Last night I was talking to friends and family on facebook and that old thing the telephone because the clinical day had included aggression, abuse, and a smashed window. You cope…. and then the adrenalin continues to run throughout the night and you have difficulty getting to sleep.

And in the back of my mind I was thinking about yesterday’s post. I called Al Sharpton a slave owner — in the hope that it would draw attention to the immorality of speaking for a group you will do nothing to help.

I was confrontational. But the website was down, there was no instalanche, and GOMI has not come calling. It appears that the net is back up today. And the text talks about confrontation.

Mark 7:1-23

¹Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, ²they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. ³(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; ⁴and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) ⁵So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” ⁶He said to them, ”Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
⁷   in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
⁸You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

⁹Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! ¹⁰For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ’Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ ¹¹But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God) — ¹²then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, ¹³thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

14Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

17When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, 19since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

One of the guys in the gym is a tax accountant. He says that in the USA the black letter law (the law itself and the regulations) is very detailed and precise, and keeping within that black letter is required: but no one knows exactly what that is. NZ law is complex but simpler, because the principles of the law matter.

That makes things simpler for most people (who have very simple accounts: wage earners in NZ do not even need to put in a tax return) but more complicated for people who try to be clever, because the regulations will be expunged by the court it the spirit of the law has been broken.

Jesus is pointing out the same thing. The Pharisees were keeping the letter of the law, but the spirit was long gone. In the same way, the race hustlers (Al Sharpton, Hone Harawira and their ilk) do not have slaves. But they hold people in oppression — and although the letter of the law is adhered to the effect is similar.

Jesus confronted evil. So should we.

UPDATE
I forgot to add the second half ot the reading. This reinforces the issue. We are not wrong because of the reguulations that we may or may have not broken, nor are we justified by the regulations we have kept. We are evil because of that which is within us.

Our fallen nature, the desires of our lizard brain, give us a tendency to do wrong. And thus we need salvation.