A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on August 22, 2021 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Mark 7:1-13. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Gospel according to St. Mark, the 7th chapter:
Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had 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 come 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 commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” 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 Corban” ’ (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.”
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
Today, we hear Jesus's Words against the Pharisees and the Words are good reminders for us that we should not be setting up anything that stands in the way of the commandments of God, at least nothing certainly that would give us the impression that we could keep the commandments of God for our own salvation. You see, this is what was happening with the Pharisees. They taught from a book called the Tradition of the Elders. That should be capitalized in our reading, the T of tradition, the E of elders. This Tradition of the Elders was supposed to have been handed down from the elders that accompanied Moses up onto Mount Sinai, where he received the Law of God. Now at Mount Sinai, Moses received 613 commandments from God that the people of Israel were to follow. And, as the Pharisees taught, this Tradition of the Elders contained many more commandments, from not God, but of men, that gave the impression that you could keep the commandments of God.
Imagine it this way. God says honor the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. We hear that and we know that we set aside time to hear God’s Word and meditate upon it, to hear His preaching. But the Tradition of the Elders would say something like you may not walk more than one mile. You may not do any work on the day that is called the Sabbath day. You may not do such and such a thing. It wasn’t about how to honor God, but how to prevent yourself from breaking the Law. It’s how the Tradition of the Elders would work. It’s all about you. And you would go, well, I've not walked more than a mile, except of course, to go to the synagogue to hear the Word of God. I've not done any work. Therefore I must have kept that third commandment. I must have honored the Sabbath day by keeping it holy in my heart. And thus, God must be pleased.
Or let’s think about one of the commandments that has to do with the cleansing of the priests, a little lesser known one. Well, the tradition of the Pharisees came forward and said, well, it's not just the priests who should do such things, but all the people. And in fact, not just themselves, but all things. I mean, they have the washing of hands in the Tradition of the Elders. Now that's not the washing of hands that we've become so accustomed to, especially over these last, what, 20 months, right? You have to use soap and water, you have to do it for 20 seconds, otherwise it's not really a washing of the hands. Instead, the Pharisees would do is take one fist and one palm, dip their fist in water, and rub it together. And that was considered the washing of the hands. I mean, I don't know exactly what they did with the pots and the vessels and all the dining couches. Certainly we know that they did not like dunk them under the water, but they must have washed them in some way, right. To wipe it in water, probably again with the hand, in some way. Instead, it would make sense that they say, let us present ourselves rightly before God, giving Him thanks and praise for all that He has given to us. But, that would be about honoring God, and not themselves, and so it wasn’t the focus.
Now, the Pharisees and some of the scribes who'd come down from Jerusalem, were sitting there with Jesus and they watched as His disciples didn't obey the Tradition of the Elders. Instead, the disciples about their business and began to eat. Besides the fact that this is the commandments of men, there is another passage that gives us a bit of what the Pharisees would expect. The disciples of John come to Jesus and ask why His disciples do not fast unlike them and the Pharisees. Jesus looks at them and it says, Well, they can't fast while the bridegroom is with them, but soon the bridegroom will be going and they will fast. Jesus tells them that fasting is for the time when the party is over, or when you’re looking for, hoping for something greater. And since there is nothing greater than Jesus, the disciples couldn’t, wouldn’t want to fast.
The Pharisees would have expected this answer, that Jesus was placing Himself above the Tradition, just as He had before. But, now, Jesus doesn’t say that they’re not washing because He’s here. Instead, He blows them out of the water by telling them they were those who were prophesied by Isaiah as the people who honors God with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him. In vain you worship God, teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men. So Jesus, doesn't just say, look, the Tradition of the Elders is fine. Wait till I'm gone, there'll be doing it. He says, the Tradition of the Elders is not even close to what God would have you do. He’s completely eradicated the Tradition. He’s taken away their hope of obedience to the Law, He’s taken away their self-righteousness.
You can imagine the consternation on the faces of those people gathered around Jesus. This Tradition, after all, guided their lives. If there was anything for them to do in their daily lives, it was from this Tradition and now Jesus has set it afire. You know, what would really help the Pharisees? What we Lutherans are really very, quite good at in our preaching? A proper distinction between Law and Gospel. Now, they didn’t get this because they thought they could obey the Law and God would be pleased. They couldn’t see the inordinate way they needed the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins for the depth of their depravity. When they thought about the Messiah, it wasn’t as the one who would reconcile them to God, but the one who would meet their earthly needs.They thought the Messiah would come in some kind of way to rescue them, to redeem them from the Romans or from slavery or from any of the things that plagued them. They didn't really totally understand, these Pharisees, that the Messiah would come to save them from their sins.
