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Proper 17

Mark 7
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.” [16] [f] 20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”


The sleepy long weekend continues: what better time to spice things up with a little sin. Really, we can talk about a variety of sins, some A-list sins and some a little more garden variety sins.

And lists! I love lists, especially lists that seem to disagree or at least take a different tack on a common theme. And without venturing down the Greek traslations path I foreswore a couple of weeks ago, we can still compare and contrast between some translations, both ancient and modern.

At 401 years of age, the Authorized Version (we also know it as the King James Version) is always the best place to begin. Now, we have a family rule about correcting people willy-nilly, but I have to say they one of my pet peeves is people who insist on call it the St. James Version of the Bible. King James was no saint, you can trust me on that. He appears a few times on the naughty list in Mark 7, let’s just leave it at that.

So here is KJV of Mark 7.21-22:

21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.
I’m sure you are familiar with all of these (the meaning of the words, of course) with the possible exception of lasciviousness. Good word, lasciviousness. To be lacivious means you are wanton, or lewd, like most late-night comics, or too many of the shows on television. Look, I’m preaching already, but it’s too soon. Back to King James.

I know I promised you no Greek, but now I can’t help myself. Our list, according to King James includes “an evil eye,” which I have to say I find rathery puzzling. The Greek word for eye, ophthalmos, with the qualifier evil (poneros) usually gets translated as envy, which we will see in a moment. But how does “an evil eye” become envy? I lived in Greektown for a whole lot of years, and over there an evil eye is an evil eye.

Not wanting to leave you hanging on this question, I turned to google, and sure enough, the evil eye, something feared in many Mediterranean countries, is related to envy. People seem to cast an evil eye on someone with things they covert, hence all the little glass baubles to protect you. All of this, of course, is unrelated to ‘stink eye’ (disapproval) or my favourite, ‘the hairy eyeball,’ which means about the same.

So on to the New International Version, which we heard this morning:

21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.
So covetousness has become greed, wickedness to malice, then the two I already mentioned, blasphemy becomes slander, pride to arrogance and foolishness to folly. Hard to believe that Bible translations provide this much wiggle room, something I’m going to have to ask about over lunch with my private biblical scholar.

The one that just leaps off the page here is going from blasphemy to slander. I don’t really put these two together, since one seems to be unfair words against God and the other is untruthful words against someone else. Then I read Matthew 12.31. In a nutshell, Jesus says that slander is a forgivable sin, but slander against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. So they go together after all.

Now let’s look at the most scholarly, and recent of the translations I want to highlight, the New Revised Standard Version:

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
Now we really get to test our word power. Notice that lasciviousness became lewdness in the NIV, and now it’s licentiousness. I won’t tire you with the Greek, but all the other places this word appears in the New Testament have to do with sex. So the NRSV is just getting fancy on us, and using yet another five dollar word to express that to be lewd is bad.

Or have they? Licentiousness does mean to be sexually unrestrained, or lewd, but it also has a couple of wider meanings to note: unrestrained by law or general morality; going beyond customary or proper bounds or limits; disregarding rules. Well, that just changes everything. Making a rude or suggestive statement is one thing, but the latest translation wants to expand it to include on the great curses of or time: exceptionalism.

What is it? Exceptionalism, is the abiding sense that the regular rules don’t apply to you. I’m sure you’ve met these people. They jump the queue at the supermarket. They have more than eight items in the express line. They make that u-turn north of the 401 on Weston Road (wait, that’s me). Regardless, those cursed with exceptionalism have gained a place among the terrible sins listed in Mark 7, all because the some scholars want to inprove our vocabulary. All because licentiousness is on the list.

There is one word on the list I want to take issue with, but before I do it I must stop ignoring the context of the list itself (sloth?). Jesus and his disciples have stopped doing the handwashing required under the law, and some of the religious leaders take note. Jesus then calls them hypocrites, something he did often, and cited a fairly complex point in law involving a specific offering that meant you didn’t need to support needy parents. Needless to say, the conversation ends there, and Jesus proceeds to make his summary to the disciples, and that summary includes our list.

His overall theme is defilement, that being rendered unclean has less to do with the state of your hands are more to do with the state of your heart. Yes, pollution could enter the body in a variety of ways, but the real pollution is what leaves the mouth. For from the mouth can come all sorts of evil, evil that betrays the true state of our heart, the seat of who we truly are.

The word I take umbridge with (that’s umbridge as in suspicion, not Prof. Umbridge of Harry Potter fame) is folly. Two of three versions settle on folly instead of foolishness, but I think I reject the word altogether. Here Jesus is highlighting the heart of what makes us human, that is our foolishness.

Maybe it’s time for some quotes:

Albert Einstein: Before God we are all equally wise--and equally foolish.
William Shakespeare: Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.
Tiger Woods: Money and fame made me believe I was entitled. I was wrong and foolish.

Thanks, Tiger, for making my point about exceptionalism.

So if Einstein is right, that we are all equally wise and foolish before God, then Jesus has planted a giant trap for all of us. You see, we can read such a list and think to ourselves, nope, nope, not really, nope, no more than others, definitely no, not since noon, and so on. We don’t really see ourselves in the list. And so it would seem Jesus is talking about some other people, the people we don’t hang out with much anyway.

Then along comes foolishness. Specifically our foolishness, the foolishness that just now you are picturing in your mind’s eye and thinking “what an idiot, what was I thinking?” And if you are human, and reside of this planet, that likely descibes your every day. Say something foolish, do something foolish, have foolish thoughts, and the pattern repeats. We cannot escape our foolishness, beginning with the sense that we don’t belong on the naughty list. Because we do.

Call it the great equalizer. We begin to create a space between the people over there who are a great disappointment to God, and ourselves, the ones God loves. Then Jesus says wait, if you are foolish, and you are foolish, then don’t be so quick to condemn the others. If you want to be quick, be quick to forgive, because God is quick to forgive, even when we can’t.

And for that, we say thanks be to God. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 3:46 PM