The following sermon was presented by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on August 28, 1988. The title is, By What Authority? And the scripture reference is Mark chapter 7, verses 1 through 13. 

The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Mark. In this passage, our Lord rebukes the Pharisees and scribes for their excessive emphasis on human institutions and traditions and for rejecting the authority of Holy Scripture. Chapter 7, verse 1.

Now, when the Pharisees gathered together to him with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, They saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they purify themselves.

And there are many other traditions which they observe. the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze. And the Pharisees and scribes asked Jesus, Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?

And he said to them, Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching us doctrines the precepts of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold fast the tradition of men.

And he said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and he who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die. But you say, If a man tells his father or his mother what you would have gained from me is corbon, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your traditions which you hand on, and many such things you do.

The Gospel of the Lord. What did Jesus have to say about the authority of Scripture? He had a great deal to say about it. He said things like this from the Sermon on the Mount.

Not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. That's to say, not even the part of a single letter will pass away until all is accomplished. He said, whoever relaxes one of the least of the commandments and teaches others so, shall be called least in the kingdom of God.

He said, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but I tell you, they bear witness to me. Jesus Christ studied the scriptures. He memorized the scriptures.

He taught the scriptures. He lived by the scriptures. When he was tempted, he answered temptation by the simple declaration, it is written.

If it is written, that's enough. I will bound my life by what is written and not go beyond it. We're told that on the evening of his own resurrection, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

We call Jesus the Word of God, the Word of God incarnate, the man who was and is God's Word. And yet the Word of God incarnate lived by the Word of God written. I wonder if you realize that most of the controversies he had with those two marvelous groups of people that we call the Pharisees and the Sadducees were ultimately controversies about the authority of Scripture.

Did you realize that? There might be specific issues, but the issue behind the issue is almost always the authority of God's word written. Both of these groups were challenging that, but they were doing so in quite opposite directions.

The Pharisees had fine-tuned the art of smothering the scriptures with layer upon layer of tradition, interpretation, rules, regulations, so that you could hardly find the word on which all of that was originally based. The Sadducees, on the other hand, simply rejected major portions of Scripture altogether. They said, we don't believe that's authoritative.

We just reject it. And what they retained, they interpreted with a rationalism that left no room for angels, miracles, heaven and hell, life after death, resurrection. It was a very this-worldly view of things.

You may remember on one occasion some Sadducees questioning Jesus about a certain woman who married each of seven brothers in turn. As one died, she would marry the next eldest, and then the next eldest, one by one they died off, and finally it says the woman also died, as well she might. And the Sadducees' question was, in the resurrection, whose wife is she going to be?

Now, see, that was not a genuine question. That was a trick question. In fact, they were ridiculing the whole notion of life after death.

They were saying, bad enough to be the wife of seven husbands in succession, can you imagine being resurrected and being wife to all seven of them at the same time? Ha, ha, ha. And Jesus' answer, it was a three-fold answer.

Number one, he said, your premises are completely wrong because in the resurrection there will not be marriage as we know it here. Number two, he then interpreted to them from a passage of scripture that they claimed to accept the fact that the Bible very clearly does teach life after death in spite of their sarcasm. And then thirdly, he ended with this little zinger.

He said, this is why you are wrong, that you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. And it says after that the Sadducees didn't dare to ask him any more questions. The Sadducees took away from the Scriptures.

The Pharisees added to them. Both groups are very well represented in the church today. Every week I get letters from all over the country from folks whose clergy are teaching them all sorts of things like everyone is going to be saved, or salvation is bestowed almost magically in baptism, or we need to be praying for the dead on the assumption that somehow that's going to be effective for their salvation after death, Or that the standards of biblical morality, biblical sexuality in particular are no longer relevant or whatever.

And folks write and they say, what do I say? How do I answer that? Well, you say what Jesus said.

You say what Jesus said. I want to look at what he did say in this passage, this encounter with the Pharisees one day. I need to give you a little bit of background.

The Pharisees taught that in addition to the Word of God written, there was another parallel divine revelation that was handed down from one generation to another orally. And it was called the tradition of the fathers, or the tradition of the elders. And they said it went all the way back to Moses himself, who got it, along with the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, from God.

and since both the written word and the oral tradition come from God they are equally authoritative, they are equally important. Now the problem is they didn't always agree with each other and increasingly the Pharisaic school gave priority to the oral tradition and as it was added to the scriptures were interpreted in the light of the tradition. During the second century B.C., these oral traditions were finally written down in the Mishnah, a collection of six books of law arranged topically, and that was later supplemented by the Gemara, a commentary on it.

You've heard those terms, I'm sure. The Mishnah and the Gemara taken together constitute the Jewish Talmud. By the time of Jesus, the rabbis were fond of saying that God himself studies the scriptures during the day and the Mishnah at night.

And then they were fond to add this comment, the scriptures are water. The Mishnah is wine and the Gemara is spiced wine. You see their value system.

You can see how that works out in this little story of Korban. The Word of God, the Scriptures say, Honor your parents. That's one of the Ten Commandments.

That is an absolute responsibility, and we never grow out of it. No matter how old, no matter how many accolades and awards and honors, no matter what status you ever have, you are still your parent's child, and we have an obligation to go on honoring and if need be, caring for our parents. But now the Mishnah taught that if out of piety you dedicated your money to the Lord, then it all belonged to Him.

