Sunday
School Lessons
Commentary by Walter Albritton
March 30
Our traditions must yield to the greater
wisdom of Jesus
Mark 7:1-23
Key Verse: From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil
thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders.
--Mark
Traditions may be
helpful. They are also dangerous. The danger is that we may begin to worship
our traditions, instead of God, when God alone is worthy of our worship.
Take music, for
example. We may prefer a certain type of music and begin to believe that only
“our kind” of music truly honors God. The music, then, can become more
important than the worship of God.
We may prefer a
certain order of worship, which includes elements that we believe must always
be included. If the Doxology, for example, is omitted, then we are unhappy.
Such attitudes toward
traditions can lead to ugly self-righteousness. When this happens, we find
ourselves paying mere “lip service” to God rather than obeying him with our
whole hearts.
The acid test of our
traditions is this: Do they conflict with the teachings of our Lord Jesus? When
they do, we need to throw them out and put our focus on obeying Jesus.
The Pharisees had
perfected the art of burdening people with traditions and regulations. They
insisted on ceremonial hand washing before meals. Eating with unwashed hands
caused a person to become defiled spiritually, the result being “unclean”
hands.
Eating from an
unwashed cup, with unwashed hands, was, to them, an offense to God. To the
strict Jews, those who did so were no better than the despised Gentiles.
Some foods were clean;
others were unclean. Admittedly, some of these rules about food came from the
Old Testament. However, Jesus overrules some of those rules. Therefore, what
matters to us as Christians is what Jesus teaches, not what regulations one may
find in Leviticus.
Jesus teaches us that
defilement results not from what foods we eat, but from what attitudes we
harbor in our hearts. In Mark
Hypocrisy in the
heart, for instance, is a far greater concern to Jesus than clean hands and
clean foods. What is offensive to God is for us to “honor” him with our lips
when we do not love him with all our hearts. He desires that we honor him with
our lives and our lips.
Jesus would have us
ask him to cleanse and purify our hearts instead of fussing and discussing
issues of hand washing and unclean foods. We can observe with profit that he
gave us no beatitude that says, “Blessed are they who wash their hands.” He
did, on the other hand, say:
“Blessed are the pure
in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
When it comes to our
traditions, no matter how much we may treasure them, we had better not allow
them to become more important to us than obeying Jesus. We shall be wise to
embrace the spirit John Sammis expressed in the old gospel song, “Trust and
Obey”: “what he says we will
do.” + + + +