Sermon for September 1, 2024 - The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, But Can It Change?
Upon first glance, it is hard to see the Good News in our Gospel story today. After spending six weeks immersed in the imagery of the bread of life found in John’s Gospel, we shift gears and find ourselves back in Mark. Now, I must admit, I was really looking forward to this shift. It is good for us to spend time with pieces of scripture, but six weeks was starting to feel a little long and repetitive. But, now hearing the story for today, I almost want to go back to another week of bread and eternal life, rather than spending time wading into these difficult verses. It is hard to see the Good News, but if we look carefully enough, we just might see more clearly what Jesus is trying to tell us through his pointed criticism.
No one is exempt from a strong searching of the heart. That’s the first thing that we should notice about these selected verses from Mark 7. The Pharisees, the crowds, the disciples are all called to an examination of just how much their religious acts, their various rituals, even their dedication to following God’s law actually correlate with the love they hope to profess in their hearts. It’s a hard truth to hear; how more often than not our faith lives seem disassociated from what we think we believe, what we want to believe.
And it’s another hard truth to hear that what we want to believe about the goodness of our hearts is frequently not true. That as much as we will ourselves to have a decent and right heart, every heart is susceptible to evil, to corruption. But before we go the route of “we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves,” Jesus comes along to free us from the evil the lurks deep in the recesses of our innermost being, a reminder is in order, the heart is capable of both good and evil. And following Jesus will require a rather constant vigilance to just what side of the heart is showing its true colors.
Perhaps this moment is Jesus’ way of calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Perhaps it’s Jesus’ way of telling the crowds just what it takes to be one his followers. Perhaps it’s Jesus’ way of foreshadowing for the disciples both Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial. But perhaps also it’s Jesus’ way of communicating to us just how delicate and difficult faith is. Not just for us, but because how we exercise our faith also affects others. The Kingdom of God relies on our watchfulness as to just what side of our hearts is revealed in our behavior.
Five years ago this past week, Republican Senator from Arizona, John McCain, died of brain cancer. Quickly, my Facebook feed filled up with news stories of tributes to McCain, expressing admiration of his service to the country, his patriotism, and his courage. Most interesting in reading through the various accolades and homages was the consistency of the reverences and regards. Regardless of political loyalties or partisanship, the praise for McCain centered on the senator’s constancy in how his leadership, his decisions, his relationships revealed his true heart. That there was a perceivable correlation between the beliefs of his heart and his behavior in his career as a politician.
Living a correlate life is not something you can fake. But we try hard, so very hard, thinking that we can fool others and ourselves with our good intentions, all the while masking our true feelings with what we have determined as anticipated and acceptable good behavior for a Christian. We end up convincing ourselves that our actions are indeed worthy of God’s desires, that our actions are truly demonstrative of God’s will and not subject to the will to impress, the will to communicate success, the will to suppress what we don’t want people to see.
What Jesus subjects to fiercest in this passage is the human being. What Mark seems to be saying through these striking verses is not how or what one should eat but the internal corruption of the heart. It is this malignancy that chokes the life out of tradition, contorts it into a way of excusing injustice, and blinds those afflicted by it to their own culpability for the evils that trouble the world.
Jesus’ comments propel us to keep our evils in the spotlight. Whatever Satan is in Mark’s Gospel, it is not the cause of wrongdoing. That job belongs to the human heart. Placing blame on a diabolical entity lurking in the shadows risks diverting attention from our own propensity to rebel and destroy. Truly “evil intentions” dwell, not only within society’s notorious figures, but within ourselves and those we love and trust most fervently.
We know enough about the human condition to say that evil is about more than an individual’s selfishness or bad decisions. It roams our collective existence, our social, economic, and familial systems. We are at once perpetrators and victims. And our victimization furthers our capacity to perpetrate. “The human heart,” or the human will, remains a complex thing. Our kin and culture usually keep us ingrained in patterns of defiling self-destructiveness and idolatry.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things,” and as we have heard from Jesus today, that very well may be true, but the Good News in this, the whole reason that Jesus is even teaching us about this, is because we are in control. The power to change begins within ourselves, in the heart. We will be prompted and stirred by God and the Holy Spirit through the people we encounter each and every day, but it is up to us to change. We have the power to have a change of heart, to turn from the inwardly focused and sinful nature and literally turn towards God, so that our hearts and are actions are unified in reflecting the love and mercy of God. It is never too late to have a change of heart. (Could end here or after the next paragraph.)
This text shows us that Jesus sees clearly the ugliness of human hearts, yet he does not turn away. He sees right through our highly edited versions of ourselves, knows what lurks in our hearts, yet loves us still. In the larger story of the Gospel, he shows us what true faithfulness is by daring to touch those considered unclean, by daring to love those who are social outcasts, by loving and serving and giving his life for all people; tax collectors and sinners, lepers and demon-possessed, scribes and Pharisees, you and me.
This good news exerts a claim on our lives, a call to follow. Following Jesus is not about separating ourselves from those considered less holy or unclean. Following Jesus means that like him, we get our hands dirty serving others, caring especially for those whom the world has cast aside. True faithfulness is not about clean hands, but a heart cleansed and a life shaped by the radical, self-giving love of God in Christ.
