Pretty as a Picture; Ugly as Sin
And [Jesus] said, “What comes out of a person is
what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts,
sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit,
sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from
within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:20-23).
Grace to
you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
Oscar
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is
a thought provoking tale that plays on the difference between what is on the
inside of a man versus what is seen on the outside.
An artist
named Basil Hallward meets a young man named Dorian Gray. Impressed by Gray’s
beautiful physical appearance, Hallward paints a picture of him. A friend of
Basil’s named Lord Henry Wotton promotes a worldview that beauty and sensual
desire are the most important things in life. Falling under the influence of
this philosophy, Dorian wrestles with the harsh reality that his beauty will one
day fade and thinks aloud that if only the picture could age instead of
himself, he would sell his soul. A Faustian bit of magic grants this request, with
the caveat that the picture will not only age instead of Gray, but also take on
the changes in appearance for all the evil acts the man commits.
Dorian Gray
therefore goes through year after year of life looking perfect and beautiful on
the outside, while his picture becomes hideous and disfigured, the embodiment
of all the evil within him. He remains “pretty as a picture” while the picture
becomes “ugly as sin.” Only in the end, as a distraught Dorian stabs the
picture trying to cover the evidence of his own depravity, does he become the
picture, dying with a knife through his own sin-filled heart, and leaving
behind his own twisted corpse, a final hideous representation of his own sins.
The
connection to the text is clear: the evil that is on the inside of each of us doesn’t
show itself at first, but is eventually revealed in our actions and attitudes.
Even when we can keep it hidden, in the end, judgment brings to light all the
evil we would try to hide.
In our
Gospel Reading last week, Jesus faced the criticism of the Pharisees and the
scribes because He and His disciples did “not walk according to the tradition
of the elders” but ate “with defiled hands.” Jesus took them to task for “teaching
as doctrines the commandments of men,” and “rejecting the commandment of God in
order to establish [their] tradition.”
But Jesus
does not simply refute and criticize the Pharisees, this week He also teaches
the people the correct understanding of God’s will and human nature. Jesus
turns the pharisaical conception of impurity upside down. What defiles a person
is not what goes into a person—what they eat or drink—but the darkness that
lurks within their hearts. You can’t whitewash a tomb and rid it of the
corruption of death it contains inside. A pretty façade won’t fix a building that
is structurally unsound.
We are a “beauty
is skin deep” culture that too often judges value by appearance. But even worse
is how we judge sin. Our nature is to focus on external sin rather than on
internal sin—the outward actions rather the source.
We are
much like the Pharisees in focusing on external sins of others rather than recognizing
and repenting of the sins that come from within ourselves. We see a married man
hold hands in public with a woman twenty-five years younger, not his wife, and
assume the worst, but we don’t see what’s going on in our hearts when we flip
the remote back to the channel we shouldn’t see. We see a woman flaunting her
furs and jewelry, but we don’t see the envy and greed that surge through our
heart. We see the story in the paper about the latest mass shooting, but we don’t
see how being angry with someone at church is murder too.
What is
inside of us is killing us. We are also those people who may look okay on the
outside but are actually dying on the inside.
The old
radio show The Shadow always began by
asking, “Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
Well, someone knows even better than the Shadow. Jesus pointed out the evil
that lurks in our hearts that we may be able to hide from others. It’s not what
goes into us but what is inside of us that is killing us. We are sinners, by
nature, wicked and rotten to the core.
God looks
into the heart, not to outward behavior. And like a spiritual MRI, Jesus diagnoses
the source of our problem—the condition of our heart: “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out
of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,
adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride,
foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Now, if I’m
not mistaken, Jesus just told you that all of these things come from your heart, and that they defile you. And I also did not hear the word “if”—if these things proceed from your heart
they will defile you. No, our Lord tells us that in fact all of these things
proceed from all of our hearts.
Beginning
with sexual immorality, twelve kinds of evil thoughts and actions are combined
in a dreadful litany of vices. The first six are in the plural form and
describe behaviors; the last six are in the singular and have more to do with
attitudes. These twelve vices, all of which come from within, leave no doubt to
the wretched impurity of the fallen human heart. These things rage first within
the heart and them come out in actions and attitudes.
