The Red Thread – Nourishment

Mark 7:5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders
instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
…14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
…the missing verse 16 in the NIV is footnoted to be v4:23 “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Before I’d even read this chapter I was struck by seeing the amount of “red” on the page. Jesus had a lot to say about their traditional observations but tradition wasn’t the problem. God had given man 10 very important commands to be traditionally observed. The problem had become letting outward religious actions take the place of an inward relationship to God.

That’s what makes Jesus’s use of food as an example so perfect. God designed us as an efficient system with both emotional and physical needs. Faith is still a dietary matter. It’s making the choice to let God himself be responsible for our nourishment and then tradition can become food that changes our heart not just a physical ritual temporarily taken in and then eliminated. “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.”