GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 7:15
World-Changing
Recently, I read about people sitting at a table enjoying their meal when someone turned on the radio, and the announcer said that at 7:48 a.m., Japanese bombers attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The music stopped. People on the dance floor stood in silence, listening to the reports. Everyone in the room knew that their world had changed.
I was sitting in my office, getting ready for classes on September 11, 2001, when Alice called and told me to turn on the radio. The reporter described two planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers; another plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Classes continued throughout the day, but there was a sense that the world had changed. In the following hours and days, the magnitude of the change became apparent—changes that still affect the world.
Following the Pharisees and scribes’ confrontation with Jesus and his response, Jesus called the crowd back. It is likely that the Jerusalem delegates either pulled Jesus aside or that the crowd heard the cutting criticism of the delegates and drifted away. In either case, he called them back and gave them two commands—listen and understand. Then he spoke a sentence that changed their world: “There is nothing outside of a man entering into him that is able to defile him, but the things coming out of the man are the things defiling the man.” (Mark 7:15) His audience had been taught that eating the wrong food or eating without ceremonial handwashing would defile them or make them unworthy before God. They knew their traditions. They were taught it from birth, and parents passed it to their children generation after generation. And with this one brief announcement, Jesus changed their world. It is no wonder that people had trouble comprehending what Jesus said. The people in the restaurant on December 7 and the Americans on September 11 had trouble comprehending the announcements that shifted their worlds.
vWhen the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes conquered Palestine in 198 B.C., he wanted to destroy Judaism, so he demanded that all Jews eat pork—swine’s flesh, strictly forbidden by Levitical law—but hundreds of Jews died rather than do so. Fourth Maccabees Chapter 7 records the story of a mother forced to watch the torture and execution of her seven sons, who refused to eat pork; they died rather than eat meat that was unclean to them. Then Jesus, in one sentence, caused the Jewish world to shift—it was not what went into a man that defiled him before God, but what came out of a man. It is difficult to imagine the intellectual, spiritual, ceremonial, and cultural shift that one sentence announced to that audience, but Jesus’ statement still causes people’s worlds to shift when the impact of that statement grabs one’s spirit.
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