The Trouble With Rules

"You have all these rules and you think that they'll save you." — The Joker, "The Dark Knight."

Today I get to be the featured speaker at our Oasis service. The passage being considered today is Mark 7:1-23, a section where the Pharisees question Jesus about the fact that his disciples aren't following the letter of the Kosher laws. Jesus hits them back, questioning whether it's the rules or something more that is more important.

In fact, the central question for the passage is are we saved by the law or by faith? As believers, we should know the answer to that question. But the Pharisees were slavishly devoted to the law, and they thought that devotion to the law would save them. In the process, they'd forgotten why we had the law in the first place.


Sometimes we think of this as the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. As humans, we struggle with this idea. My wife watches two little boys during the week. As part of her job, she talks to them about things to help teach them. Sometimes it’s letter and numbers, but sometimes it’s things in our world. The other day when she was at a stoplight with them in the car, she asked them if they knew what the lights meant. They said they did. Green means go. Red means stop. Then she got to yellow. When Lindsay asked the boys what it meant, they said it was a cushion to help you get through the intersection. Of course when we hear things like that we can’t help but laugh. It’s funny, but it also is a reflection of how we project the rules to our kids. Boys who are four and five years old don’t know a lot about driving laws, all they know is what they see their parents doing.

It’s kind of a reflection of our society and the law. We all know what the yellow light means. It is a warning that red is coming. It is a warning that you should slow down and prepare to stop. It is a reminder that if you can safely stop, you should. But we also know what it means to us in terms of our daily lives. We’re busy. We’re in a hurry. We need to get somewhere fast. So when we see a yellow, we step on it to slide through the intersection and go about our day. We are following the letter of the law — as we are allowed to go through the intersection on a yellow — but not really the spirit or intent of the law.

We see in the passage that the Pharisees are slavishly devoted to the law, but they are so focused on the letter of the laws and moving down a checklist that they’ve forgotten the purpose. Worse yet, they’ve inserted their own traditions into the law have held them up to a higher standard.

One of the Ten Commandments is Honor Thy Father and Mother, which included caring for ones parent’s in their advancing years, even providing financial assistance. Under the law, the penalty for failure to do so was death. But there was another provision in the law, called Corban, where an individual could declare their money was dedicated to God, and thus were relieved of obligation to their parents. Many Jews had started using this provision, but not really giving the money to the church either. It was a sort of legal technicality that allowed them to get out of their obligations. It was like a criminal using a technicality to avoid a conviction and jail time. Jesus condemns the practice for what it is, using the letter of the law to wipe away the spirit of the law.

As Christians I think there is a tendency to miss the forest through the trees. That is what Jesus is critical of here. He notes that while adhering to the rules, the Pharisees have missed the point. We sometimes do the same things. I here Christians express frustration that the laws and social norms in this country don’t mirror Biblical morality. There are some that think if we could only change the laws we could change the people, but you can’t legislate morality. Just because people follow rules doesn’t mean it’s changed their hearts.

James gets at this idea when he says faith without works is dead. He doesn’t say that because what we do earns our salvation, he says that because what we do is a reflection of our heart and our values. What we produce is a reflection of our core beliefs. Jesus says the same thing to the Pharisees when He says, “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’”

The Pharisees were locked into the idea that following the rules was most important. They had all these rules and they thought the rules would save them. Jesus’ life and ministry served to show us another way. Our words and deeds are a reflection of our hearts, and what’s most important is what’s in our hearts.