If they understood that, then they would probably have a better distinction here. Let's talk about this for a second, this proper distinction between Law and Gospel. Now I can go on for a long time on this. In fact, our first president of our Synod, CFW Walter went on for 39 evening lectures as he preached on this to his students at the seminary in St. Louis. I won't go that long. That's okay. The Law is given to us in three ways. It's useful in three ways. The first use is as a curb, which is to say this far, you shall go and no further. The second function is as a mirror, wherein the Law shows us our sin. And the third function is as a guide. Now the guide is useful only for Christians; those who do not believe in Christ have no understanding of the Law as a guide because it is only as a Christian, now having been redeemed out of our sinful state, that we look to God and we say, what now shall we do? And God says, look at my Law, do this. And we obey that Law then as Christians, without fear, because he's already saved us.
The Gospel contains no demands of God. The Gospel are the promises of God, promises of life and forgiveness and salvation, the promise of everlasting life. The promise of redemption, the promise of rescue, the promise of resurrection. The Gospel contains all of the promises, which in Christ, are yes and amen. To confuse these two, you end up in a whole lot of different errors. And that is actually what happens most of the time, where we mingle the Law and the Gospel, or sometimes we eliminate one or the other. Sadly, we probably know some church bodies out there that have essentially eliminated from their teaching the Gospel. If you’re going to be a Christian, you must just obey the Law in this way that we’re teaching you all the time. And if you don't, you better start doubting your salvation, get right with Jesus and get back to obeying the Law. Think of some of the groups with prohibitions against alcohol, or, even worse, infant Baptism.
Sadly, there are also some groups out there that basically abandoned the Law and say, whatever you want is fine with God. We see that in a lot of liberal Protestantism today, we see that in a lot of, what are called, Gospel-reductionist churches. We see it even in a church that bears the name Lutheran, in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. They've abandoned the Law of God and have said that the only Law that we shall obey is the one of love. And thus, if it is loving, we will do it or we will allow it. Now, that sounds nice. But the problem is, when you do that, and abandon the Law of God, you start to live in your own way and you judge yourself by your own standard of righteousness and not God’s. After all, that is what our world demands of us today, is it not? The world demands that we live according to its righteousness and not God's. And thus, when we sit and we say, well, I cannot do such and such, or I will not do such and such, I will not bow my knee to say that a man can be a woman or a woman a man, or that a man can lay with another man or a woman a woman, that life in the womb doesn’t matter, that those fleeing from oppression and terror don’t matter, or that I am a racist simply because of the color of my skin and not the content of my character, the world looks at you and says, then what use are you? And we say, truly, I'm of no use, not on my own, but in Christ I've been redeemed. And they will mock you and they will laugh at you and they will scorn you in all these ways, because you are holding to this proper distinction between Law and Gospel, and teaching the truth of God. You cannot bend the knee to the commandments of men when you are bowing your head before the Lord; there is no righteousness found for you there.
In truth, you know what you've done to transgress the Law. You know the desires of your hearts, the Words of your hands, the fleetingness of your minds. You know that you are worse than the Pharisees. You know you deserve only the scorn of God. Yet, you should also know that your Christ has redeemed you from your sin. And you know, now having been redeemed that you should go out and live in such a way that the righteousness of God shines through you. God shines His glory into this world through you, because you are redeemed, reflecting Christ. And when you know this, you are on your way to grasping this proper distinction.
But, the Pharisees had no understanding of this. And in fact, all they could do was pile law upon Law. And as they did it, they came to believe that they could obey the Law, that they could keep God's commandments. Now, if you could keep God's commandments, you would have no need of Jesus. In fact, this goes back to the garden. At the very beginning, Adam and Eve were created to live in that garden and in perfection forever. God created them knowing that would choose to fall into sin, but He gave them time to live under their own righteousness. All they had to do was to obey God, right? Not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden was all that was required. If they had done it, they would live forever according to their own righteousness. That's all they had to do. And yet, Eve stood there, deceived by the serpent, believing herself to be her own God, to make her own rules, and she took that fruit and ate of it. And don't think that Adam wasn't complicit in this. He was standing right next to Eve. He should have corrected her. He should have dismissed the serpent away from her, but instead he let the serpent speak the lies that come from the pit of hell, encouraged his wife by his silence to eat of the fruit. And when he was offered that fruit, he ate of it himself. God created them to live according to their righteousness and they failed.
