Commentary - Mark 7:1-13

Bird's-eye view

In this pivotal confrontation, Mark presents a head-on collision between two rival authorities: the authority of God's revealed Word and the authority of man's accumulated traditions. The Pharisees and scribes, acting as the self-appointed guardians of Israel's purity, challenge Jesus on a matter of external ritual, unwashed hands. Jesus seizes this opportunity not just to defend His disciples, but to launch a devastating counter-assault on the very foundation of their religious system. He accuses them of hypocrisy, of honoring God with their lips while their hearts are far from Him. He demonstrates how their traditions, far from being a helpful "fence" around the Law, have actually become a tool for nullifying the clear commands of God. Using the stark example of "Corban," Jesus exposes how their pious-sounding rules enabled them to shirk the fundamental duty of honoring their parents. This passage is a masterclass from the Lord on the supremacy of Scripture and a permanent warning against any form of religion that elevates human customs, however well-intentioned, to the level of divine law. It forces the question that every generation must answer: who is the ultimate authority in our lives, God in His Word, or man in his wisdom?

The core issue is the heart. The Pharisees were obsessed with external defilement, but Jesus pivots the conversation to the internal corruption of the human heart. Their meticulous washings were a grand exercise in missing the point. True religion is not about what you do with your hands before a meal, but about what is in your heart before a holy God. By quoting Isaiah, Jesus places them in a long line of covenant-breakers who substitute outward performance for inward reality. This is not a mere debate over liturgical details; it is a fundamental clash of two religions, the religion of God, which demands a new heart, and the religion of man, which is content to wash the outside of the cup.

Outline

Context In Mark

This episode in Mark 7 occurs after a period of intense ministry where Jesus has demonstrated His authority over sickness, demons, nature, and even death. He has fed the five thousand, walked on water, and healed many in Gennesaret. His popularity with the common people is at its peak, which makes Him an ever-increasing threat to the religious establishment in Jerusalem. The arrival of this delegation of Pharisees and scribes "from Jerusalem" is significant. This isn't just a local squabble; this is the official religious authority coming to investigate and challenge this Galilean upstart. Their challenge over ritual purity sets the stage for Jesus to clarify the nature of true purity, which He will elaborate on in the following verses (Mark 7:14-23). This entire chapter serves to draw a sharp line between the kingdom Jesus is inaugurating, a kingdom of the heart, and the corrupt, external-focused kingdom of the scribes and Pharisees.

Key Issues

The Hedge That Strangled the Garden

The rabbinic teachers of Israel had a concept of building a "fence around the Torah." The idea, in its best light, was to create additional rules and regulations to prevent people from even getting close to breaking one of God's actual commandments. If the law says not to work on the Sabbath, they would define "work" with excruciating detail, down to the number of paces you could walk or whether you could save a life. The problem is that the hedge, which was supposed to protect the garden of God's law, grew so thick and thorny that it choked out the very plants it was meant to protect. Worse, the gardeners began to pay more attention to the hedge than to the garden. They became experts in hedge-trimming, while the fruit of justice, mercy, and faith withered on the vine. Jesus comes into this overgrown mess with a divine machete. He is not attacking the law of God; He is attacking the traditions that had usurped the law of God. He is cutting down the hedge so that people can once again see the beautiful, life-giving law that stands at the center.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1-2 And the Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around Him when they had come from Jerusalem, and had seen that some of His disciples were eating their bread with defiled hands, that is, unwashed.

The battle lines are drawn immediately. The opposition is not a rag-tag group of local malcontents; this is an official delegation from the seat of power, Jerusalem. They come with institutional authority. And what is the great sin they uncover? Not theft, not adultery, not blasphemy, but a breach of ceremonial etiquette. The issue is not hygiene. The word "defiled" is a technical, religious term. The disciples were eating with "common" hands, hands that had not undergone the prescribed ritual washing. For the Pharisees, this was a serious infraction, a failure to maintain the boundary between the holy and the profane.

3-4 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash themselves; and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.)

Mark, writing for a likely Gentile audience, pauses to provide some necessary cultural background. He explains that this isn't some personal quirk of these particular Pharisees. This was a widespread custom, a central part of their religious identity. They had a whole system of washings. There was a specific way to wash before meals, another, more thorough washing if you had come from the marketplace where you might have bumped into a Gentile, and a whole host of regulations for purifying utensils. Mark identifies the source of these practices not as the Law of Moses, but as the tradition of the elders. This is a crucial distinction. This is man-made religion, passed down from one generation of rabbis to the next.

