Responding the the Culture

After He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man. 16[“If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”] Mark 7:14-1 NASB

What Jesus is doing here is not only providing a theological argument, He is hitting right at the heart of the Jewish culture, and at a belief that mostly everyone in this crowd adhered to. The majority of the people hearing these words of Jesus would wholeheartedly disagree with His statement that nothing from the outside can defile you. Some people say that Jesus never responded to the culture of the day. That’s not true. Jesus is teaching against something that has been established as a pillar of truth in the Jewish culture for centuries, that what you eat or put into your body can remove you from being in a right standing with God. “Wash your hands, watch what you put into your body, and abstain from certain foods because those things will defile you and make you lose the favor of God in your life.” Why didn’t someone tell Jesus: “Don't worry about all of that stuff, just preach the gospel.”? Because Jesus was addressing a massive stumbling block that kept people from seeing and hearing the message of the gospel of the kingdom. The fact is that these people were hearing Jesus' words through the filter of the religious culture of their day. Jesus was teaching them, they were listening, and then they were trying to reconcile the teachings of the Pharisees with the teachings from Jesus. They may have thought that they could reconcile both ideas, but Jesus is bringing new wine that doesn't fit into old wine skins. So, Jesus is throwing a seed of truth into the minds of the people which is causing their foundational truth's and beliefs to be shaken. There is no reconciling these two belief systems, and Jesus is not offering that as an option. 
This same thing is happening today where the church must address things in the culture that are stumbling blocks for people coming to faith in Christ. Things like: wrong ideas of who God is, wrong ideas regarding sin, and wrong ideas regarding ourselves, sexual identity, marriage, abortion etc. We must address these things because these are strongholds and fortresses in the mind of our hearers that must be destroyed. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that "the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they may not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ". How is he blinding the minds of people? By building strongholds of wrong thinking into their minds that have grown into fortresses.
Above all else, and at the root of all sin, we must primarily address the greatest sin in the world which is the sin of independence. Every thing that we address comes back to this one sin: "I can live my life without God." This is why the first call of Christ is always a self-denying call. It always has been and it always will be. You cannot be His disciple if you do not deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Him (Luke 9:23). In the self-denying call of the gospel, the stumbling blocks that we have in our mind are removed. Why? Because we are denying the one thing that allows those stumbling blocks to remain, and the one thing that allowed them to be raised up in the first place: Ourselves. 
The churches proclamation is the gospel of Jesus Christ; as we proclaim it, we will encounter things we must deal with. Let us be ready and prepared.  Our mission is not completed through the arm of the flesh, it is done by the Spirit of God moving through the church of Christ . 

Questions to Consider: 

1. Jesus is confronting a popular religious and cultural concept by these statements He is making about how what we put into our physical bodies does not defile us. How important is it that the church address issues that are confronting the culture of today? 

2. Mark adds that Jesus was declaring all foods clean by these statements. Why is this a big deal for a Jewish community that Jesus is speaking to? Read Acts 10:9-16 where God confirms the same thing to Peter in a vision.