Tradition: Confusing Form with Power  Mark 7:1-23

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason -- March 26, 2006

“Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men…You nicely set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.” Mark 7:8,9

As we finished with Mark 6, we noted that there was a gathering of the disciples together with Jesus. This was a gathering of helpers with Jesus.

As we consider the beginning of Mark 7, we should note that there is another gathering  about Jesus: It is the Pharisees and certain of the scribes who gather themselves together with Jesus. And the noteworthy thing is that they are gathering not to help him but to hinder him.

They have come from Jerusalem officially representing the religious leaders and they are quite concerned about Jesus. This is a direct result of the ministry of the disciples of Jesus as they were out teaching, preaching and casting out demons in the countryside. This sending out of the Twelve has drawn new attention to Jesus. We noted last week that they were so effective that Herod heard about them and was terrified that John the Baptist had come back to life to haunt him. So much for a guilty conscience! The Pharisees and Scribes were also drawn to the reports coming in about this Jesus.

The movement in Galilee was evidently growing rapidly, and the religious leaders are perturbed. So they send out a delegation to investigate what is happening up there.

As they confront Jesus, it becomes quite clear that there is a difference between Jesus and these religious leaders. And we note that Jesus dealt with them with anger, satire, directness and scorn.

The Pharisees were punctilious in their observance of traditions. His focus was on the simple obedience to the commandment of God. He shocked them with the habits of his disciples. And they shocked him in return with their apparent disregard of the will of God. In a nutshell, that is the difference between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees.

The Pharisees wanted to know: “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands?”  Mark 7:5

What is a tradition? The most obvious sense of the word refers to those things which we do again and again when the time or situation presents itself once again. Harris’s have a tradition at Christmas: Every five years they all gather together as a family. That is a tradition. The Gleason’s have a tradition of fondue on Christmas eve for whomever is able to be home for Christmas. Differing ideas, but both are traditions. We have all kinds of things that we do as traditions.

Tradition is the living faith of those now dead.                                                                         Traditionalism is the dead faith of those still living. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, p. 65.

Recently I read of A very poor holy man who lived in a remote part of China. Every day before his time of meditation in order to show his devotion, he put a dish of butter up on the window sill as an offering to God, since food was so scarce. One day his cat came in and ate the butter. To remedy this, he began tying the cat to the bedpost each day before the quiet time. This man was so revered for his piety that others joined him as disciples and worshipped as he did. Generations later, long after the holy man was dead, his followers placed an offering of butter on the window sill during their time of prayer and meditation. Furthermore, each one bought a cat and tied it to the bedpost.   Source Unknown.

William Poteet wrote in The Pentecostal Minister how in 1903 the Russian Czar noticed a sentry posted for no apparent reason on the Kremlin grounds. Upon inquiry, he discovered that in 1776 Catherine the Great found there the first flower of spring. "Post a sentry here," she commanded, "so that no one tramples that flower under foot!" Some traditions die hard.  Leadership, Summer, 1989, p. 43.

I am quite sure that if the Lord were to be in America today in bodily-form, he would not say the same things that he said to these men as they came to him. The reason for that is that we would not say the same things to him as they did. But we would undoubtedly defend our traditions as firmly as they did.

What are some of the things we might see defended in churches around the nation?  Well, one might imagine that there are churches that would defend the fact that they are not integrated. Others would undoubtedly defend the fact that the poor are not in attendance. For others it is the fact that the King James Bible is the only valid version of the Scriptures and anyone who does not agree with that are unwelcome. How we dress separates us. Some women can’t wear pants to church, and must wear their hair in a bun. For others it is casual to the “T”. And then there are issues of jewelry and make-up, race, gender and national origin.

Traditions separate us. Traditions are stoutly defended by many of us. How might Jesus respond to these things?

Let’s get back to our text and see if we can determine what was meant by the traditions upon this occasion and in this atmosphere:  They were precepts orally transmitted, illustrating, applying and explaining the written Law. These were mostly Pharisaic in origin.

The Pharisees were the Puritans of their day. They were the ones who tried to keep Judaism true to the Law regardless of the influences threatening to end the separateness of the people of Israel. The Pharisees were men who had banded together to maintain, by all means, the distinction between the Jewish people and the nations around them.

The Scribes were an order of learned men who were always associated with the Pharisees. Not all scribes were Pharisees and not all Pharisees were scribes. The work of the scribes was to take the Law of God, illustrate it and apply it to local situations and circumstances. When someone inquired: What does the Law of God mean for us at this point? The scribes interpreted the Law of God. Gradually, they formed precepts to meet new conditions.

The accumulation of these precepts became a great body of traditions.

