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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Today’s bulletin cover pictures delectable delicacies—well, maybe not so much the squid, but surely the pork crown-roast and the lobster. As the bulletin cover captions—and as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading—Jesus said that nothing outside of people, by going in, can defile them, and an implication of that statement, which apparently the Divinely-inspired evangelist St. Mark added, is Jesus’s “cleansing” all foods. Those particular foods and other foods were previously prohibited as “unclean” and “detestable” by the ceremonial law that God gave to His people of the Old Testament (Leviticus 11:1-12), but Jesus arguably fulfilled that law and so Himself later told St. Peter to stop calling “common” or “unclean” what God had already “cleansed” (Acts 10:9-15; confer Preus, CPR 34:4, p.17), and the New Testament Church still later worked through issues related to the dietary laws (for example, Acts 15:1-31; Romans 14:1‑23). While we might enjoy pork and lobster, the matter of cleansing such foods is only one implication of what Jesus said in today’s Gospel Reading, and it is an implication that is somewhat incidental to today’s Gospel Reading, at that. More to the point of today’s Gospel Reading is both that what comes out of people’s hearts “defiles” them, or makes them “common” or “unclean”, and that, by nature, what comes out of our and all people’s hearts is evil. In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus wanted both the crowd and His disciples to understand their evil hearts, and so He wants us to understand our evil hearts.
As we heard in last Sunday’s immediately-preceding Gospel Reading (Mark 7:1-13), the Jewish leaders wrongly taught both a human “washing tradition” that apparently concentrated on an obtainable external righteousness and other traditions that made void the Word of God. So, in today’s Gospel Reading, again having called the crowd of people, Jesus perhaps was repeatedly saying to them that instead of the Jewish leaders the crowd of people should hear Him and understand. And, when Jesus had entered a house away from the crowd of people and His disciples asked Him about what He had said, Jesus asked or exclaimed about their lack of understanding and repeatedly told them to understand. Understanding and wisdom figured prominently in today’s Old Testament Reading, too (Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6‑9). In the Old Testament Reading, God through Moses told the people of Israel—and tells us—to listen to what Moses was saying, which ultimately would be their and our wisdom and understanding in the sight of all the other people, who then will recognize God’s people as wise and understanding. Such wisdom and understanding can come only from God and can move people away from foolishness to faith, trust in God for the forgiveness of sins, and to the avoidance of sin that follows forgiveness (Goldberg, TWOT, pp.103-104, 283-284).
You and I probably are familiar with “to-do lists”. For example, I know that there are things on my Mom’s list for me “to-do” when I get to her house this afternoon. What we hear in today’s Gospel Reading is more of a “to-don’t list” or a “not to-do list”—I thought those titles were original to me as I visited Pilgrim’s shut-ins Friday, but I later found out that they were already all over the internet. As we heard, Jesus said that out of our hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness—we might say that all those are evil thoughts, words, and deeds that recur, and evil attitudes related to them (Preus, CPR 34:4, pp.17, 18). Regardless, all those are evil and defile us, make us common or unclean, because our hearts are already evil from the moment of our conception (Psalm 51:5; confer Genesis 8:21 and Preus, CPR 34:4, p.16). Apart from God’s Word we cannot understand our evil hearts, but by His Holy Spirit working through His word, we are sorry for our sin and say as we did with the Psalmist, “Turn to me and be gracious to me” (Psalm 119:129-136; antiphon: v.132).
And, God does turn to us and is gracious to us, for that is Who God is. God is gracious; He is loving; He is wise. In the Word of His Old Testament and New Testament, God reveals to us our sin, and God also reveals to us our Savior from sin, Jesus the Christ, the Son of God in human flesh, Whom St. Paul elsewhere calls the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). Jesus took our sins to the cross, and there He died for us, in our place, the eternal death that we deserved. And, the third day He rose again from the dead. As St. Paul writes, Jesus not only became to us wisdom from God but also righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30). God is the One Who can and does create in us clean hearts (Psalm 51:10), cleansing our hearts by faith (Acts 15:9; confer Preus, CPR 34:4, p.17). When we are sorry for our sin and trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, then God does forgive us; God forgives our original sin and all of our actual sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives us through His Word and Sacraments.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus rules out something outside of us, by going into us, defiling us, making us common or unclean, but Jesus does not rule out something outside of us, by going into us, cleansing us, setting us apart, or making us holy. As we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading, the Word of God enables us to live—the Word of God enables us to live whether we as a group hear and understand that Word read or preached or whether that Word is applied to us as individuals with water in Holy Baptism, with a pastor’s touch in Holy Absolution, or with bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood in the Holy Supper. We are not made common by something unclean, but here at this Altar and its Rail we come into communion with Him Who cleanses us (confer 1 Corinthians 10:16). In all of these ways, God forgives us, cleanses us, sets us apart, makes us holy. In all of these ways we might also say that God puts on us His whole armor, that we heard about in today’s Epistle Reading (Ephesians 6:10-20), by which armor He protects us as we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
So equipped by God for such heavenly wrestling, we also do more “mundane” things—“mundane” in the sense of their being of this earthly world and maybe also in the sense of their being less interesting or exciting. We at least try to keep God’s Commandments in keeping with our vocations. We try not to do the things on the “to don’t” or “not to-do” list. As St. Paul writes, just as we once presented our members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now we present our members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification (Romans 6:19). God’s Word is our wisdom and understanding in the sight of others. We make known God’s Word to our children and our children’s children. And, “Understanding evil hearts”, we take care of our own souls diligently by the right use of God’s Word and Sacraments, living in God’s forgiveness of sins and so also living in His peace and joy.
The author of the Hymn of the Day, Christian Ludwig Scheidt, was born and lived in Germany in the eighteenth century. After graduating from university once and working for a time, he went back to school. He did not learn how to cook such things as squid, pork crown‑roast, or lobster, but he studied both philosophy, in order to understand the things of men, and theology, in order to understand the things of God (Pollack, 574-575; Precht, 757; Heimbigner, LSB:CttH II:636). Scheidt understood evil hearts and God’s Word well enough that he could pen the hymn’s final stanza that was translated and we sang as follows:
By grace! On this I’ll rest when dying;
In Jesus’ promise I rejoice;
For though I know my heart’s condition,
I also know my Savior’s voice.
My heart is glad, all grief has flown
Since I am saved by grace alone. (Lutheran Service Book 566:5; Preus, CPR 34:4, p.18)
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +