Reflection of the Week - 31 August 2021

Posted Aug 31, 2021 in Faith

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Isn’t it funny that you can eat a delicious meal and yet, if you get sick and it comes back up an hour later it’s foul and somewhat disgusting! Same food. Changed. Even if you don’t get sick it’s still rather yukky when it comes out the other end a while later.

You think that’s a bit potty-mouthed for a Bible study? Jesus himself didn’t pull any punches. In verse 18 he explains to the disciples who, as so often, don’t quite get it, ‘Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’

It is easy enough to take in good stuff; we come to church, we read our Bibles, we pray, we listen to fabulous sermons and even play Christian music … somehow over the hours that follow, the good stuff then gets changed as it passes through us.

The going to church can become self-righteous ‘I’m better than him/her,’ when we see our neighbour washing their car instead. The reading our Bibles becomes an exercise in head-knowledge without it applying to our hearts. The praying becomes a shopping list to a vending machine God who must do our will or suffer our doubts of his power or benevolence.

The sermons are forgotten or, worse, picked apart over Sunday lunch.

It is not that people should not go to church or read the Bible or pray, but if that is all we do – just do them, not live them, then we are missing the whole point of the doing.

We do not do the ‘right’ stuff so that we can become right with God; it is the other way around. We become right with God because of Jesus, and out of that right-being, grows the right-doing.

There is no point just going through the motions of being a Christian if you do not know Christ.

(Adapted from: https://reflectionary.org/2015/08/26/mark-71-8-14-15-21-23/)

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