5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with defiled hands?”

Here is the formal charge. Notice they don't ask why the disciples break the law of God, but why they don't follow the tradition of the elders. In their minds, the two had become equivalent. To disrespect their tradition was to disrespect God. They are essentially asking Jesus, "By what authority do you and your followers disregard our established religious practices?" They are testing His allegiance. Will He submit to their authority, or will He defy it?

6-7 And He said to them, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE COMMANDS OF MEN.’

Jesus's response is a cannon shot. He doesn't get bogged down in a debate about hand-washing techniques. He goes straight to the heart of the matter and identifies the root sin: hypocrisy. And He does so by appealing to a higher authority, the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 29:13). He essentially tells them, "You are not a new problem. God diagnosed your condition centuries ago." Their religion was all lip-service. They had the external vocabulary of worship, but their hearts were distant, cold, and unmoved. Their worship was in vain, useless, because it was built on the wrong foundation. They had taken the "commands of men," their traditions, and elevated them to the status of "doctrines," divine requirements. This is the essence of false religion.

8 Leaving the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.”

Jesus now states the principle in the clearest possible terms. It's a zero-sum game. They had to make a choice, and they chose wrong. In order to grasp hold of their human traditions, they had to let go of God's clear commandments. It's not that the traditions were just a harmless supplement to the law; they were a replacement for it. They had traded divine gold for human dross. This is a direct assault on their claim to be the faithful guardians of the law.

9 And He was also saying to them, “You are good at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.

The language here is biting and sarcastic. "You are good at this." "You have a real knack for it." He is saying they have perfected the art of nullifying God's word. It's not an accidental oversight; it is their consistent, skillful practice. They have made a science out of disobedience, all under the guise of piety. The charge is that they actively and cleverly reject the plain meaning of God's law so that they can establish their own.

10-12 For Moses said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER’; and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH’; but you say, ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever you might benefit from me is Corban (that is to say, given to God),’ you no longer leave him to do anything for his father or his mother;

Now Jesus provides Exhibit A for His prosecution. He moves from the general principle to a specific, outrageous example. He quotes the Fifth Commandment, a foundational law concerning the basic structure of society. God's law requires honoring parents, which certainly includes providing for them in their old age. The penalty for cursing a parent was death, showing how seriously God takes this obligation. But the scribes had created a loophole. A man could declare his assets "Corban," meaning a gift dedicated to God. By doing this, he could tell his needy parents, "Sorry, I can't help you. All the money you might have benefited from is dedicated to the temple." It was a way to use a religious vow to escape a clear moral duty. And the scribes, with their tradition, upheld the vow over the commandment. They allowed a man to break a clear command of God in order to keep a foolish, self-serving vow.

13 thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.”

Here is the verdict. Their tradition doesn't just "weaken" or "obscure" the word of God; it invalidates it. It renders it null and void, without authority. They have effectively erased the Fifth Commandment from the books and replaced it with their own scribbled footnote. And Jesus adds that this is not an isolated case. "You do many things such as that." Their entire system was riddled with this kind of corruption. The Corban rule was just one symptom of a terminal disease: the elevation of man's word over God's.

Application

The temptation to domesticate God's Word with our traditions is as potent today as it was in the first century. We may not have rules about washing pots and pans, but we have our own unwritten codes, our own denominational distinctives, our own cultural expectations that we can easily begin to treat as though they were handed down from Sinai. We can become so focused on our particular "way of doing things", whether in worship style, or political affiliation, or parenting methods, that we neglect the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith.

This passage forces us to bring all our traditions, personal and corporate, and lay them at the feet of Scripture. We must ask the hard question: does this practice or belief illuminate God's Word, or does it invalidate it? Does it lead to a heart that is closer to God, or does it simply produce a mouth that is good at saying the right things? The Pharisees thought their traditions made them holy, but Jesus said their traditions made their worship vain. The only way to avoid this is to cultivate a deep and abiding love for the Word of God itself, and to be ruthlessly willing to discard any human tradition that obscures its power or nullifies its commands.

Ultimately, the problem of the Pharisees was a heart problem, and the only solution for a corrupt heart is the gospel. Jesus didn't come to give us a new and better set of traditions. He came to give us a new heart. He came to be the perfect keeper of God's law, fulfilling it in every detail, not just externally but internally. Our righteousness is not found in keeping a set of rules, however biblical they may seem, but in being clothed in the perfect righteousness of Christ. When we are secure in His finished work, we are set free from the hypocritical lip-service of the Pharisees and enabled to worship God in spirit and in truth.