“Of what terrible things is the human heart the source!  From self flow impurity, dishonesty, wickedness, knavery, deceit, lust, haughtiness, blasphemy, senselessness, and everything that is evil.  These things are not put into us, but come out of us.”[1]  So wrote pastor and Bible student W. Graham Scroggie.  The eighteenth-century English philosopher John Locke theorized that a person entered this life as a tabula rasa, a blank slate.  In other words, all was put into us, taught: a matter of socialization, culture, historical situation, circumstance—nurture, not any supposed nature.  I don’t say there’s absolutely nothing to that.  Scripture, however, and Christ, tell us there’s more to it than that.  It’s another of the things that can feel hard to accept.

At my church in Illinois, we also were affirming our way through the Westminster Shorter Catechism.  That day, we had gotten to the part about original sin, and human nature being corrupted.  Right after the service, one of our dear saints made his way straight to me to tell me point blank: “I believe people are good!”  And what was I going to say?  We’ve all known good people in our lives, and we’ve been so glad they were.  We hear that, “Only God knows what’s in a person’s heart.”  Yes, and what He knows of mine causes me to hang my head in shame—but always also with a great hope.  I provide the shame.  God provides the hope.  Knowing that God who knows me through and through down to the deepest depths and darknesses still offers me hope makes me hopeful indeed.  And glad.

David sang, “Search me, O God, and know my heart!  Try me and know my thoughts!  And see if there be any wicked way in me” (Ps 139:23-24).  I don’t think David sang thus in the expectation that there was no wickedness to be found in his heart.  See how clean I am, God?  I rather think David sang thus to implore God to reveal what David could not and would not see without God’s help: the blind spots to which David had made himself blind.  In Proverbs, we read that “All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the LORD weighs the motives” (Pr 16:2), and again, “Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, But the LORD weighs the heart” (Pr 21:2).  Jeremiah cried out, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9).  Yes, we all love truth, and we’re past masters at lying to ourselves, about ourselves, others and, sometimes, God.

Jesus has been in heated debate with the Pharisees, for whom meticulous observance of all the law was supreme.  The law was life.  The law was faith.  The law was holiness.  The Pharisees would never have put it this way, but in a real sense, for them the law was God.  The scribes were there, too.  These were the ones who had devoted their lives to the closest study of God’s Word, in order to explain and elaborate for the faithful just what worshipful living looked like.  The right way to do one thing and another.  The regulators.

The teaching of Scripture seemed quite clear: there were certain things out in the world that, should we come into contact with them, would defile us: polluting things.  That’s not hard to see or believe.  I suppose nearly all of us have had the sorrowful experience of stepping in dog feces; some of us have had a happy day at the beach ruined by a bird dropping its droppings on us.  If you’ve ever had to clean up organic nastiness of one sort or another, you get that there is that out there that can make us unclean; however, we don’t take those things into our bodies.  We can wash those things off.  There are things you and I can’t just wash out of ourselves.

The laws God gave his ancient people Israel forbade eating certain animals.  In our day, we can rationalize that as primitive food safety guidelines—no pork, no shellfish, and so forth—no bats—but the prohibitions weren’t understood that way in those times.  The Greek word Mark uses when Jesus says “defile” has the literal sense of making common.  Common in contrast to consecrated, dedicated, holy—devoted to God.  Things that defile knock us out of proper relation to God, knock us out of being a people specially devoted to loving and serving God, living life God’s way.  Of course you’d want to avoid such things, religiously.

When Jesus then tells them “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them” (7:15), that would have bowled them over—all of them.  So far as they had always read and understood Scripture, there were all sorts of things outside a person that could defile them and shut them out of God’s presence: that’s why it was of the first importance to avoid all such things . . . and people.  Life was in avoidance, the people knew this, but what was continually falling into neglect was the deeper message at the heart of it all: not avoidance but obedience, not avoidance but consecration, a consecrated heart.