Dear
Christians, it is essential to our eternal welfare that we understand the
seriousness of our situation. Sin, the transgression—the breaking—of God’s Law,
is not limited to outward sinful acts—the evil things that we’ve done, the good
things we’ve failed to do. You are fooling yourself if you think you’re doing
all right simply because you haven’t killed anyone yet, never had a marital
affair, committed grand theft, or perjured yourself in a court of law. All of us
have sinned against God through anger, lust, covetousness, failure to help
another, the list goes on and on. Jesus looks into the hearts of man and sees
that nothing proceeds but sin and iniquity. This has been the case for all men
since the birth of Cain and Abel.
Now, the
world around us likes to put in its own two cents about the goodness or
badness, if you will, of mankind. One popular notion is that man is basically
good, and that it’s the evil found in society that corrupts him. If we just fix
society, then people will be free to live out their basically good lives. Another
idea that is popular among Christians is that man is born neutral—that young children
are neither good nor sinful, and their upbringing will determine what kind of
people they are to become.
Scripture,
however, says something else entirely. It tells us that the desires of man’s
heart are only evil continually, that through one man sin came into the world,
and on account of sin, death. Scripture further declares that we are conceived and
born in sin. So much for being basically good!
So, can’t
we do something about it? Knowing that we have original sin, doesn’t that just
mean that we need to try harder?
Well
again, what does Scripture say? It says that we are born dead in our trespasses
and sins, following the course of the world, living in the passions of our
flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind, and were by nature
children of wrath. The last time I checked, dead people can’t do much for
themselves. And even if we could, it’s pretty clear that we would not want to.
And even if we wanted to, Scripture also tells us that the wages of sin is
death, and that one who breaks the minutest detail of law is guilty of breaking
it all. So much for evening the score and making up for our own sin and guilt!
Jesus
points to the condition of our hearts because He wants us to recognize our
fallen nature—that we’re not sinful because we sin, but rather we sin because
we’re sinful. It all begins in the heart, which is sinful and is deserving of
everlasting death even before one is born and breathes air for the first time. Jesus
teaches that people are not defiled by food or things entering the body from
the outside, but rather by their own evil inclinations and sinful behaviors.
This
teaching exposes the uselessness of our own excuse-making and self-justification.
It dismisses our claims that other people and things are to blame for our
shortcomings and failures. It demonstrates the futility of simply trying harder
to not sin and do the right thing.
However,
Jesus does not merely condemn; He also sets free. It takes something completely
outside of you to wash you clean on the inside. God looked into His heart, not yours, to devise a plan
for our salvation. It wasn’t anything inside you that paid for your sins—no good,
pure thoughts of the heart, no outward action that would please the strictest
Pharisee. It was the God of heaven, infinitely above us, completely outside of
us, who came to earth and paid the price for sin: His life on the cross. Look
away from yourselves; look to Jesus up there on the cross; His pure, undefiled,
sinless heart broken, pierced through for our sinful ones.
And then
the Holy Spirit—from outside—comes into our sinful hearts and brings the
cleansing of Jesus’ death. He comes to you in the water of Baptism, which
washes away your sins in a miraculous way. He speaks to you, not in a whisper
from within (our sinful hearts could play all kinds of tricks with that!), but
in God’s external Word—of preaching, of absolution, when you read and study the
Bible—and He declares you pure, holy, and forgiven. And while nothing outside a
person and coming into him can defile you, taking into yourself Jesus’ very
body and blood in the Lord’s Supper does purify you. It brings forgiveness so
real to you that you can taste it.
Through
the means of grace—God’s Word and Sacraments—God creates faith in your hearts. And
a heart of faith is a clean heart, purified of that sin within, and it receives
eternal life. In Christ, you are washed clean of the sin lurking on the inside.
Your heart is no longer ugly as sin, but pretty as a picture—the loving heart
of Christ. Indeed, for Jesus’ sake, you are forgiven for all of your sins.
In the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Unless
otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English
Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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