And when they specifically asked the question, supposing somebody does that, supposing he declares his money korban, dedicated to God, and then afterward discovers that his parents are in great financial need, may he take some of that money dedicated to God and use it to care for his parents? And the answer was no. Do you see what Jesus is saying? By your tradition, by your interpretation, by adding layer upon layer, you have made void the Word of God.

In the incident in today's Gospel reading, The Pharisees are upbraiding Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat with unwashed hands. Now you need to understand that the problem was not hygiene but etiquette. It wasn't that the disciples' hands were literally dirty.

It's that they were ceremonially unclean. They hadn't gone through the proper religious ceremony of washing before eating. When you stop and think about it, Jesus' response to them, at least at first, seems very, very strong, almost harsh.

He says, you hypocrites! You hypocrites! You are worshiping God with outward form while your heart is very far away from Him.

What you are offering Him is empty, worthless worship. Now, wait a minute. I'm just talking about washing my hands.

what's wrong with washing your hands before you eat? The answer is absolutely nothing unless you make a law that it must be done just so because God himself has not made any such law. Evidently that is very serious to the Lord Jesus.

Worthless worship. that's a self-contradiction the word worship means worth-ship think of it worth-less worth-ship you are going through the motions and your heart is very far from God I don't want ever to hear that said to me, do you? do you know, I've known singers who have left the choir in their church, in some cases left the church itself, because they introduced guitars or pianos into the sanctuary.

We know that the only proper way to worship God is with an organ. You know, the same controversy was held when they first introduced the organ because we know that the only proper way to worship God is with stringed instruments. I've known people who were literally unable to worship because one of the candles was crooked.

I'm absolutely serious. Don't misunderstand. I want the candles to be straight, but you can get so caught up in the externals that you can't see anything else.

Do you follow what I'm saying? I've known folks who were absolutely unable to worship because somebody near them was sitting there with open shirt rather than coat and tie. Lots of Episcopalians are unable to participate in the liturgy unless it's in Elizabethan English.

Trivial examples, of course they are. That's exactly my point. Trivial examples except for the folks who are caught in them.

It's easy for most of us to look down upon the Pharisaism of the fundamentalists with their little lists of do's and don'ts about drinking and smoking and dancing and makeup and theater and so on. We'll have our own list sooner or later. Pharisaism crops up like weeds wherever you let it.

I remember Michael Marshall, Bishop of Woolwich, telling me when he first went to his parish in London, it's a very, very high church parish where they did everything by the book and by the numbers. And you can imagine, young man, first Sunday, a little bit nervous, gets through the service, goes out into the sacristy, and his head acolyte says, Father, you made 17 mistakes. Traditions.

Traditions. You know the seven last words of the church? We never did it that way before.

Serious business. Serious business. I've given you some pretty trivial examples.

Let me move it to another level. Do you know that Anglicans, the Anglican communion for exactly the last hundred years has insisted that the only kind of valid ecumenical venture will be one that is based upon having a system of episcopal oversight. Bishops.

You can't have any discussion of reunion of a divided Christendom unless we do it our way. get it nothing wrong with having a system of bishops and in fact I think it has much to commend itself but you can't find today's system of episcopacy in the New Testament it is a valid expression of the concern for pastoral care but you can't find that in the Bible so how dare we say that the only valid ecumenical venture will include it Or take it a step further, the insistence of the Roman Catholics that there is a universal primacy, indeed infallibility, of the Pope. Parasitism, traditions of men.

When that which has evolved outside of Scripture is put on a par with Scripture or even above it, we are in very great danger of making void the Word of God by our traditions. You say, no, no, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm not denying Scripture, I just like things to be done a certain way, like how you wash your hands. Get it?

Nothing wrong with that until you start making rules about it. Nothing wrong with crossing yourself or bowing to the cross or genuflecting or kneeling or raising your hands to worship God. That's great, until you make rules about it.

You with me? Jesus did not reject all traditions as wrong. He simply said don't make them obligatory.

Scripture is divine. Tradition is human. Scripture is obligatory.

Tradition is optional. Scripture is supreme. Tradition is subordinate.

Now you know what's happening right now. I know what every single one of you is saying. Boy, I know some folks who need to be hearing this sermon.

Let me put it to you this way. When how we do something is more important than what we do, or when what we do is more important than why we do it, we are in great danger of crossing over a line and by our traditions making void the Word of God. I said at the outset that the Sadducees took away from Scripture and the Pharisees added to it.

The interesting thing is that the end result is the same. You realize when you add to Scripture, you're diminishing from it? If just believing the Gospel isn't enough, if there's something else that I've got to do, then the gospel is somehow incomplete.

When I add to it, I diminish it. One of the greatest threats, I don't know if you ever thought of it this way, but I submit to you that one of the greatest threats to our relationship with God is religion. And praise the Lord, Jesus came to save us from that, as well as from sin, death, and the grave.

If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed the truth shall make you free and God's word is truth let's bow our heads together Lord we thank you for sending the Lord Jesus to be to us your word incarnate we thank you for sending to us the Scriptures to be Your Word written. Lord, it's our desire this morning to be those who neither add to nor subtract from Your Word, but instead by the power of Your Spirit, live in it for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Amen.