The 14^th Sunday after Pentecost | 25 August 2024 | A Sermon on Mark 7:1-13 | by The Rev. David H. Brooks |

 Mark 7:1-13 English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles

¹When the Pharisees gathered to [Jesus], with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, ²they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. ³(For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders, ⁴and 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.) ⁵And 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?” ⁶And 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;
⁷in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

⁸You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

            ⁹And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! ¹⁰For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ ¹¹But 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)— ¹²then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, ¹³thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

Why Worry About Hypocrites?

“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites.”

Does anyone worry about hypocrisy anymore?

Sure, people react to hypocrisy all the time, and hurl that term against people they don’t like for all sorts of offenses. The celebrity with the private jet who talks about climate change. The congressional leader who pays illegal migrants under the table while railing about insecure borders. The neighbor who complains about rude drivers while driving too fast through your narrow community streets.

But… does that stop you from buying that celebrity’s album, or voting for that congressional leader or going to that neighbor’s cookout?

More to the point, does concern about hypocrisy stop you? After all, if you are typical (as the psychologists would define that word), then you are pretty good at both sniffing out the hypocrisy of others and hiding your hypocrisy from yourself. In a weird living out of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, we are all the children of that place, for each of us is above average, better than those around us. Or, as a friend of mine liked to say: “your reasons are bad excuses, my excuses are good reasons.”

And that is the heart of hypocrisy—the disconnect between what is presented or perceived and what is true. The word itself connects to the world of the Greek stage, where actors would don masks to present themselves as the characters of the story, to perform without the performance really having to do with anything “real” about the person wearing the mask. That’s not the King, that’s just some actor in a mask reciting lines.

Maybe we don’t worry about hypocrisy anymore because we live in a world that is all about performance, about presentation, about wearing masks. In a world where a public figure can be celebrated because she “performs her authenticity,” we all believe that our performing is what is true about ourselves, and we give ourselves all the benefit of the doubt. We may think Shakespeare was too on the money when he declared that “all the world’s a stage; the men and women are merely players.” But we are now induced to think that the stage belongs to us, the lines are our own, the play is for and about us, and we go through life expecting lots of applause.

So, in answer to the initial question, there is at least one person who is concerned about hypocrisy: Jesus of Nazareth. He calls out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who are ready to honor God with their words, but their deeds (which originate in the heart) are far from God. Jesus points this out by highlighting the matter of corban, where a gift to God disrupts a command by God. It is as if the stage players, deciding that the play as written will not work, substitute their own lines, stage directions or new characters because the Author clearly isn’t up to the task. The honor they give to God never gets farther than their lips because they turn the focus away from what God is doing and will do to their own “traditions of men.” We can’t be certain about God, but the custom of cup-washing cannot be allowed to cease!

As the Pharisees, so now ourselves. Again, we are well able to identify those “traditions” outside of ourselves that are not life-giving, but the real danger comes from within ourselves, for we are reluctant to take off our masks, to admit that that our lips and our hearts are not in alignment, to acknowledge that we would sooner let God go than part with what we say is best about ourselves. We would rather continue in our hypocrisies, to quibble about God and his purposes but insist that “we are good people.”

Part of the challenge and the joy of following Jesus is that he, as the own who God sent, reveals our hypocrisies, the places in our lives where we set too much authority on our own traditions, the ways in which we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt while condemning others, the masks we wear. The Pharisees confront Jesus by asking “why do your disciples not walk in the way we acknowledge,” but Jesus has called us to walk in his path, to find in him our true and authentic selves, to take ourselves less seriously and him more so, to take our direction from his guidance, to receive from him true salvation, where our lips and our hearts are in unison.  Amen.

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© Pr. David H. Brooks

      Pr.Dave.Brooks@zoho.com

      Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church

      Durham, North Carolina, USA