The Heart of Our Problem
Mark 7:14-23
I want you to take a moment to sit back in your chair, and close your eyes (don’t go to sleep!) and imagine something. I want you to imagine that it is a beautiful, warm but not hot early June day here in northern Michigan. It’s such a nice day that you decide to head out for a hike. Imagine the scene. Start by paying attention to what you see. The trees. The leaves on the trees. The blue sky. Are there some white clouds in your sky or not? Are you on a trail or out in a meadow? Is the terrain rolling and hilly or more flat? Just take a second to see everything. Now pay attention to what you feel. Feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Is there a light breeze? What is the ground like under your feet? Are you sitting or standing? Now pay attention to what you can hear. If there’s a breeze, can you hear it rustling through the leaves in the trees, or the grass? Hear the birds singing. Maybe some insects buzzing. The area around you if full of life! What can you smell? Can you smell the pine needles? Maybe the late spring wildflowers blooming. Now, just take a few seconds to soak all of it in.
As you continue your hike, you come to a creek. Last week’s rains have filled it, but it isn’t rushing too fast. It’s just gently flowing over and around rocks, meandering through the woods. Just take it all in. Can you hear the water flowing? Can you see it. Now, you notice something. Something you hadn’t noticed before. There’s a red plastic cup, a piece of trash, flowing down the creek. It’s close to the edge, so you decide to fish it out, feeling good about yourself for leaving this beautiful setting better than you found it.
As you prepare to leave the scene, you notice another piece of trash you had missed before, a plastic bag caught on a branch in the creek. You have to step on a few large rocks to get to this piece of trash, but you fish it out too. Sadly, you aren’t even back to the edge of the creek when you notice another piece of trash, and then another, and another, and another, all flowing down the stream or stuck on something in the stream. For an hour, you pick trash out of the stream, and you notice that it has really made a difference. And when you look at your pile of trash along the edge of the creek, you are amazed at the amount you’ve fished out.
You sit back and rest for a moment, realizing that you’ll have to keep coming back each day until the site is really clean. But the next day when you come back, it seems like all of your hard work has been undone. Even though you carried all of the trash out to your car yesterday, there is even more trash in the stream today, and an oily film on top of the water. Somehow, the garbage bred and reproduced overnight. You think about how unlikely it would be for someone to come to this very spot to dump their garbage in the few hours while you were away, and you realize that something smells fishy – so to speak. So you begin to follow the creek upstream.
Sure enough, you come to a garbage dump that has been there for years. It’s spilling over into the passing creek. Your cleaning job only opened up a gap for more stuff to settle. You could go and clean every day, but if you want your creek to be clean, you’re going to have to go to the source and deal with the trash there.
Today, as we continue our journey through the Gospel of Mark, we come to a passage in which Jesus talks to the crowds, and then privately to his disciples, about what really makes us unclean, and he talks about the state of our hearts. Not the blood-filled muscle pumping in your chest, but the center of your personality, the core of your being, the seat of who you are as a person. You see, according to Jesus, your heart is the source from which your life flows. Unfortunately, we spend great amounts of time, money, and energy – even in the church – doing trash removal “downstream.” But real transformation begins when we travel upstream to the source of the trash, in our hearts. The real battles take place in our heart.[i] Turn with me to Mark 7:14-23.
Jesus has just gently confronted the legalistic scribes and pharisees over their long list of do’s and don’ts – all the things they believed they had to do to stay clean before God. And now he calls all of the people who had witnessed this exchange, including those religious leaders and his disciples, to gather around him so that he could teach them something really important. He’s just finished up his exchange with a group of Pharisees and scribes, and then he calls out “Here me, all of you, and understand.” In other words, “listen carefully.” He’s asking them to very carefully listen to and reflect on what he’s about to say, because it is of utmost importance. And then he says this: “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.”
That statement required the followers of Jesus to undergo a MAJOR paradigm shift. It involved a major change in their worldview, and those kinds of deep changes don’t come to any of us easily. His disciples had spent quite a bit of time walking with Jesus by now, hearing him teach, seeing him perform some literally unbelievable miracles – healing people from sickness and disease and disability, delivering them from demons and the powers of darkness, exhibiting power over the natural world itself and the powers of chaos that so often seem to be in control there, even raise someone from the dead. AND they’d had repeated private tutoring from Jesus after he taught the crowds, where he really slowed things down and gave them the chance to ask questions and seek clarification. And they still struggle with that one paradigm-shifting, worldview-changing sentence Jesus had just uttered. “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.”
