For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) – Mark 7:19

Today's Scripture Reading (January 5, 2024): Mark 7

I would make a lousy Jew. I have a lot of food allergies, but pork is actually something to which I am not allergic, which makes it one of the foods that I often like to eat. At the same time, many of the foods Leviticus says I should eat my allergies prohibit me from consuming. So, I am glad that Jesus made this comment.

Theologian William Barclay writes that with this one speech, Jesus wipes out not just the various food restrictions made in the Mosaic Law but also the significance of most of the book of Leviticus. What you eat and what you drink cannot make you unclean. Bacon, as much as my Jewish friends disagree with me, cannot make me unclean because bacon doesn’t go directly into my heart or the seat of my intention. Instead, it goes into my stomach and is then evacuated from my body.

The Mosaic Law intended to set up guard rails to keep us where we need to be. But the Law never really worked that way. In many ways, the Law failed us. And Jesus understood that the Law failed us; we needed a different plan.

Many years ago, I attended court with a friend, and I think we were at the end of the afternoon docket. As a result, we saw several others who appeared with business before the judge. One of the people who had a date in front of our judge was an elderly gentleman fighting a photo radar ticket. And he tried everything. He threw the kitchen sink at the judge. It wasn’t his car, except the picture clearly showed it was. The radar gun wasn’t aligned, but the police officer produced the paperwork that confirmed that the radar gun had been tested that very morning.

But the excuse that made me cringe was his last one. He argued, yes, he was speeding, but that he had diabetes. On that day, his blood sugar had been low, and he had to get home quickly so that he could get something to eat and take the appropriate medication. It was at this point that I think the judge had enough. “You admit that you were speeding, but not only that, you admit that you were impaired at the time by health circumstances and should not have been behind the wheel at all. Be happy that I am just finding you guilty of the speeding charge and not upgrading it to something else. Go pay the fine?” I would have added that not only that, but every other thing you have said in this court has been a lie. Why should I trust anything that you are saying? Ah, but luckily, I am not a judge.

Most of us speed. I have a friend who doesn’t, but let’s call him the exception that proves the rule. And we speed for many reasons, or maybe no reason, but all of them are internal to us. We have a law that sets the appropriate speed for us to drive. The speed limit is higher on divided highways, a little lower for two-lane rural roads, lower still in urban areas, and even lower in school and playground zones. But the Law doesn’t stop us from speeding. We do what we want to do.

And that becomes the problem. We are the decision-makers, and we often ignore the Law because it doesn’t fit what we want to do. Our heart takes us to places we shouldn’t want to go, but we do. What we need has never been more rules but a heart transplant that will help us want what God wants, and that is something that only God can help us accomplish.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 16