Don't follow your heart: A meditation on Mark 7

The number of pop-psychologists, TV personalities, and personal “life coaches” who advise people to follow their heart are astounding.  From popular culture movies to books, this oft repeated phrase shines through, with the implied conclusion that whatever your heart desires will make you happy.  And, at least on a superficial level, this can be true.

Do you want money?  Being without it might make you think you’d be happier with it (as the contemporary country song croons that money might not buy happiness, “but it can buy me a boat.”)   Do you want power and prestige?  How about sex?  Do you want a faster or cooler car?  Do you want your own private island off the coast of Baja Mexico?  Do you want a castle in northern Scotland?  Do you want to be a woman or a man, fly like a bird or run like a lion?  Perhaps you want softer things, like love and warmth and safety.  Maybe you want books stacked from floor to ceiling, or a world without war and famine.  Maybe you want a Church that is pristine and a government that is honest.  Whatever it is that you want, shouldn’t chasing it down and capturing it for yourself be the path to happiness?

Unfortunately, as repeatedly demonstrated in both history and Scripture, the pursuit of one’s heart’s desires does not often end well.  The problem isn’t with wealth, or power, or sex, or islands, or castles.  Plenty of people have been happy with or without all these things… and plenty of people have been miserable with or without them, too.  The problem isn’t with the things as they are encountered in their proper created order, but with our own heart.

God teaches us that our hearts are deceptive beyond all things, and Jesus brings this point home in our Gospel lesson for this week.  After our fall into sin, we are tempted to think that it is things that enter into us or surround us that either make us holy or unholy, clean or unclean, happy or unhappy.  The food we eat, the ceremonies we observe, the habits of our cultural time and place—all these things cloud our vision about what makes a person good or evil.  Instead, Jesus directs us to look deeper into ourselves, and examine the seat of our own intellect and emotions.  There at the base of our existence, at the very root of our being, we find the corruption that actually defiles us.  Theologians have called this concupiscence, which is our inclination and desire toward evil.  We weren’t originally made with corrupt desires, but after the fall, no human being has been able to escape the twisted contortions of their own heart.  Like a fouled fountain that pollutes all the streams it flows into, our fallen and sinful heart leads us to seek good things in evil ways.  We seek power and money and sex and everything else under the sun, not according to the good order and use for which God made it, but for selfish ambition and prideful gratification.  Our heart’s desire toward endless satisfaction will build hatred of those who have what we covet; slander and murder of those who stand in our way; theft, sorceries, adulteries, treacheries, fornications, and every other evil under the sun.  Our heart is corrupted by sin, deceives us into thinking we and our intentions are pure, then drives us into the most heinous acts of evil.  Our heart tells us lies we want to believe, and borrows the devil’s lexicon to lead us into hell.  Indeed, out of our heart comes all the things which defile us, revealing that we are twisted and corrupted at our very core.

While we may have a hard time accepting the painful Word of Law which reveals us for what we truly are, our Creator has known us from the beginning—the beginning of creation, the beginning of the fall, and the beginning of our own individual lives.  He knows the lies the devil planted in our hearts, and He knows how powerless we are to rip them out.  He knows that without His mercy and grace, there is no hope for any person whose heart will inexorably lead them into eternal death and despair.  And so, into a world of sinners who’s hearts reverberate like hammered strings in the devil’s harpsichord, the Son of God descended to make satisfaction for our sinful hearts and all the evil they produce.  Jesus Christ, there at our beginnings, is also there at the Cross, that He might take our hellish ending upon Himself.  Our Creator has become our Redeemer, the sacrifice for our sins and our own sinful nature, that we might also be forgiven and free from the hell our diseased  hearts yearn for.

But more than this, He does something to the human heart no one other than the Creator and Redeemer could do:  He gives us His life and His nature, even as He drowns that old nature in the waters of our Baptism.  He puts His Holy Spirit into our spirit, His heart into our heart, His life into our life.  Now, born from above by His Water and Spirit, He raises us up unto a new life in Himself—a life that can never die, and is never motivated by wickedness or pride.  This new life is one of purity, sanctity, holiness, love, and compassion.  This new life we have given to us by grace through faith in Christ alone is a sanctified and holy life, making us His holy saints.

Our God who is our Creator and Redeemer, has also become for us our Sanctifier.  Through His Holy and Eternal Word, our God comes to us and restores us to fellowship with Him.  He puts His divine name upon us:  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God now and forever.  He puts His life into us by His Word, and leaves His Spirit both with and within us to guide us by His Word.

Put away the self inflated voices of popular culture that tell you to listen to that deceptive heart of yours.  Hear instead the Word of the Lord which calls to you, raises you up, and gives you a life fulfilled for eternity in your Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.  Turn away from the words of death the devil wrote in your fallen flesh, which fallen people write into every human medium of their own creation. Hear instead the Word of Life, which always gives what it promises.  Amen.