile him."

And when he had entered the house and left the people,

his disciples asked him about the parable,

and he said to them,

"Then are you also without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him,

since it enters not his heart, but his stomach and is expelled?"

Thus he declared all foods clean.

And he said, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,

adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

You know Jesus is cutting to the point when you see him say, "Hear me," in Mark.

It means that he's about to say something that is the sum of everything leading up to

it.

He says this pretty plainly that the problem for us isn't an external defilement, as so

many Jews supposed.

It was a problem with what was inside of them.

It was a heart problem.

And almost comically, the disciples are still confused.

They're still thinking about the bread earlier.

They think this is another convoluted parable that needs explaining.

And Jesus is talking about food again, and it's very confusing.

So Jesus spells it out for them in no uncertain terms.

Even though food seems to be constantly on the brain for these guys, food does not enter

into the heart.

The main purpose of the Old Testament food laws was that it marked Israel as a distinct

people who were set apart to follow the one true God and make him known.

Jesus says here that in the New Kingdom, it's not about the food.

This would have been probably really welcome news for the Roman Christians that Mark is

writing to, and he even includes a note about Jesus declaring food clean because it meant

they didn't have to follow Kosher laws in order to follow Jesus, which was a matter of concern that

does get brought up in Acts and was probably still an issue being dealt with in the church in Rome.

But this was an issue of the heart, not the stomach. They're still thinking about righteousness

as if it's something to be contracted or soiled, and Jesus says, "No, it's you. It's an issue with

with the deepest part of your heart.

He lists all these sins that come directly from the heart

with half being evil acts and half being evil attitudes.

All of these were not coming from dirty Gentiles,

but from the very heart

of these dedicated Jewish followers of Jesus.

Thing is, if they had been more informed by God's word

and less formed by the traditions of the day,

They would not have been surprised by this.

It was through the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 17

that God told his people,

"The heart is deceitful above all things

and desperately sick."

So how good then is the good news

that Jesus is the great physician

and came to fix what we never could?

How good is it that Jesus invites us

into relationship with him, in which he takes this heart of stone that is far from God and

replaces it with a heart of flesh that beats for him now.

How good is it that we're not saved by our own ability to keep up appearances or go through

the motions of tradition perfectly?

Instead, the work that we are called to is heart work, in which we consistently and relentlessly

bring ourselves to Jesus and we open ourselves to the work that He wants to do in us.

So as Ecclesia churches, this gathering of believers, we want to relentlessly pursue that

work among us.

Over and above all cultural appearances and traditions, we want to have a heartbeat of

our own that is focused around receiving the truth of God's word, responding to and applying

that truth as we are formed by Jesus, and encouraging each other in the process.

So we are going to start a kind of new routine as a church going into this coming week that

encourages us to do that kind of work in our lives.

There's a kind of analogy that's developed for the modern American church, and it looks

something like Sunday services being the big event.

And you keep up appearances by showing up

and you go through the motions,

and then you get a shiny label as a good Christian person

who did your diligence this week and went to service.

But if what Jesus really calls us to is discipleship,

and discipleship according to scripture

looks like taking up your cross daily and following Jesus.

It looks like day by day being formed into the image of Christ.

It starts to become pretty evident from Scripture

that the Sunday assembly isn't an event.

It's the instructions and encouragement

needed for what happens the moment you head back home

and to work and to school.

And that's where the work of discipleship

is actually happening.

that's where the steps toward Jesus are being taken.

And house church becomes for us like a kind of

midweek pep talk, a time to ask questions

and get encouragement and get prayer.

So what does this look like for us as a church?

Well, Sundays look really similar

and we will preach the word of God.

We will worship God wholeheartedly through song

and otherwise we will remember what Jesus did

through communion and we will encourage one another.

But with you on Sunday, you will take a piece of paper

that we're tentatively calling

the discipleship training materials.

And our hope is that you will sit down a few times

between now and the midweek gathering

and have some time with the word of God,

with some questions and potentially in some discussion

for families, we highly recommend these be done

as a family together, leading your kids through these.

This isn't a replacement for regular Bible reading,

and these will probably take

between five and 10 minutes each,

but it's hopefully an encouragement

to engage with God's word a little deeper

and apply what is in it.

Then on Thursday nights, we will all gather,

and we'll talk about it in house churches,

and we'll have time to ask questions

and talk about what was good,

and talk about where we're struggling,

and ultimately encourage one another

to continue on this journey of discipleship.

And the good news is that Jesus is calling us

not to change ourselves,

but to allow him to do that work that only he can do,

and change us not superficially on the outside,

but making us whole and new from the inside out.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this sermon, you can find these questions

at ecclesiachurches.org/resources.

Ecclesia is a church of house churches gathering weekly in Council Bluffs, Iowa and in homes

throughout the week.

We are a Bible-centered church focused on preaching from Scripture and making disciples

of Jesus.

You can learn more about our statement of faith and contact a pastor by visiting ecclesiachurches.org.