Clean and Unclean: Why Jesus Was Cryptic (2 of 6)

He answers a question about handwashing with a riddle, and the disciples do not understand it either.

Wright’s explanation for the indirectness is the most useful thing in this passage, and it accounts for something the reader would otherwise put down to obscurity for its own sake.

What Was the Original Complaint?

Handwashing, and not for hygiene.

Pharisees and legal experts from Jerusalem notice that some disciples eat with unwashed hands, and Mark stops to explain the practice to his readers, which tells you he expected an audience that did not know it.

The washing maintained the tradition of the elders. Cups, pots and bronze dishes were washed the same way. It was a purity practice rather than a health one, and it came from the tradition built around the law rather than from the law itself.

What Is Korban?

The example Jesus uses to show the tradition working against the commandment.

Moses said honour your father and mother. Under the practice Jesus describes, a man could declare his property Korban, given to God, and thereby be excused from using it to support his parents.

The result is that a commandment gets cancelled by a device, and the device has religious language attached to it. That is the charge: you abandon God’s command in order to keep human tradition.

The Isaiah quotation he attaches names it precisely. This people honours God with their lips while their hearts turn away, and what they teach is human commands.

Why Not Say It Plainly?

Because of what saying it plainly would have meant to that audience, and Wright’s answer here is the key to the passage.

Some of the most famous martyr stories in that world were about Jews tortured and killed for refusing to eat unclean food, pork in particular. Those were not obscure figures. They were national heroes, and the refusal that killed them was the whole point of the story.

Jesus has grasped something about the way humans are that requires a radically different line, and it is not going to go down well.

Wright’s comparison is uncomfortable and exact. You might as well try telling the leaders of the old South Africa that all races are equal before God. It is not something they are going to want to hear.

So the form is deliberate. If you are telling your own people that they are going the wrong way, that their heroes fought for the wrong cause and their martyrs died in the wrong ditch, you will be careful how you do it. It has to be cryptic.

The Pharisees had to be answered, since the dispute was public and some statement was required. He was not going to hand them an obvious propaganda victory.

Why Are the Disciples Confused Too?

Because the riddle is genuinely hard, and the obvious reading is the wrong one.

Talk of what goes into a person and what comes out of them leads naturally toward the digestive joke, which Wright notes would have been at home in Greek comic theatre and is not what a kingdom announcement is for.

They ask him about it once they are back in the house, and only then does he explain. That is the same pattern as the parables: a public saying, private confusion, and an explanation given indoors to people who asked.

What Is the Actual Teaching?

That defilement is generated internally, and the list he gives is specific.

Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, treachery, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly.

All of it comes from inside, and that is what makes a person unclean. Nothing entering from outside can do it.

Notice how ordinary the list is. It is not a catalogue of ritual failures. It is a description of what people are actually like, and it relocates the entire purity question from the hands to the heart.

Why Does This Matter So Much Later?

Because the argument this passage settles is the one the early church nearly split over.

Acts spends chapters on whether Gentile believers had to keep the food laws. Peter has a vision about it and still gets it wrong at Antioch, where Paul confronts him. The Jerusalem council convenes over adjacent ground.

The principle had been stated years earlier, in a riddle, to men who did not understand it at the time and had to ask about it later in a house.

That is worth sitting with. The teaching that resolved the church’s first great crisis was delivered before anyone could see the crisis coming, in a form deliberately chosen so that it would not start one prematurely.

Part of a series on the conflict with the Pharisees. See also Lord of the Sabbath.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone (SPCK, 2001), on Mark 7:1-13 and 7:14-23. Supports the account of the Korban device, the reading of the indirect form as necessary given the martyr tradition around unclean food, the South Africa comparison, and the observation that the disciples shared the general puzzlement and had to ask privately. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Mark 7:1-23, Matt 15:1-20, Isa 29:13, Exod 20:12, Acts 10:9-16, Acts 15, and Gal 2:11-14.

Where the sourcing stops: the martyr accounts Wright refers to are in the Maccabean literature and are not named in the Gospel text. The connection between this teaching and the later disputes in Acts is my own framing of the sequence rather than a claim Mark makes.

Footnotes

1. The martyrs point is what makes the indirectness intelligible rather than evasive. A nation had stories it told about people who died rather than eat pork, and those stories were load-bearing for its identity under occupation. Announcing plainly that the category was misconceived would not have been brave, it would have been unhearable.
2. That the disciples had to ask privately, here as with the parables, is a recurring pattern worth tracking across the Gospels. The public teaching is deliberately hard. The explanation exists and is given to people who come back and ask for it, which is itself a comment on how the teaching was meant to work.