If you have to go to the doctor, which kind of doctor would you prefer? A kind, gentle doctor who is very sensitive to your feelings but almost seems like he’s just telling you what you want to hear – or a kind of rough, gruff doctor, who doesn’t have a very pleasant bedside manner but is fiercely determined to properly diagnose your trouble and provide the proper treatment? About a decade ago, there was a TV series called House M.D., which focused on the latter kind of doctor. A doctor who wasn’t interested in easy cases or easy diagnoses or easy solutions, who didn’t really care about his patients’ feelings – all he cared about was getting the right diagnosis and finding the right cure. In the words before us, Jesus is somewhat similar to Dr. House – he is focused on one thing: giving us the proper diagnosis of what is wrong with us so that he can give us the proper cure.

Dr. House often found himself at odds with the medical establishment, the hospital administration. He advocated the best practices for his patients even when the hospital administration wouldn’t. Jesus does the same thing here. He defends his disciples against the religious establishment – the Pharisees and…experts in the law who had come to spy on Jesus and his disciples. They didn’t have to wait long to find something to charge Jesus’ disciples with: they saw some of his disciples eating bread with unclean (that is, unwashed) hands. Mark explains, for Gentiles like us, why this mattered – beyond merely practicing good hygiene: according to the tradition of the elders…the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they scrub their hands with a fist.

Jesus responded with a scathing rebuke. He called the Jewish leaders hypocrites – that they were nothing but pretenders; that while they pretended to worship God and hold to his commandments, they had, in fact, abandoned God’s commandments and were holding instead to man-made traditions. Anyone who attempts to place the authority of God behind the words (or laws) of men is a hypocrite. The Catholic church does that when it forbids priests to marry. [1] Baptists do this when they say that God forbids consuming dancing or playing cards or consuming alcohol. [2] Revivalists do this when they say that you must “decide” to invite Jesus into your heart and have a highly emotional “conversion experience.” [3] Do Lutherans do this? Well, not in our official doctrine. But in practice it’s always possible for us to give the impression that we are teaching manmade rules as if they were God’s Law – for example, that you must marry a Lutheran or you must send your children to a Lutheran school or else you’re sinning. That may be good, sound advice, but God has not commanded those things.

Against this hypocrisy, Jesus launches a two-pronged defense. The first is a defense against the wrong diagnosis. What the Pharisees had been teaching the people is that their real problem, the real issue between them and their God was what they were doing (or not doing) with their hands before they ate a meal. That sin was merely an outward matter. It’s like if you were going into cardiac arrest and yet the doctor diagnoses you with a sprained ankle. The wrong diagnosis masks the far more serious underlying issue.

The second prong of Jesus’ defense deals with the Jewish leaders’ tendency to abandon God’s commandment and instead hold to human tradition. Here he’s dealing with the wrong prescription, the wrong medication, the wrong cure to fix the wrong diagnosis. The human traditions that the Jewish leaders forced on their followers were a relatively easy solution. Wash your hands, your cups, your pitchers, your kettles and dining couches and God will be pleased with you. This is the doctor who prescribes you an opiate to dull your pain – while leaving the underlying condition untreated. This is the church that tells you that if you just don’t eat meat on Fridays in Lent, don’t smoke, don’t dance, don’t drink alcohol, don’t visit dirty websites or put a little bit more in your offering envelope – that’ll cure all the problems that exist between you and God.

Jesus turns away from the Jewish leaders and comes to the bedside of his patients: his disciples and the crowd. “Everyone, listen to me and understand.” Now that’s the kind of doctor you want, right? For example, if your primary care doctor, the one you’ve seen every year for decades, sat you down and said, “Listen up, here’s the real story, the real science behind masks and vaccines,” you’d listen, wouldn’t you? Well, here is Jesus Christ, the Son of God in human flesh and blood pulling us aside to give us the proper diagnosis to our problems. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear indeed!

Listen to Jesus bluntly and forcefully contradict the Jewish leaders’ diagnosis: there is nothing outside of a man that can make him unclean by going into him. This goes contrary to everything our world – and the false religions in our world – say. The world says that the reason you die is because of what you eat or drink or breath; that you’re a miserable spouse because you had miserable parents; that you’re self-centered because you live in a narcissistic society; that you’re greedy because of capitalism; that you’re filled with lust because of the filth you see on TV and the internet; that you have a short temper because of all the really bad drivers out there. Just like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, the world and the world’s religions teach that whatever sin you’re guilty of is not really you’re fault – it’s caused by someone or something or some situation outside of you.

Jesus presents the exact opposite diagnosis: the things that come out of a man are what make him unclean. Outward factors, outward situations don’t make you evil; they merely bring out the evil that’s already festering inside of you. It’s not what goes into your body that makes you guilty before God but what comes out of you. And here’s the scary part; here’s what Dr. Jesus sees on the x-ray of our hearts: evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. Do those things sound like they can be cured by washing your hands? That’d be just as dumb as listening to a doctor who prescribes aspirin for brain cancer. The cure the Pharisees and experts in the law were prescribing was completely inadequate.

