This sermon was preached at St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Maryborough, 8.15am, and Grace Lutheran Church, Childers, 10.30am.
Grace, mercy and peace be to
you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
This people honours me
with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
Prayer: May the words of my
mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,
our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
In
our Gospel reading today, we read particularly about a discussion that Jesus
has with the Pharisees. In fact, he accuses the Pharisees right at the centre
of the reading with the words, and says: Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites,
as it is written, “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is
far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments
of men.” You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.
So why does Jesus say this to them? We read in our
reading: Now when the Pharisees gathered to [Jesus], with some of the
scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate
with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. Now, it’s not an unusual
thing for people to wash their hands before they eat – we might even think that
this is a sensible thing. We might say that it is hygienic. Some countries
around the world are particularly fussy about this, especially if they are
people who don’t normally eat with cutlery, like knives and forks or
chopsticks, and have to eat with their hands. But you see, the Pharisees did
not say that the disciples simply had unwashed hands, but that their hands were
“defiled”. They were saying that washing your hands made your hands holy for
the meal, and not washing your hands made your hands “unholy”. Do you see? This
was not simply a matter of hygiene, but it was a matter of holiness. This
hand-washing was a special ritual that they would perform before the meal.
In the Old Testament, there was no law that people had
to do this. But when the priests entered the temple, there were various
instructions to them about washing. For example, in the book of Leviticus, we
read about how before Moses consecrated Aaron and his sons to be priests, they
had to be washed. They also had to wash their clothes and bathe their bodies in
water before performing sacrifices and various things. So the Pharisees wanted
to apply these kinds of things to everyday life. So it became their tradition
that they should perform a special ceremony or ritual of washing their hands
before they would eat. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, but they saw it as a
matter of holiness. They thought that washing your hands made you holy, and
that not washing your hands made you unholy. This is not taught in God’s law,
and so they were inventing laws about holiness that were not from God.
We read: The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat
unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders, and 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.
So when they ask Jesus why his disciples did not hold
to these traditions, Jesus says: Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites,
as it is written, ‘This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is
far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments
of men.’
This is a very important passage, and there are many
things here for us to learn from that apply to us today. First of all, Jesus
calls them hypocrites. We often think of a hypocrite as someone who
doesn’t practice what they preach. They say one thing, but do something else.
But it’s probably best to see this word as being like an “actor”. A hypocrite
is someone who wears a mask—they put on a good front, but behind the mask
there’s nothing there. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus describes this a bit
further. He says: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you
clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed
and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and
the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly
appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all
uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you
are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
When we watch the TV or movie, and see an actor
playing a part, we can almost start to imagine that the actor is actually the
person they are playing. But they are not. So also, people might act holy and
righteous, but that doesn’t make them holy and righteous. What makes a person
holy and righteous is not how they act in public and what kind of a front they
put on, but God’s word.
One thing that can be a real cancer in the church is
when people are always worried about what the church looks like, whether we’re
talking about the church building, or the people themselves. Sometimes we think
of the church like a business, and we think of things in terms of marketing,
and say: “We have to do things like this, or like that, otherwise what will
people think?” Sometimes if we don’t know some hymn or some song, we might need
to practice it before church. But some people might say, “We can’t do that.
What will visitors think if we’re all messing around, looking like we don’t
know our stuff?” It’s OK – sometimes we need to do things like this. We don’t
know everything, and sometimes we need to learn things, and that’s OK. It
doesn’t matter what they think.
Now, at the same time, it’s a good thing that things
in the church are well-ordered, well-structured, that the church building is
clean and well cared for. This is all good. But the most important thing about
the church and its people, is not how things look like, but how things really
are. Do you understand that? The most important thing is not how thing look,
but how they really are.
And so Jesus in calling the Pharisees hypocrites is
saying to them that they think they look holy and righteous, but in actual
fact, they are not. How they appear is not the same as how they really are. So
Jesus says: This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far
from me. They look like their honouring good, from the outside, but inside,
they are not honouring God at all.