What happened was that traditions were intended to be interpretations of the Law applying it to local circumstances. These over time became interpretations and applications of traditions. Eventually what they had were interpretations of interpretations of traditions. When that happened there existed between the people of God and the Law of God such a mass of tradition that the Law of God itself was completely out of sight and practically forgotten.

The intention of tradition was that of maintenance of religious life.

Consider for a moment the life of the early church as portrayed in the Book of Acts. The one clear truth of the life of the early church was it’s freedom of life in the Spirit. You will not find a formulated creed in the book. You won’t find the form of any particular liturgical service in the Book of Acts. Freedom in the Spirit is essential to the life of the Church.

But we know what happened in the years following these early days of the church. In the process of time there grew up all kinds of traditions, and forms of church life that differed from those of other believers separated by what they believed essential in the life of the believer.

At times these traditions have dictated uniformity of dress, modes of speech and so on until the church today is a mass of tradition, conflicting, contradictory, as great as were the traditions that covered up the Hebrew religion in the time of Christ.

The obvious distinction we must make is one between the revelation given us in the Scriptures, which is authoritative and final, and these traditions. The revelation is the Old Testament Scriptures interpreted by the New Testament which give us the declarations of the Apostles regarding the principles of Christian life and service. We must remember that traditions even in the Church are interpretations…human interpretations of these principles. As such, we must never place ourselves in submission to them.

Jesus declared that any movement that leads men into subjection to tradition is a departure from the commandment of God. When someone expects us to obey a tradition, it is an evil thing. Men submit to tradition when they have passed out of an intimate relationship with God. Put it another way: If we want to live in an intimate relationship with God, we must never submit to a human interpretation of Scripture or what our life should be like as a church.

It is clear from reading the Scriptures, that Jesus violated the traditions of the Jews systematically, intentionally and resolutely. Look at his attitude toward the Sabbath and you will find the first source of the quarrel the Pharisees have with Jesus. He violated the tradition of the Sabbath, but never did he violate the Sabbath. In spite of their objections, Jesus set about doing the same thing over and over again. He healed people on the Sabbath, trampling their tradition under his feet, shocking them with his irreligiousness. Time and again he violated their false conceptions regarding the Sabbath.

What then is the problem with tradition? Why did Jesus intentionally violate their traditional ideas regarding the Sabbath? It was because of the fact that they had confused the form of religion with the life and power of a true relationship with God. Anything that interferes with our personal, intimate relationship with God must be rejected.

The teaching of Christ shows us that we cannot reject other believers simply because they have a different ecclesiastical tradition than ours. Traditions regarding peculiarities of dress, modes of speech, preferences for the King James version of the Bible that are symbols of sanctity or spirituality are to be rejected.

Traditions of men miss the point. The inner life of the believer can never be reached by some external ceremony or traditional approach. The external is of value only when it is an outward sign of an inner spiritual reality.

To wash your hands before you eat is worthless unless it is a reflection of an inner spiritual reality. Jesus’ testimony regarding the Pharisees was that they did not have the inner spiritual relationship with God. Therefore, their mass of tradition was worthless. It was only an hypocritical sham for show so that others would be impressed with their spirituality.

The illustration that Jesus uses here in our text is that of a tradition in which a man could declare all his possessions to be “Corban”…devoted to God. The end result of it was that his wealth would be donated to God at his death. That meant that any thing declared “Corban” or devoted to God could not then be used to provide for a man’s parents in their time of need. And this in full realization of the command for a man to honor his father and mother. Honoring them included providing for them when they were needy.

Jesus says here that what they have done is to reject the commandment of God in order that they could maintain their tradition. They were claiming it was their duty to God to honor the “Corban” while they were failing their duty to God to honor their parents. How false that is.

What Jesus was looking for was the simple obedience of the soul of man to the direct Law of God.

But it is so much easier to live by a set of rules. If  I know the rules and obey them, then I am OK. Much of the Church of Christ lives that way. Spirituality is often thought to be determined by what we do and don’t do. We all could probably put together a list of things that could be our check list of spirituality. And if we did it we would be wrong. We would be in exactly the same place as the Pharisees.

We must not allow anything to come between our soul and Christ. We must know His Word and apply it to our lives. We must stand against traditions that would cover up the truth of the Word of God and our responsibility to it.

And when we make the determination that we are more afraid of God than we are of men in our walk with Christ, we will find freedom and the path of power in our Christian life.

Tradition is the confusion of the form of religion with true spirituality.

If we have true spirituality we will recognize traditions for what they are…enslavers, robbers of freedom and power in the Spirit.

 --Dennis Gleason