Why was that one statement so mind-blowing? I mean, no Old Testament Jew, before their exile in Babylon, would have thought that a ceremonial hand washing, which had to be done AFTER the dirt and dust and grime and whatever else had been cleaned from the hands, made an unclean person clean. They understood the symbolic nature of the act, reminding them of their state of uncleanness before God. Their real cleansing came through the sacrifices offered on the annual Day of Atonement in the tabernacle and later in the temple – the sacrifice that Jesus offered in himself once and for all on the cross.
But in exile, without the land that had been promised them by God, without the holy city of Jerusalem and the glorious temple there that represented the presence of God among them, the people began to really cling to the law as the thing that defined them and held them together as a people in exile. They weren’t in the land. Jerusalem and the temple were piles of rubble. The law was all they had left. But over the centuries, that clinging to the law for identity and hope, went from worshipful reverence to a fetish – something they worshipped not because it pointed them to God but in and of itself. And they began to see strict obedience to the law, including lay people living by the parts of the law meant only for priests, as a way of making themselves not just ritually pure but morally pure.
You see, there’s nothing wrong with rules in and of themselves. Laws make us safe and prosperous. Without some kind of law, we devolve into chaos pretty quickly. We have enough accidents and loss of life with the extensive body of road laws that we have. Without those laws, if we all could drive in whatever lane we wanted, at whatever speed we wanted, and turn and cross intersections however we wanted, none of us would get anywhere safely. God gave his people his law to keep them safe and make them prosperous. It was never intended to become a measure of righteousness. Rules do not make us righteous, they expose our unrighteousness. And the ancient rituals were a constant sign and reminder of their deep need for a more profound, deeper inner cleansing and purity – something we cannot provide for ourselves, no matter how many rules we make up and keep, no matter how hard we try.
Jesus points out the absurdity of our thinking that moral uncleanness is something that comes into us from the outside. For them, eating the right foods in the right way after doing the right washing was a way of staying pure before God. By that reasoning, something you ate could make you unclean. Can it raise your blood sugar and your blood pressure and your cholesterol? Absolutely it can! But can it make you unclean before God. Absolutely not. Nothing that comes into you from the outside, through your mouth, your eyes, your ears, or your nose, can make you morally unclean. Nor can any outer cleansing or following a rule make you morally clean.
No, it is what is inside us, in our hearts, that comes out of us in our words and actions that makes us unclean. And the only suitable solution is to take care of that trash heap at the source, in our hearts, the center of your personality, your will, and your thoughts. The core of who you are as a person. That is your heart. It is in that “heart” of each one of us that our actions and inactions are determined, the things we do and the things we don’t do. Look at Vv. 21-23.
The tragedy of our sin is that we are born with hearts that say ““I don’t need God to tell me what is right and what is wrong. I will decide what is right and what is wrong for me, on my own. I am the master of my own life and I will live as I choose.” That doesn’t mean that we aren’t also capable of doing lots of really good things. It does mean that each one of us is sufficiently sinful to be separated from God. The tragedy of sin reaches its demonic fulfillment when we go from having to sin because our hearts are, in the words of the narrator in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, “Your soul is an appalling dump heap Overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable Mangled up in tangled up knots!”
The philosopher Michael Ruse has written, “With respect to the main claims of Christianity … I am pretty atheistic …. I prefer the term ‘skeptic’ to describe my position …. I am an ardent evolutionist …. I think that science is the highest form of knowledge – I am a philosophical naturalist.” And yet, surprisingly, Ruse also ardently defends the biblical doctrine of original sin. Ruse argues:
I think Christianity is spot on about original sin – how could one think otherwise, when the world’s most civilized and advanced people (the people of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant) embraced that slime-ball Hitler and participated in the Holocaust? I think Saint Paul and the great Christian philosophers had real insights into sin and freedom and responsibility, and I want to build on this rather than turn from it.[ii] Amazing, isn’t it, that the one thing this atheist philosopher agrees with those of us who follow Christ is in our view of the sinfulness of our hearts?
