Scripture and Tradition (Mark 7:1–23)
In a fascinating encounter, we have Jesus, his disciples, the Pharisees, and some unwashed hands! These dirty-handed disciples become a flashpoint in the argument between Scripture (God’s Word) and the traditions of the Old Testament church.
If you haven’t read Leviticus recently, or worked in children’s ministry for a while, dirty hands may, on the surface, appear to be a fairly benign issue. Of course, we should be less concerned about the state of our hands than the state of our souls (this isn’t 2020 after all! Too soon?).
But Leviticus is helpful for giving us context. It details exhaustively what cleanliness—and, by virtue of that, holiness—looked like for the people of God. Holiness is a serious matter when God dwells in the midst of his people. In many ways, we today treat holiness far too lightly compared with the Pharisees.
While misguided in their overreach, the Pharisees were at least attempting to treat holiness as serious business. And that is precisely the point: they went beyond what God had said, and made a whole mess of things. They followed the “tradition of the elders” (7:5) instead of the Word of God. Think about it, the ultimate issue was not that the Pharisees cared too much about Scripture, but that they extended these purity laws beyond their biblical scope and then treated those extensions as binding on all (sound familiar?).
For Jesus, then, the issue of unwashed hands points to something far deeper. Using Scripture itself, Jesus exposes the problem by quoting Isaiah 29:13 in Mark 7:6. Isaiah had long ago warned that Israel was going beyond what God had spoken. Jesus is picking up on the sad reality that not much has changed since Isaiah’s day.
Earlier, God had warned his people not to add to or take away from the covenant (Deut. 4:2). When God entered into this covenant with his people, he gave them his testimony (the Old Testament Scriptures), and expected loving obedience to what he had revealed (Ps. 119:47–48).
Fast forward to the time of Jesus, and we see that the problem is still alive and well. Instead of the simplicity of “honour your father and your mother,” the Pharisees find ways to bypass what God has clearly said. They are guilty both of adding to God’s Word (hand-washing regulations) and subtracting from it (neglecting the command to honour father and mother).
Much of Jesus’s teaching ministry seems to revolve around two related activities:
Rebuking added traditions
Correcting misunderstandings of Scripture
Both are clearly present in Mark 7.
The issues that then face the New Testament church are similar, though we now have additional revelation in what we call the New Testament. Just as with the Old Testament, we are commanded not to add to or subtract from what God has revealed (Rev. 22:18–19). This means there is no further infallible revelation (sorry, Mormonism).
Coming back to tradition
Traditions within the church can be both good and bad. We rely on what has come before us—the Nicene Creed, the Church Fathers, the Reformation, and so on. To reject tradition entirely would be foolhardy and would land us in another mess altogether (but that’s an article for another day).
However, we must reject tradition in any form that seeks to set itself up as equal with Scripture.
Notice how Jesus responds: “It is written” (7:6). He does not appeal even to his own authority at this point, but to the authority of God in his inscripturated Word. As an aside, notice how Jesus also deals with Satan in the wilderness: the authority of the Word of God, rightly interpreted, rebukes Satan himself.
The Roman Catholic Church places tradition on equal footing with Scripture (alongside the Magisterium). This opens the door to a host of doctrines that are not found in Scripture (I know this is a theme I keep returning to, but bear with me). It is important to see that the Reformation was, in many ways, a recovery of the supremacy of the Bible in the life of the believer and in the life of the Church. Part of the impetus for this was precisely what Jesus himself is doing in Mark 7.
Tradition must always be corrected by Scripture. Always. But stated positively, we can rejoice that God has given us everything we need in the Scriptures. There is no secret knowledge, no hidden teaching necessary for faith or obedience, because God has revealed all that we need in his Word.
By contrast, if one traces the development of tradition in the Roman Catholic Church, it becomes difficult to define its limits or meaningfully examine it. New traditions can, in principle, be introduced at any time. The Protestant position, however, offers a profound sense of security: we have everything God has revealed to us, and we will always have it.
“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deut. 29:29)