Now, Jesus isn’t giving us carte blanche here to fill ourselves with as much of whatever we want to eat as often as we want to eat it.  He isn’t saying that all food is good food, or that all that gets offered to us out there as food promotes robust health.  One of the more difficult problems we face today is the questionable character and quality of what gets passed off as food in the freezer sections, grocery aisles, and restaurants; these days, if you go out to eat, you had better make it a one meal a day kind of day.  As I and my doctor can attest, and as you might agree, much of what ails us can be traced directly to what we are in the habit of putting into our mouths.  You’ve heard of lip service; let’s call this problem mouth service.

Jesus is speaking of the source of our spiritual malady, the source of our defilement—is it external or internal?  Avoiding certain animals and refraining from eating dairy and meat at the same meal—no cheeseburgers, sorry! and definitely no bacon cheeseburgers!—not eating such things won’t make us good people, let alone conclusively demonstrate our loyalty to God.  Repeating rituals doesn’t make us holy; living for righteousness makes us holy.

The problem is more than a problem with our society, because the problems of our society are problems of the heart, the will, the hungers and desires prowling deep in the heart.  God had warned Cain, “You will be accepted if you do what is right.  But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out!  Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you.  But you must subdue it and be its master” (Gen 4:7).  If you refuse.  Don’t refuse to do what is right.  But why would anyone ever refuse to do what is right?  Indeed!  That’s the question.  That’s what stymies us, confounds us, and condemns us.

And Jesus shows us the answer even as he also shows us the way out.  He tells those stunned but not uncomprehending listeners, “it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (7:15).  It isn’t clothes that make the man; it is the character of the man.  It’s not eating or enjoying pork and shrimp that messes up our relationship with God.  We know there is a lot of filth floating around out there.  Technology makes it all too accessible all too easily.  We’re dancing a difficult dance to avoid it all, not to mention trying to shield our loved ones from it.  It can feel like a losing game, a lost battle.  Jesus reminds us that all the filth out there . . . it comes from in here.  People are good!  Dive a little deeper: swim around beyond, beneath, below where the sunlight reaches.  What all will you find, accumulated and lurking, down there, blind, ravenous?  Lost to sight, lost to mind, but always there, in the depths of the heart.  Not all of it dead.  You must subdue it and be its master.  But Cain didn’t, and neither do we.  Yet we are not helpless: we are not abandoned.  Strength is available, and forgiveness, and light.

Peter remembered how, when they were again by themselves, they asked Jesus what he meant.  Maybe they sensed the truth of what he had said, but his teaching was so contrary to the conventional teaching, the way they had always been taught and thought, until now, until Jesus.  The Pharisees were expert, adept, at the external observance of the law, the rituals, and Jesus condemns them in the most vigorous terms for their elaborate show of purity.  If your faith goes only as deep as what you wear and don’t wear, what you touch and don’t touch—even with your eyes—that’s not quite deep enough.  Having all the proper prejudices won’t make you right with God.

Mark calls what Jesus teaches a parable (7:17).  The disciples are asking Jesus to speak more plainly, explain what he means.  They knew a parable had a deeper, an internal meaning.  “[I]t is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”  What is it that comes out of a person?  How does it get in a person?

Jesus answers in a way that feels a little abrupt, frustrated.  “‘Are you so dull?’ he asked.  ‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?’” (7:18).  Maybe.  But that was a little hard to see when you had been taught all along that part of holiness included not eating certain things, that what we had most to fear was that outside of us.  Defilement, pollution, falling—Jesus is saying these don’t come from outside.  What does Jesus mean by defile?  The word strikes a deep chord: defile, that’s like deep bad—morally unclean, befouled, corrupt, filled with filth.  Now, all the filth out there?  It wouldn’t be out there if there weren’t a market for it.  How is there a market for it?  It feeds something, inside, part of us and not part of us, blind and ravenous, the part we hate, and that hates us back.

In the Old Testament, God makes rules against things that seem unimaginable to us—really disgusting, filthy, shocking, depraved practices.  Cover the children’s ears!  Why even mention such things?  Who could possibly even contemplate them, let alone participate in them?  Unthinkable!  But beloved, no one makes a law against something that doesn’t happen, that never happens, that no one ever does.  You don’t make a rule, a law, against something that happens only rarely.  You outlaw something all too common that needs to stop.  Why do people do such things?  How could they?  Because it feeds the darkness directing them, making its demands, because it’s easier to give in than to resist, reject, rebuke.  Because the more you do it, the easier it is to do: let those listening take heed.  Sin has whatever power and all the power we give it; may we never get to the point of no longer caring!

