When Tradition Trumps Truth

Mark 7:1-13

How many of us remember seeing one of NASA’s space shuttles thunder through the sky and into space? Was anyone ever there to see a launch live? I was never there live, but I watched several on TV, and of course now many launches are on YouTube if anyone wants to watch them. To me it was spectacular to see those solid rocket boosters thunder to life on the launch pad and send the courageous – or crazy, depending on your perspective – astronauts into low earth orbit to carry out experiments, deploy satellites, and eventually, build the International Space Station. But do you realize that the diameter of those solid rocket boosters was determined in large part by the size of a horse’s butt?

The U.S. standard railroad gauge is four feet, eight-and-one-half inches. How did we wind up with such an odd railway width? Because that was the width English railroad-building expatriates brought with them to America. Why did the English build them this wide? Because the first British rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. Why did they use that gauge? Because the same jigs, tools, and people who built wagons built the tramways and used the standard wagon-wheel spacing. Wagon-wheel spacing was standardized due to a very practical, hard-to-change, and easy-to-match reality. When Britain was ruled by Imperial Rome, Roman war chariots, in true bureaucratic fashion, all used a standard spacing between their wheels.

Over time, this spacing left deep ruts along the extensive road network the Romans built. If British wheel spacing didn’t match Roman ruts, the wheels would break. The Roman standard was derived after trial-and-error efforts of early wagon and chariot builders. They determined the best width that would accommodate two horse butts was four feet, eight and one-half inches. Thus the United States standard railroad gauge is a hand-me-down standard based upon the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

The company Thiokol made those solid-fuel rocket boosters at its Utah factory. The engineers who designed and manufactured the SRBs shipped them from factory to launch site by train. The railroad from the factory ran through a mountain tunnel only slightly wider than the railroad track. Even if Thiokol engineers wanted fatter SRBs, the railway gauge limited their design. In a sense, the space shuttle design was heavily influenced by a horse’s butt.[i]

Tradition is simply a way of thinking, behaving, or doing something that has been used by people in a particular group or family or society for a long time. And in itself, tradition isn’t bad. Family traditions, community and cultural traditions, and faith traditions anchor us to our heritage – to those who have gone before us – and they tie us together as a group. But when those traditions, not bad in themselves, become law and ways of controlling people, or gatekeeping, determining who is in and who is out, they become harmful.

When Jesus interacted with the Pharisees and the scribes, he often found himself criticized, eventually condemned, for not honoring Jewish traditions that had actually started to come between people and God. As we continue our journey through the Gospel of Mark (and by the way, if you don’t have a Bible and want one, see me after the service and I’ll give you one), turn with me to Mark 7:1-8.

God always invites us to find ourselves in the pages of Scripture, in the characters in the stories Jesus told, and in the interactions between Jesus and the people around him. And as followers of Jesus, we like to think that we’d be standing right there beside Jesus, nodding in agreement when he spoke. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re often much more likely to be found among his opponents and in the brokenness that he encountered. So before we get on our high horse and start criticizing the Pharisees and scribes, let’s see if we if we’re more like them than we’d like to think.

We often imagine the Pharisees as a powerful and culturally influential group, but they really weren’t. They weren’t the power brokers of Jewish society. They were struggling to impose their vision of morality and obedience to God’s law on the rest of Israel. And they really meant well. They actually took their example from the Old Testament prophet Daniel, a young Jewish nobleman who was sent into exile and deported by the Babylonians when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian army. Remember that he and his friends committed themselves to strictly observing the Jewish dietary laws and other laws as a way of standing out and standing up for God while they were in exile – standing out from the Babylonian crowd. And God blessed them for it.

And the Pharisees took Daniel as their inspiration. They deeply believed that by committing themselves fully to the Old Testament law, and helping the rest of Israel to do the same, that God would bless and restore Israel, and Israel would once again be an independent nation blessed by God. They rightly believed that even the most common act in daily life, right down to the way you ate, could be an act of devotion offered to God. But in their passion and zeal, they went beyond inviting others to live as they chose to live and actually tried to impose their way of living on everyone else.

The scribes were highly educated men who spent their time copying the Jewish scriptures – which we know as the Old Testament – word for word by hand. They ate, breathed, and slept the law of God, carefully preserving its precious words without error. If they made a mistake, the entire manuscript they were working on had to be thrown out. They knew the Word of God better than they knew their way around their own homes. And so they were also the ones asked to help the people interpret and apply the law of God to their daily lives. They knew and taught the Word of God.

And Jesus presented a problem for both groups. He didn’t interpret the Word of God in the ways they were used to interpreting it. He spoke with authority, correcting them for wrong understanding of the law of God. And he bucked tradition. So he made enemies of the Pharisees and the scribes. And the local Pharisees invited some of the scribes from Jerusalem to come and help them with their “Jesus problem.” They didn’t like the way he taught, the way he lived, the people he spent time with – they didn’t like any of it. Because they thought he was leading the people away from the holiness and righteousness they deeply believed the Israelites had to exhibit in order for God to restore the Jews and Israel to their proper place as the people of God in the world.

And one of the things they noticed was that Jesus’ disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate. Well, not really. They didn’t engage in a ritual washing of the hands that wasn’t about getting dirt and dust off, it was about making their hands ceremonially clean, ritually clean, before they ate. It was very specifically spelled out how it was to be done, and it was actually prescribed in the Old Testament. But only for the priests. The priests had to symbolically purify their hands before entering the tabernacle. And the Pharisees passionately believed in something that we hold dear today – the priesthood of all believers, and thus that all Jews needed to live by the laws that the Old Testament indicated were only for priests. And Jesus’ disciples weren’t doing this specific hand washing. And it was noticed, and noted, and then they brought it to Jesus’ attention. “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

Requiring the priests to symbolically purify their hands before entering the tabernacle was a law intended to remind the people of the holiness of God and the need for all people to be purified, made righteous, before God. But in their passion, they took that and made it a requirement for everyone, a way that EVERYONE, priest or not, HAD to act. Tradition had become law. There was absolutely nothing wrong with someone choosing to hold themselves to that standard if they wanted to live that way. Nothing at all. The problem came when the invitation became a requirement, and when those who did live that way viewed themselves as superior to those who didn’t. THAT is the attitude Jesus challenges.