The first seven items in this list Jesus gives here are prohibited acts, the last six are thoughts and attitudes that lead us into sin. Evil thoughts and evil deeds, all flowing from hearts tainted by sin. The list itself isn’t comprehensive. Sin takes many forms, but it all comes from the same place, a heart attitude that says “I don’t need God to tell me what is right and what is wrong. I will decide what is right and what is wrong for me, on my own. I am the master of my own life and I will live as I choose.” Sin is, at it’s core, putting self in the place of God. And we are born with that heart condition.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Science of Good and Evil, writes:
I once had the opportunity to ask Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, what he thought was the difference between Oskar Schindler, rescuer of Jews and hero of the story, and Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp. His answer was revealing. “Not much,” he said. “Had there been no war, Mr. Schindler and Mr. Goeth might have been drinking buddies and business partners, morally obtuse, perhaps, but relatively harmless. What a difference a war makes, especially to the moral choices that lead to good and evil.”
Shermer goes on to quote Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[iii]
But can we really be guilty for sinful responses that seem to erupt in us automatically? Can we really consider sin voluntary if it is not consciously chosen? Think about this illustration of how unintentional sin works:
Trained instincts – that’s how fighter pilots can react immediately to rapidly changing situations as they operate $27 million war machines. When a threat aircraft is closing in, there’s no time for pilots to reason through what to do. They have to rely on instinct – but not just natural instinct. They need instincts shaped deep within then through years of regiment. The countless little decisions they make in the cockpit are automatic, but that doesn’t mean they’re involuntary. The pilot voluntarily trained for them, and in the cockpit he reaps the instinctive benefits of that training.
Like the fighter pilot’s hours of training, our hearts are under a regimen of beliefs and values that don’t align with Scripture, drilled into us through what we put in our heads, what we receive as wisdom from other sources, what we accept as normal from culture. All of these shape our unintentional sin.[iv]
The truth is, we all need heart surgery. Not to clean out restricted arteries and bypass clogged ones, but to clean out the dump, the mess, the self-centeredness and selfishness that is in our heart. And that is what Jesus came to do. He came to clean out the mess, and he did that on the cross, dying in our place the death that by rights we each should have to die, and giving us his life in exchange. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Our job is to accept the cure. To place our faith in Jesus, accepting his forgiveness, and trusting him to do his work in us, transforming us from the inside out. It’s a transformation that starts in that messed up and messy dump, our hearts, and from there the clean flowing water comes out in thoughts, words, actions, and desires that bring glory to God and point others to him.
During an extended visit with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Dr. Mary Poplin discovered the depths of sin in her own heart. It happened while she was trying to care for a five-month-old infant who was deformed, constantly sick, and often miserable. She always found ways to avoid feeding this child, but one day it was unavoidable. She writes:
When feeding time was over, the babies were falling asleep in their bassinettes, and I was getting ready to go …. I glanced at the infants on my way out [the door] and noticed that undigested formula was dripping out of this child’s bassinette. He had thrown up what must have been the entire eight-ounce bottle. Looking around for someone to tell as I left [the room], I saw no one in the infant area, and the few adults in the room had their hands full with other children.
So I decided, with no little struggle, to stay and clean up the mess. I put on my apron again, lifted the baby out of his bassinette and helped him on my shoulder as I began to gather the dirty sheets together and use them to wipe up the mess. As I was cleaning, I heard a muffled sound from the infant in my arms. Tears were pouring out of his eyes, and the only sound he could make was a convulsive sob.
As I looked at him, I saw in myself what Jeremiah called “the desperate wickedness of the heart.” I realized I had approached this task with a spirit of resistance and impatience. I had thought very little, if at all, about this child and his needs, other than to be clean. As I threw the sheets into the laundry pile, I began to bathe his little misshapen body and change his clothes. Afterward I held him to me tightly as I … looked at him, rocked him, and prayed …. In a short time, he was asleep.
I must tell you that the moment I saw him weeping and realized the wretchedness in my heart, I knew it was sin. There was no doubt in my mind that this is what Christ meant when he said, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts.” I asked Christ to forgive and change me. In those moments as I rocked the baby, I could feel Christ’s work inside my spirit just as surely as if he were sitting next to me.[v] Accept his cure, trust his work, and cooperate with his process in you. Those are the steps. Let us pray.
[i] Condensed from Kyle Idleman, Gods at War (Zondervan, 2013)
[ii] Quoted in Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr., editors, God and Evil (IVP Books, 2013, page 126
[iii] Michael Shermer, “Something Evil Comes This Way,” www.skeptic.com (3-18-04)
[iv] Dr. Jeremy Pierre, “Involuntary Sins,” TABLETALK (June 2016)
[v] Mary Poplin, Finding Calcutta (InterVarsity Press, 2008), pp. 82-83