Image and Reality: A Meditation on Mark 7 for the Season of Pentecost

Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him,

Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders,

but eat bread with unwashen hands?

He answered and said unto them,

Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written,

This people honoureth me with their lips,

but their heart is far from me.

Howbeit in vain do they worship me,

teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

 

In Mark 7, a conflict emerged between the apparent relative righteousness of the Pharisees and Jesus’ disciples.  The Pharisees had inherited (and likely adapted or added to) a rabbinical tradition regarding washing one’s hands before eating.  Keep in mind that this had nothing to do with modern notions of sanitation or microbiology, but rather in presenting an image of holiness separated from the world around them.  The Pharisee washed his hands because he did not want to be seen as polluted with the unclean things around him, such as the market place, or the common work of common people, or even of the common people themselves.  Such ceremonial washing was a show of their own holiness, and by direct implication, a judgment upon the unholiness of those around them.  Thus their inquisition of Jesus about His disciples’ eating patterns was not about the propriety of the ceremony itself, but rather a self-justifying attack on Jesus to show how much better they were than Him.

 

Such impulses are not uncommon in our time, either.  And while religious people have a particular flair for creating their own religious rules and ceremonies to make themselves appear better than those around them, secular people have similar tendencies.  Religious people might make up rules about drinking, or smoking, or prayer methods, or mission work, or contributions, or liturgies, or clothing, or phraseologies that are peculiar to their own historical group.  And not that any of these things are particularly wrong in themselves, but when used to prop up one’s own pride over another, to create an image of holiness that is also used to deride others as less holy, they become reflections of evil in the heart.  Secular people in the era of Marxist woke ridiculousness create their own virtue signaling practices and ceremonies, too, using them to elevate one group over another.  The inner problem is the same, which is the evil heart from which come all kinds of murders, adulteries, fornications, and greed.  It is the darkened heart which brings forth dark thoughts and deeds, or as some of the old philosophers might have said, it is our ideas and convictions which precede our actions.

 

And there’s the rub.  The reality is that each and every person has within them a heart which is darkened and twisted by evil as a consequence of our common Fall.  For the secular person, there really should be no surprise that their efforts to show themselves righteous and better than their peers manifests in family pedigrees, elite educational institutions, political groups, and social clubs of the wealthy and powerful—and all the rites and ceremonies which go along with them, to create their images of rank and pretense.  But for the Christian, there must always be a battle between this dark inclination of our fallen nature and the higher calling of our life which is hidden in Christ.  By the witness of Jesus’ Word and Spirit, the Christian knows that an image of holiness is meaningless apart from its reality, or worse, an active hypocritical attack against the true holiness of God.  Still possessed of the same fallen nature that secular people have, the Christian still has the same temptations to pride and avarice, to adultery and fornication, to hatred and murder and covetousness and theft that everyone else has.  But what they have which the secular world does not, is the knowledge that they are not holy in themselves and can never be by their own works—they know that what is holy in them does not come from them, but from Jesus alone.

 

So the life of the Christian becomes one of faith in the promises of God’s forgiveness and life for Jesus’ sake, even as it is one of repentance before God’s commands to be truly holy as He is holy.  It is a life that pursues more than the fleeting and deceptive phantasms of imagery, instead piercing through to the deeper bedrock of what is truly real.  What is real in the human condition is that no one may save himself, nor rescue himself from death in this world or the next, because no one can recover their originally created holiness by themselves.  What is also real, is that every Christian, born from above by Water and Spirit, living by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, is while still in this world both a sinner and saint.  The Christian is called to daily drown that sinful nature in the promise of their Baptismal waters, and to rise in faith to a new life in the power and triumph of Jesus and His Word.  And when the Christian leaves this world, laying down his corrupted flesh in the earth, he will rise again in Jesus so that his image and reality are returned to perfect harmony forevermore.

 

In a world where everyone is awash in false and deceptive images which hide dark realities below their shiny surfaces, the reality of Jesus reaches into the reality of our lives, and breathes a new hope into every breast by His Word and Spirit.  In that moment where faith clings to the real promise of Jesus, where real faith leads to real repentance and a real conversion of the heart, there is found a real eternal life which no false pretenses can destroy.  There, our individual reality is daily reformed into the image of Christ, so that while our darkened intellect may not yet be able to grasp what we shall one day be, we know that we shall one day be like Him.  This is the promise which gives eyes to see past the diabolical distractions of false imagery, and to see more deeply into the saving reality of Immanuel—God with us, in reality and truth.  Amen.