What are we feeding, and what are we starving?  Where are we getting our moral food, true, good food for our souls?  If we’re accepting what this society, this culture, life in this world in these times is offering us as food, we’re in big trouble.  The trouble seems to be that people don’t know they’re in trouble, or maybe they only sort of barely realize it, nervously laugh it off, dismiss that voice calling another way, calling us to wake up and look, not outside, but inside.

Jesus explains himself, for the benefit of his followers.  Defilement—this isn’t about food; it isn’t what is out there that defiles us.  That’s looking in the wrong direction.  “For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body” (7:19).  That’s why we don’t concern ourselves with keeping Kosher, or Halal, which is of such distinctive importance for Jews and Muslims, respectively.  Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.  Belief and behavior for the heart.  What’s in there?  Now, a good upbringing is better than a bad upbringing, oh yes.  And a healthy society is better than a sick society, a virtuous culture than a wicked culture.  And from where does the bad, the sick, the wicked come?  The heart.  The old, secular philosophical mantra is “Nothing is good or bad except thinking makes it so.”  That’s not completely off base: what guides the thinking, shapes the thinking, directs our thinking?  Upbringing, society, and culture are all products of, reflections of, the heart, and what has filled it.  What fills the heart of this culture?

“He went on: ‘What comes out of a person is what defiles them.  For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.  All these evils come from inside and defile a person” (7:20-23).  No, no!  That isn’t right!  People are good!  Inside.  From inside.  Already there.  Calvinists have long been condemned for their talk of “total depravity,” just as the doctrine of original sin is also refused: babies aren’t wicked!  Tabula rasa!  And David sang, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:5).  Already there.  Not external.  Internal.  The consequences of the Fall, Eve and Adam’s choice for disobedience, to be a law unto themselves—the consequences were not confined to Adam and Eve.  Their choice for disobedience had existential, essential consequences for all mankind, as though the helix itself were wounded, fractured, thereafter: a dominant genetic defect, a congenital deformity.  All the evil out there?  It’s a reflection, a manifestation, of the evil already in here.  All the good we do can’t hide or smooth it over.  The veneer peels away.

“Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly”—oh, none of us have done all these.  Actions, damnable though they be, don’t tell the whole story.  Evil thoughts.  Thoughts for evil, wickedness, disobedience.  By their thoughts you shall know them.  I never thought much about it, but Jesus lists twelve evils.  Twelve . . . one for each of the apostles there, listening, asking him.  Oh, murder might not have been for Peter, but what of Simon the Zealot, the liberationist guerilla?  Greed?  John tells us of the greedy one among them, the thief.  Envy?  The Twelve, jealous—I might almost say envious—argued among themselves who was the greatest.  I recognize my evil thoughts, there, and fear the ones I haven’t yet recognized.  Do you recognize yours?

“Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?  Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:24-25).  David had also sung that God “desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place” (Ps 51:6).  Christ calls to us even before we know to respond, or how.  Strength is available, and forgiveness, and light.  Christ shows us the way, opens the way for us, and promises to accompany us all along the way.  The beautiful reminder is before us this morning.  No, the act of eating this bread and drinking this juice will not make us clean; bread and juice do not put Jesus in us in some corporal, metabolic way.  Only faith.  As surely as you receive these gifts, this gift of Christ by faith—who he is for you, what he does for you—so you receive by faith what he promises to do, and can do.  We don’t receive Communion, the bread and the juice, in our stomachs—that’s not what’s happening, here.  We need Christ in us.  Christ assures us he will be with us, in us, through us and for us, as surely as the bread and the juice, as we receive in faith, as we pray and struggle and strive for loving obedience, worshipful living, as we desire Christ more than all we find outside us and all we had found within.

[1] W. Graham Scroggie.  Gospel of Mark.  Study Hour.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976.  132.