And there the true plan of God was revealed, not that they would live by their own righteousness, but that they would depend on another. This true plan of God would be prophesied in God's condemnation of Eve and the serpent, that He would send the Messiah out of Eve’s seed that Messiah would bruise the serpent's head even as the serpent bruised His heel and Eve hoped in this. Eve knew that she was a fallen sinner. You can imagine what it must have been for Eve to feel in her body sin entering into her. As she bit into that fruit, she could feel sin infecting every piece of her down to her very soul. Shem who had once lived in righteousness, could feel sin now taking over. And so she had to put her hope in that promised Messiah. She had to; that's why, when she gave birth to her firstborn, Cain, she didn’t say, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord, but, I have gotten a man, the Lord. She understood that the Messiah would be God. And she had put her hope in this Messiah thinking that it was her son, but even her hopes were dashed as Cain raised his hand against Abel and slaughtered him, burying him under the ground. God even had to come down and call Cain out on his great sin, the first murder. Eve knew in her body that she had this sin, and it infected everything, but the day will come when Eve will know, and you will know, when out of your graves your body is brought up and you feel the sin leaving your body, never to return. The aches and pains and griefs and sorrows of this life will leave you because our Lord has promised that He will raise your bodies as His body and make you glorious.
That's a wonderful, wonderful promise of God. But the Pharisees did not look at that with hope. They looked instead at their own righteousness. Eve knew she could no longer be righteous. The Pharisees thought they could be righteous. If Eve had no hope, what was the hope of the Pharisees? Well, the hope still would be Jesus. The hope of the Pharisees is still Jesus. Even if they could not see it with their own eyes, their hope of the Messiah was still Him. We know some did turn from their wicked ways and look to the crucified one, the resurrected one, for their redemption. That's a beautiful picture, that even the most hard-hearted sinner can turn from their wicked ways and see their Lord.
And so it is for us that as we understand who we are before the face of God, wicked sinners who deserve nothing but hell, that we would see our Jesus and know that He has redeemed us, that He has brought us up out of the pit and into His marvelous light forever. You see, our Lord takes our hardened hearts and softens them. He takes our lips and, instead of just giving Him lip service, He purifies them with the coal of His absolution, and lets our lips then praise Him, and takes that heart, which is far from Him, and brings it close to Him by giving Himself to you. After all, is He not going to put Himself into your body today? And as He passes down your gullet, goes past your heart, He is right there. And so we find that as He brings our lips to praise Him, in our heart to worship Him, we find that we do gather around His Word and Sacrament and we gather around His doctrines.
Now, the church has a peculiar way of doing things. But, it’s not on the same level as the tradition of the Pharisees. For instance, I wouldn’t ask anyone not ordained to preach the sermon or to offer the forgiveness of sins to the entire congregation, or even to consecrate the elements. We have an order of worship that we follow, one that the whole Church has access to. We have colors for the church year, prayers we offer in different seasons, even certain ways we move or position our bodies at different times through the service. We have a peculiar way of doing things in the church. Now these are the traditions of men, but informed by the Word of God. The difference between these and the Tradition of the Elders is that we don't do these things in order to save ourselves. We do these things because God is a God of order and goodness, and it is right that we order our lives and worship in this way. In our hymn of the day, you sang a line about Luther and his catechism. It’s the only time Luther is mentioned by name in our hymnody. But, don’t think we just blindly follow after Luther there. Don’t think we put him on the same pedestal as Jesus. As Luther taught God's Word, we bow the knee to the Word. We don't just follow Luther because he was an incredible man, though certainly he was; we follow Luther when he taught the Word of God rightly. We don't follow him because he's perfect. He's not. We call ourselves Lutheran because of the way that he taught the doctrines of God and the freedom they contain. We don’t follow his traditions, or any traditions, in order to save ourselves, but because the one we have are useful in demonstrating that we have been saved in Christ. Thus, we gladly call ourselves Lutheran because we hold certainly and steadfastly to that Gospel, to that promise of Christ, that He has redeemed us. That is the joy of being this kind of Christian, that we find all things have been done for us.
There is no man and no man’s teaching we need to obey except the God who is man, Jesus Christ. And we obey Him, not because we fear His judgment, but we obey Him in love because of the judgment that was pronounced upon Him by His Father. It is that our Jesus has saved you, my friends. And He has brought you close to Himself. He has softened your hearts to receive His Word and so also to receive His Sacrament. Do so this day with joy and with gladness for your Lord has redeemed you and given to you a righteousness that surpasses anything we can earn in this world, His own. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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