Biblical Wanderings: Mark 7:14-23

Once again, he called the crowd and said, “All of you, listen to me and consider: nothing that enters a human from the outside can make them unclean; but that which comes out of a human, these are what make humans unclean. If anyone has ears to hear - hear.” After he had left the crowd and gone into a house, his disciples asked about the parable. “Are you still such dopes?” he said. “See - nothing that enters a human externally can make them unclean, because it doesn’t enter their heart - rather, the stomach, and then it’s discharged.” (Thus all foods are clean.) He continued: “What comes out of a human, that makes them unclean. For from within the hearts of humans come bad thoughts, looseness, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, an envious eye, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come from within, and make a human unclean.”

 Should I do this or that? I’m a minute-by-minute kind of guy. Meditation for 20 minutes. Breakfast right around 8. Oatmeal, cottage cheese, pumpkin seeds, blueberries, and a rice cake. Work from 9 to 11, then get started on lunch, which is always rice, chicken, carrots and broccoli, with a bit of coconut oil and salt.. 

I’ve got my mornings down, but after lunch things get dodgy. What am I supposed to be doing? Should I keep working, take a break, visit a friend? Did I put too much coconut oil on my lunch? Should I be eating meat at all? They say now meat and dairy can cause cancer. If I cut it out, will I have enough energy to get by the day?

There is a “by the books” way of living life, and I don’t think it really works, because the book never stops being written. There’s always more questions, more clarifications needed, more variations that require new answers. It’s like a dictionary: you open up to a definition, and find that definition full of other words that need defining. 

That’s the scene that Jesus is entering into here. Jewish law is not just the Torah [the first five books of the Christian ‘Old Testament’] - there’s also the oral law, which breaks into multitudinous streams of rules and regulations. These streams often contradict one another; the Talmud is full of rabbis disagreeing with one another on the fine points of Jewish living. The Jew who wishes to live a life completely in accordance with the law enters into a tangle of legislation that can never be completely unknotted.

Jesus offers something different here. Just what he offers is a bit of a mystery, and it ends up being a very central mystery to the rest of the New Testament. When he overrules the Torah, is he tossing out the rulebook? Is he amending it? If so, what other rules are no longer valid? And why does he say elsewhere that “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matt 5:18)? The bible is remarkably honest in showing how unclear his disciples were on this point, especially as they begin recruiting Gentiles into the fold who have never followed Jewish law. Eventually the matter is decided by council, rather than divine intervention: new followers are to “abstain from food sacrificed to idols, [abstain] from [consuming] blood from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality [whatever that means],” and apparently to ignore the other rules laid out in the Torah.

I think it’s significant that the new rulebook came into existence through human hands, that Jesus wasn’t present at its inception. If nothing else, it shows that Jesus was not a ‘by the books’ guy. He was interested in human life as it is lived, not in the books and laws that can make life easier. That’s the irony of all these laws, is that the original intent is to make life easier, to take away the burden of decision, replacing it with the comfort of routine. Someone else is making the calls for you.

What Jesus implants in his followers is a difficult challenge: to be guided by God, rather than by the authority of man. The message here is not “do whatever you want - no responsibilities.”  Instead, it’s the ultimate responsibility - the responsibility of being an independent human being. The responsibility of encountering bad thoughts, anger, envy, chaotic impulses every day, and holding them all with one hand while you make the choices you actually want to make with the other hand. Sometimes, a big rulebook to follow looks appealing in comparison to all that responsibility, every day. But there’s a payoff to that responsibility, and the payoff is getting to be your true self. That’s what “clean” really means - you throw out the rulebook, you drain out all the frittering impulses of your monkey mind, and you see what’s left.

So I’ve added something to my schedule: a two-way prayer, or what Liz Gilbert calls a “letter from love”. I usually spend about an hour on it, but less than ten minutes of that hour is spent writing. Love likes to parade around a fair bit before he gets to telling me anything; he takes his sweet time with life. “What would you have me know today?” I ask over and over, pen and notebook in hand, ready for a rulebook to rule the rest of my day. I never get it: instead, I get a kiss and a steady gaze.