Proper 16: Gospel, Mark 7:1-13                                                 

Mark 7:1-13  

I always love it when Jesus quotes the Old Testament. He is it’s author after all. Why should He not quote His great work? In our Old Testament reading this week we peeked in on Isaiah declaring what Jesus would quote here. Jesus takes aim in our gospel reading at the ease in which those who claim to be God’s people lean on and love their traditions more than the speech of God. Jesus speaks of their allegiance to “the tradition of the elders.” It was actually a body of writing, that by Jesus’ time, was being given as much honor as God’s holy Word. 

In the text Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29, the original gives the sense that the people’s disobedience and misalignment of priority would actually lead the Lord to do things they could not imagine, “therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder” (Is. 29:14). 

When Jesus brings this text to his own time, in His voice there is evident disdain. In His very coming wasn’t there the element of those “wonderful things”? But they had missed God’s Word and work 700 years before. The heart of man doesn’t change save by God’s intervention. And those in Jesus’ presence were relying on the wrong word. Mankind on the whole is still relying on the wrong word.

Like those in Jesus’ presence that day, we have constructed our own traditions and that usually leads us in paths far from Him. Open the Word of God today, dear saint. Take in wave after wave of the Word of God. Listen to and heed the true Word. Jesus is waiting there.