In the TV show, Dr. House always has the answer, the right treatment for the real disease. You may have noticed that Jesus does not give us an answer here. Now, if this were an episode of House M.D. – or, if you happened to be sitting in any number of other churches – then this is the point where the sermon would veer far away from the text and seek to put words in Jesus’ mouth, to provide a clever second opinion for Jesus’ apparent lack of solutions. These are the churches in which the good news, the gospel consists of directing you to follow certain steps and practices and behaviors, that if you just buy this book or attend this seminar or strive for this mindset then you can conquer all the wicked things that live in your heart. You recognize what those strategies, those programs, those prescriptions really are, don’t you? They’re not gospel – they’re just more law. Manmade laws. Inadequate solutions.

Here's where the genuine Gospel veers away from the House M.D. TV show. In the show, House always has the answer. In our text, Jesus doesn’t have the answer…he is the answer. Jesus is the answer, the only answer, to the evil that streams out of our hearts 24/7. Who Jesus is and what Jesus did is the only cure for the terminal disease of original sin that you’ve been infected with ever since conception (Psalm 51:5).

Jesus is the real solution because unlike you and me, Jesus wasn’t born with original sin. He wasn’t born with the awful infection of wicked and evil and filthy inclinations in his heart. He wasn’t born of two sinful human beings, he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. And yet, Jesus was born under the Law – that is, he was obligated to obey the same Law of God that you and I are (Galatians 4:4-5). But he wasn’t born, he wasn’t obligated to keep man-made laws – and that was one of the main reasons that Jesus always seemed to be fighting with the Pharisees and experts in the law. That’s really what this whole hand-washing controversy was about: Jesus didn’t care about their made-up laws and broke them regularly because he knew that two things happen when you try to put your own fabricated laws into God’s mouth: 1) you create laws that make people feel guilty when they shouldn’t and; 2) you cover up real sin so that those who should feel guilty don’t. (To use a very contemporary example: the so-called Critical Race Theory – a philosophy which is being propagated in public schools from pre-K through the university level – is an attempt to make some people feel guilty for the sins (and they are sins) of racism and discrimination, even if they’re not actually guilty. At the same time, this same theory seeks to give false comfort to the supposedly “oppressed” classes for their laziness or covetousness or violence or rage (because, after all, we’ve got to even the score).

And yet, while Jesus didn’t care about man-made laws, he cared deeply about the God’s Law. The stream of sewage that flows out of our hearts never flowed out of Jesus’ heart. He was never guilty of evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, slander, arrogance or foolishness. Jesus’ heart, hands, mind and tongue were perfectly pure, perfectly clean – he didn’t need cleansing for his heart, much less his hands. But even that is not yet the Gospel. Maybe your doctor is perfectly healthy, but that doesn’t do you much good, does it? On the TV show, Dr. House saved lots of people with the proper diagnosis and the proper treatment – but he never saved anyone by suffering, bleeding or dying. He never saved anyone by bearing their sicknesses, sorrows, sins and punishments. He never saved anyone by having the cup of God’s wrath handed to him and drinking it. Dr. House not only never went to a cross for anyone; he never experienced death or the horrors of hell for them, either. But Jesus did. Jesus did all of those things for you, for me, for everyone you know and everyone you don’t. The only cure for our sin-sick hearts is the blood of Jesus which cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7).

I remember one episode of House M.D. where he’s on a plane and someone gets sick and over the loudspeaker the pilot asks, “Is there a doctor onboard?” – a modern take on: “Is there a doctor in the house?” The sick person was relieved when Dr. House stepped forward to help. Well, we’re not on a plane and I don’t see anyone throwing up on themselves – but we’ll close by asking two related questions: First, are there any sinners in the house? Is there anyone here who can’t do anything to get rid of their sin and guilt? Is there anyone who has tried to stem the flow of evil from their heart but feel like they’re trying to plug a leak in a dam with a finger? Is there anyone who has tried their best and yet still feel guilty before God? Is there anyone who has tried following all the manmade rules in the world and yet can’t seem to get themselves clean? If that describes you, then you need to hear the answer to our last question:

“What kind of doctor do we find when we come to this house?” We don’t merely need an advisor, a life-coach, or even a role model. We need someone who can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves; we need a Savior. Do we have that here? The Absolution says we do. The hymns we sing say we do. The Scripture readings say we do. The sermon (I hope) says we do. The baptismal font and this altar from which Jesus gives himself to us says we do. The means of grace don’t offer you a “to-do” list of laws, manmade or otherwise. They offer you Jesus, who lived a perfect life for you and died an atoning death for you to reconcile you to God (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). The means of grace don’t just address your dirty hands, dirty thoughts, or dirty words; they offer targeted treatment for the underlying source of all of our problems: our sinful hearts.

Jesus is blunt in our text so I’ll close by being blunt with you: if you think your real problems are outside of you, then we’ve got nothing to offer you. Then you need to find someone who will tell you that the solution to your problems is in you. But, if you hear and believe Jesus’ diagnosis, that the real problem isn’t out there but in here, in your heart, then we don’t just have suggestions or advice, we have the solution because we have Jesus. He’s the doctor who not only makes the proper diagnosis but is the only real solution. Amen.

[1] https://catholicstraightanswers.com/why-does-the-church-mandate-that-priests-be-celibate/

[2] https://christianityfaq.com/baptists-believe-drinking-alcohol/

[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/revivalism-Christianity

Sermon Blog

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 - The Benefit of a Proper Diagnosis - August 29, 2021