How do we fight the evil in the world? I know it’s out there, and I know I’m against it. What do I do about it?
Let’s start with a more basic question. Where does evil come from?
This topic arises in Mark 7. The chapter opens when a group of Pharisees “saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed” (7:1-2). Why does this bother the Pharisees? Personally, I’m all for hygiene, but I don’t think my outrage matches up with that of the Pharisees. Why are they mad? What is at stake?
Mark, writing to a Gentile audience who had the same questions as we do about Jewish practices, narrates the story in the first of three explanatory statements (Mark 7:3-4): “(For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, 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.)”
The Pharisees were witnessing the slow erosion of traditional Jewish values and identity. Greco-Roman cultural norms were daily creeping into Jewish life. The ways of their forefathers were disappearing. The Pharisee – cultural conservatives worthy of our empathy – wanted to combat this decline, but “identity” and “culture” are not concrete objects. You cannot build a literal wall around your heritage. You cannot garrison troops to protect your identity.
Instead, the Pharisees enacted protections for the things they could protect – behaviors that represented their culture and identity. Instead of walls, they built rules and customs that helped shield the behaviors from change, and thereby protect the culture they hoped to preserve. They expanded on the cleanliness codes found in the Law of Moses to safeguard the identity of Israel as a holy people, set apart from the crude Gentiles and their unwashed ways.
In sum, they identified an evil and went about fighting it. They couldn’t fight the Romans, so instead they washed their hands with all the vigor and patriotism of a battlefield soldier.
Jesus, as he is prone to do, responds to their crusade against dirty hands with piercing insight, expressed in the words of Isaiah the prophet: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7:6-7; Isaiah 29:13). He adds, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8).
It isn’t that Jesus favors dirty hands, or even that he is indifferent to the cultural slide of the Jewish people as such. What he points out is aimed deeper into the human condition. Fighting evils without does not address the problem within. Clean hands do not make you Jewish, any more than dirty hands made Gentiles. The people of God are identified by the submission of their hearts to God and try as they might, handwashing could not reach the hearts.
And it is truly the heart that must be washed. To quote from Isaiah again, “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:16-17). Israel’s true identity was not to be found in soap and wash basins, but rather in their treatment of others and their yielded of their hearts to God. If these things did not change, then to quote MacBeth, “All great Neptune’s ocean [cannot] wash this blood clean from my hand.”
On the contrary, the focus on cultural rituals had allowed the Pharisees to ignore many of their deeper problems. “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!” (Mark 7:9) As an example, Jesus reminds them of Moses’ command to honor father and mother (7:10). That seems like a pretty obvious rule that should establish the identity of God’s people. Who is Israel? People who honor their parents.
And yet, the Pharisees had developed a practice to evade this command of God and demand of family. By declaring some of their wealth as “Corban” (Mark narrates again to explain that this means ‘devoted to God’), they could evade their obligation to their parents (7:11-13a). It was a religious tax shelter of sorts. Sorry, Mom and Dad, I can’t buy you groceries because I have devoted all my possessions to the Lord.
The technical name for this behavior is casuistry. It’s a good word to remember. It is defined as the use of clever ruler interpretation to circumvent the plain meaning of the rules themselves. It allows the rule-follower to feel justified in disobedience while keeping some strained version of the letter of the law. It is a kind of moral gymnastics, an ethical contortion. But it didn’t fool anyone, and it certainly didn’t fool God. “And many such things you do” (7:13b).
The failure of the Pharisees was not in their concern over culture or even their dedication to hygiene. The fault began with our earlier question. Where does evil come from? If we misidentify the problem, all our solutions are in vain.
“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” (7:14–16). Evil is not something that gets on us. Evil is something that comes from us. The enemy of our identity is not the pressure of a wayward culture so much as it is the inclination of our sinful hearts. Jesus applies the principle to the Jewish concern for eating kosher. “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled? (Thus he declared all foods clean)” (7:17b–19). Notice that Mark once again adds a narrative comment for the Gentile audience that did not understand the Jewish obsession with food. The larger point is contained in Jesus’ own statement. Culture and identity are not defined in the stomach. It proceeds from the heart.
“What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 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” (7:20–23). If you want to fight evil, start within. The enemy is nearer than you think.
Jesus knew where the enemy was. Accordingly, he used a cross, not a sword, because the enemy of God’s people is neither on a battlefield nor on a ballot. At the cross, Jesus waged war in a place no legion could march. He besieged the human heart. Jesus set forward the true identity marker of his people.