What Jesus says here we should also direct to
ourselves. Do we simply care about what people think of us from looking at the
outside, or do we care about what God thinks about us? Are we just trying to put on a show, or do we
really desire to hear God’s word and to receive his forgiveness? When we come
to church, do we just go through the motions, and then think we’ve done our bit
for the week? Or do we really take notice of what we’re saying, and take
everything very seriously? Do we just honour God with our lips, but meanwhile
our hearts are a million miles away?
We are all hypocrites, but Jesus is no hypocrite. With
Jesus, things are exactly as they are in reality. He is a real Saviour, who
died on a real cross, and really rose from the grave. And so he doesn’t offer
pretend forgiveness to pretend sinners, he gives real forgiveness to real
sinners. And so we might look at the church, and find it full of sinners. But
we have a pure word from God, that speaks the wonderful forgiveness of sins
over us, so that things are not simply how they look, but they are how God sees
them and how he himself says that they are. He looks at his church, and he
doesn’t simply see a bunch of sinners, but he sees the blood of his own Son
covering over all that sin, and he speaks to us from heaven that that blood
applies to us and that he has forgiven us personally. This is the real thing in
the church—we learn this from God’s word, not from simply how things look.
Now, this also brings us to another thing, which is
tradition. The Pharisees had many traditions. Now tradition is an important
thing, and many times it is a good thing. We have many traditions not just in
the church, but in our everyday life and in our homes. For example, when it is
someone’s birthday, we often have very strict traditions about how things are
done. We make or buy a cake, and put candles on it, and then we all sing “happy
birthday”. Even the song from a musical point of view isn’t the best song ever,
but it’s tradition, and nobody can change it without messing a whole lot things
up. But then there are local traditions: different families have their own
versions of things. Some people clap their hands for the number of years, or
they have an extra song, like “Why was she born so beautiful”, or “For he’s a
jolly good fellow”, or something like that. Now, when we have a birthday, we
all know what’s going on, and we can all join in.
In the church, we also have various traditions too,
and many of these things are good things, and give good order to things so that
everyone knows what to do and how things are going to happen, and we can all join
in.
There are some traditions that God actually commanded
us to do, for example. Take preaching or the Lord’s Supper. Jesus actually
commanded pastors to preach. Also, with the Lord’s Supper, he said: Do this
in remembrance of me. It’s something that we do every week, and it’s a
tradition, we might say. Our forefathers did it, and we now pass it on to our
children. But it comes from Jesus himself.
There are all kinds of things that we do in the
church, which are not specifically commanded by Jesus too, that we do simply
because they are good things. For example, the Creeds are not specifically
written in the bible, but they are good, because they summarise the bible.
There is no specific example of a baby being baptised in the bible, but we
baptise babies because Jesus told us to baptise all nations, and the promise is
for our children, so we baptise them. I could go on and on.
The problem is when we put human traditions, things
that were not specifically commanded by God, and we turn them into laws, that
if we do them it makes us holy or righteous or saved, and if we don’t do them
we are not holy or righteous or even saved. This then becomes idolatry, because
we can take God’s law and replace it with human rules. We are in danger of
replacing even God with ourselves.
And so Jesus gives an example in our reading of how
the Pharisees were taking God’s law, and replacing it with their own laws. He
says: In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of
men.
Now this is one of the reasons why it is so important
for us Christians to hear God’s law in the church. Now, there are two things in
the bible—two doctrines or teachings which summarise everything. We have God’s
law, which shows us our sin, and finds sinners and exposes them. And we have
the Gospel, which shows to sinners their Saviour, and makes them new. The
Gospel is the wonderful message of the free forgiveness of our sin, because of
what Jesus has done for us in his death and resurrection, and we receive this
gift without any contribution from ourselves, or because of anything that we
have done.
But it’s also important for us to learn God’s law, for
a number of reasons, even though the law doesn’t actually save us. First of
all, the law of God provides good order to the world. It is good and it is
holy. But secondly, we need to hear God’s law, because it shows us our need for
Jesus. The law condemns us, and accuses us, and so we need to hear it, so that
we despair of ourselves completely and look to Jesus alone to save us. But
then, as Christians, we are also called to do good works, not in order to be
saved by them, but out of thankfulness to what God has done for us. In
Ephesians, St Paul writes: For you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in
them.