One small-town church in upstate New York had had the same priest for over thirty-five years. He was loved by the church and the community. After he retired, he was replaced by a younger priest. It was his first church; and he really wanted to do well. He had been at the church several weeks when he began to notice that some of the people were upset at him. And of course that bothered him.

So one Sunday he took one of the lay leaders aside and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I have a feeling that there’s something wrong.”

The man said, “Well, Father, that’s true. I hate to say it, but it’s the way you do the Communion service.”

“The way I do the Communion service? What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s not so much what you do as what you leave out.”

“I don’t think I leave out anything from the Communion service.”

“Oh yes, you do. Just before our previous priest administered the chalice and wine to the people, he’d always go over and touch the radiator. And, then, he would—”

“Wait a minute. Touch the radiator? I never heard of that liturgical tradition.”

So the younger priest called the former priest. He said, “I haven’t even been here a month, and I’m in trouble.”

“In trouble? Why?”

“Well, it’s something to do with touching the radiator. Could that be possible? Did you do that?”

“Oh yes, I did. Always before I administered the chalice to the people, I touched the radiator to discharge the static electricity so I wouldn’t shock them.”

For over thirty-five years, the people of his congregation had thought that was a part of the sacrament of Holy Communion. You could name that church “The Church of the Holy Radiator.”

That’s a ludicrous example for sure, but our traditions are often no more profound than that. Traditions get started, and we endure traditions for a long time. And in the process we mix it up with practical obedience to the living God.[ii] Our own traditions might not involve touching a radiator every time we do communion, but we have them too. The order of service and the things we include in the service. The kind of music we sing and how we sing it. The kind of clothes we view as appropriate versus inappropriate. The kind of music we think its ok to listen to or the kind of shows and movies we think its ok to watch. How much tech time kids should be allowed to have and how old they should be before they get their own phones.

Today I don’t hear too much anywhere about singing contemporary music in worship services, but some more modern churches view singing hymns with derision. I think the old hymns are beautiful and do a lot to enrich our worship. I also like the more repetitive, meditative aspect of some contemporary music too. Most of us have more rules than we realize. We can be more like the Pharisees than we think.

Now, look at Vv. 9-13. Jesus hammers his point home by giving another outlandish example of the legalism of the Pharisees. The Old Testament clearly states, as one of the Ten Commandments, that we are each to honor our father and mother. What it doesn’t say is what that looks like in a given life situation. And that is where tradition becomes law, when well meaning people, seek at first to HELP people apply the Word of God to their specific situation. But over time, that help is spelled out so specifically that it becomes law in and of itself.

This is HOW you MUST receive communion, or get baptized, or worship God, or run your household, or interact with those outside the church. And grace and our freedom in Christ to follow his guidance dies. We try to control one another.

In Jesus’ day, there was a tradition that emphasized the keeping of an oath, of keeping your word. And there was another tradition that said you could restrict something of yours as only being for “sacred use.” It’s a confusing concept for us today, but back then, you could declare something as corban. We don’t use that word today. It simply meant that you were reserving it for God, and it was done by taking an oath. So if you declared your property as corban to your parents, you were legally excluding your parents from benefitting from it. The confusing thing is that you weren’t actually promising to donate it to the temple or your local synagogue, or to not use it yourself. But you WERE renunciating your parents’ ability to benefit from your wealth or talent or whatever.

So let’s say you did that – you declared that whatever benefit your parents might have gained from your income and security and your ability to care for them in their old age as corban, dedicated to God instead. And this would extend to your ability to give them any practical kindness such as assisting them in purchasing items needed for a required sacrifice or providing care for them if they were sick. And lets say you later regretted doing that. If you went to the scribes who also served as arbitrators to get out of your oath, they would tell you that your oath was valid and binding and must be honored, over and above the commandment to honor your parents. And that is when our human traditions trump truth.

In Galatians 5:1, St. Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” He is not talking specifically about political freedom there. He is talking about the freedom we have in Christ to follow Christ, set free from sin, and from attempts to appease God by carefully keeping an ever-growing list of rules and regulations. The church is intended to be a place where those who have been following Christ for decades come, along with those who have been following Christ for a few weeks, along with those who are wondering if they too should follow Christ.

If we’re going to do that, we have to be willing to keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing isn’t our church polity or form of governance, or our style of worship. The main thing is Christ. And at Christ church, we are dedicated to keeping the main thing the main thing. That does mean we give up some control, but we cannot allow grace and freedom to be overshadowed by a list of rules and regulations. Are there times when correction is necessary? Absolutely. Jesus is actually correcting people here.

But when we begin to codify the thing that really bugs Margianne, and the thing that really bugs Janet, and the thing that really bugs Randy, and the thing that really bugs Gregg, we wind up with a whole list of church rules that have nothing to do with a group of people following Jesus together.

I love the words of Jesus in John 21. Jesus had just told Peter that his future would be difficult and that he would because of his faithfulness to Jesus. And then Peter looked over and saw John, another one of Jesus’ disciples. And the Bible says this, “When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” Let us pray.

[i] Boyd Clarke and Ron Crossland, The Leader’s Voice (Select Books, 2002)

[ii] Terry Fullam, “Worship: What We’re Doing, and Why,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 102.