Now, we know, for example, that Jesus often teaches
his disciples that they should love other people, that they should do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. However, what sometimes happens is
that when people want us to do something that is wrong or bad or evil, they
actually dress it up and make it look like something good when in actual fact
it’s not. The devil is a wolf, but he is always putting on sheep’s clothing. So
he often makes something evil look like it’s a good thing by making it a
beautiful tradition, or something like that. He knows that something is bad,
but he calls it love. Now I’ll give a very concrete example of this: take the
issue of euthanasia, which is being promoted in our country at the moment. The
whole push to bring in euthanasia is basically the politics of making something
evil into something good. 20 years ago, there was an Australian doctor who was
suggesting all kinds of terrible ways in which euthanasia could take place, and
people called him “Dr Death”. But now, people call it “dying with dignity”, or
showing love to someone by putting them out of their misery. The issue is much
more complex than that, but what you end up with is vulnerable people who have
no family simply being killed off, because they have no one to protect them.
Instead of having doctors as people who try to bring healing and treatment to
people illnesses, we turn them into agents of death. God actually does say in
his law: You shall not murder. Now there are all kinds of issues where
something is really not right, but people put nice clothes on it and try to
make it into something good when it’s not. Anyway, I could make all kinds of
other examples like this. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s important
for us to learn what God’s law actually is, not because it saves us, but
because Jesus has commanded us to do works of love, and it’s important to know
what love really is in God’s eyes. We have to learn not just to love, but what
love really is. There are many people in our towns and have so little love
shown to them—and yet, sometimes when you try to love them, they don’t want it.
They think you are showing them hate, or judging them. It can be very confusing
for us to really know what we should do for people, and what we shouldn’t do
for them. God is the one who teaches these things, not people. Now when we preach
the law like this, we’re exposing something and bringing it into the light.
Often this means that people will accuse us of being hateful, or bigots, or unloving,
when it isn’t true. If we only learn what love is from the people around us,
then we end up replacing God’s law with human commandments, as Jesus says: In
vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
In the last part of our reading, Jesus says: Hear
me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going
into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what
defile him. Then he says: For from within, out of the heart of man, come
evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting,
wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these
evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
We come back now to the Pharisees, and their rules
about washing their hands. But Jesus also teaches them that it is not external
things, like eating food, that make a person unclean or unholy. Food simply
passes through out stomachs and out the other end. Now, we might choose to eat
certain food, we might like to eat healthy food, or we might have a particular
diet. Some Christians even choose to be vegetarians. And this is not a bad
thing, but it can become a bad thing when they look down on other Christians or
other people, because they are not doing the same thing that they are doing.
Sometimes all kinds of people can be incredibly legalistic when it comes to
eating food. What we eat or drink doesn’t make us unholy, but our uncleanness
is already inside of us. It is already contained in our sinful hearts. Jesus
gives a long list of various sins there. He says: For from within, out of
the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,
adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride,
foolishness. All these evil things comes from within, and they defile a person.
And so what makes us clean? Nothing that comes from
inside of us. Nothing that comes from any our actions, or any of our own works.
In fact, nothing that we even can possibly think of, not a single one of our
bright ideas, can save us. Only the ideas and thoughts and words that come from
the mouth of God can do that. Only the pure forgiveness of sins can do that. Our
ideas about washing hands can’t do a thing—but God’s wonderful idea of
connecting his pure word to water and washing us in holy baptism is powerful to
save us. Our ideas about eating and drinking can’t do a thing—but God’s
wonderful idea of giving us the body and blood of his own Son for us to eat and
drink for the forgiveness of our sins is a powerful thing to encourage us in
our Christian life, and to give us the strength for the road ahead. Genesis 6:5
teaches that every intention of the thoughts of [our] heart [is] only evil
continually. But in Proverbs 30, we read: Every word of God proves true;
he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
All of our thoughts condemn us, and all our ideas and
plans are useless. But God’s word endures forever, and his word has all the
power to save us. Amen.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and for
making things clear for us. Our minds are often so unclear, and we start to
make things up, and we try to save ourselves. But even though you know our
hearts, you have still sent your Son to die for us, and you still forgiveness,
and so we thank you, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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