Following Jesus with Dirty Hands
The trap isn’t just performing religion to look holy. It’s also pretending you’ve outgrown the need for Jesus to meet you in the mess.
Scripture: Mark 7:1–23; Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 23:25–28; Luke 15:11–24
Following Jesus is, on one level, simple enough that a child can do it. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. That’s not a starter version. That’s the whole thing.
But if you’ve been at it for more than a few minutes, you start to notice it can also be challenging. Some of what Jesus said is genuinely puzzling. Did he really mean to pluck out an eye if it causes you to stumble — and if so, why aren’t there more one-eyed Christians? There are real situations in modern life that the writers of Scripture never imagined or directly addressed. And there’s the whole question of following Jesus two thousand years later, in a different culture, surrounded by traditions that have been around so long it’s hard to tell which came from him and which the church added along the way.
Mark 7 is one of the places where Jesus engages exactly that question. And the answer he gives is uncomfortable in both directions.
The setup
Jesus is in Galilee, doing the kind of things he does — healing, casting out demons, feeding crowds with not enough food. A delegation of Pharisees and scribes arrives from Jerusalem. The text doesn’t say it directly, but the way the conversation unfolds suggests they’ve come specifically to confront him.
What they see is Jesus’s disciples eating without first performing a ceremonial hand washing. The objection follows immediately.
Mark pauses to explain to his readers, who are mostly Gentile and unfamiliar with Jewish ritual practice, what’s actually going on: “For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches” (Mark 7:3–4).
Notice what Mark flags. The hand washing is not a command from Scripture. It’s a tradition of the elders — a practice developed over time, codified by religious authorities, and elevated to the status of expected religious behavior.
The washing itself wasn’t about hygiene. It was a ritual purification, performed because contact with Gentiles, with marketplace items handled by Gentiles, with anything outside the boundaries of ritual purity, made a Jewish person ceremonially unclean. The hand washing — done thoroughly, all the way up to the elbow — was the way you got the contact off, the way you reset yourself to ritually clean status before eating.
It started, almost certainly, as a practice with good intentions. Most traditions do. During the Babylonian exile, surrounded by foreign gods and foreign practices, the Jewish people developed elaborate rituals to remind themselves they were called to be holy, set apart for God. The hand washing was one of those reminders — a daily, physical practice that said we belong to God, we are not like the world around us.
By the time of Jesus, that reminder had hardened into a requirement. And the Pharisees who came from Jerusalem had concluded that disciples who didn’t perform the washing were evidence of a teacher who didn’t take holiness seriously.
What Jesus actually says
Jesus doesn’t engage their objection on its own terms. He goes deeper.
He calls them hypocrites and quotes Isaiah back at them: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7:6–7, citing Isaiah 29:13).
Then he gives a specific example. He points to the law of Moses — honor your father and your mother — and contrasts it with a tradition called Corban. Corban allowed a person to dedicate property or money to the temple under an unbreakable vow. Once dedicated, that money was no longer available for ordinary use.
In a culture without social security or retirement plans, where adult children were expected to care for aging parents, this created a loophole. A person could declare their resources Corban — pledged to God — and use that pledge to refuse support to their parents. The money was technically destined for religious purposes. But the actual effect was that aging parents had no claim on it, and the person who’d made the vow could feel righteous about not helping them.
Jesus’s point is sharp. They have made void the word of God by their tradition (Mark 7:13). They have used a religious-sounding rule to get out of an actual command. And this isn’t an isolated case — Jesus says explicitly that this is one of many such things.
The performance of holiness was being used as a way to avoid the substance of it.
Where this lands now
It would be comfortable to read this as a story about people back then. To shake our heads at the Pharisees, conclude they had a problem we don’t have, and move on.
That’s not what the text is doing.
The instinct to substitute religious performance for the actual work of love is not a first-century problem. It’s a human one. And it shows up just as readily in modern Christian life.
The version most people know is the obvious one — religious activity used to construct a sense of righteousness. Showing up at the right things. Saying the right phrases. Volunteering visibly. Being seen at the events. Building an identity around looking like a serious Christian. The interior life lags behind the exterior performance, and the gap gets filled with self-justification: look at all I’m doing for God.
There are subtler versions. Working yourself into the ground for a job, for kids’ activities, for an image of being the kind of person who has it together — and treating the exhaustion as evidence of righteousness. Filling a calendar with church involvement to avoid the harder work of paying attention to the people in your life. Using theological precision as a way to feel superior to people whose lives don’t fit neatly into your categories.
In every version, the move is the same. Outward conformity is performing the work that inward transformation is supposed to do. The traditions are doing what only Jesus can do.
But there’s a second trap
This one is less obvious, and it’s the one I see more often in deconstruction conversations.
You read Jesus’s words about the Pharisees. You realize the religious performance you grew up with was, in significant ways, exactly what he was criticizing. So you throw the whole thing off. The traditions, the practices, the disciplines, the things God’s word actually does say to do — all of it gets discarded along with the performance.
I had a seminary professor who used to joke that Lutherans believe we aren’t saved by our works, and we’ll prove it. We won’t do any.
That’s funny because it’s recognizable. The reaction to performative religion can become its own kind of dodge. If religious activity was the problem, then I’ll have no religious activity, and I’ll feel good about that — and I’ll find a way to feel slightly superior to the people I left behind, because at least I’m not faking it.
That’s still hypocrisy. The heart still doesn’t match the action. The action is just different.
You can’t outsmart the trap by going to the opposite extreme. The opposite of religious performance is not religious neglect. It’s a heart that has actually been changed.
My name is Matthew, and I can be a hypocrite
If we’re honest, this is where the conversation lands. Most of us, most of the time, have some gap between what we appear to be doing and what is actually going on inside.
Sometimes the gap is in the performative direction — we look more put together than we are. Sometimes it’s in the dismissive direction — we’ve decided we’re past religious performance, but we haven’t done the harder work of letting our hearts be changed, just the easier work of changing our affiliations. Sometimes both at once, in different rooms.
I can be a hypocrite. I bet you can too. That recognition isn’t a problem to be solved by trying harder. It’s the starting point for actually hearing what Jesus is saying.
Because what Jesus is saying isn’t get your heart and your actions to line up by sheer willpower. It’s something deeper and more honest. The problem with the Pharisees wasn’t that they hadn’t tried hard enough. They had tried very hard. The problem was that the trying itself had become the substitute for the thing they were trying to be.
What it actually takes
Jesus continues in Mark 7 by listing what actually defiles a person — what comes out of the heart: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, deceit, envy, slander, pride, foolishness (Mark 7:21–22). His point is that no amount of external washing reaches the place where the actual problem lives.
Which means no amount of external washing solves it either.
The solution Jesus offers throughout the Gospels is not a more rigorous tradition or a more thorough self-examination. It’s himself. The cleansing that matters has been accomplished by Jesus — not by you, not by your performance, not by your having transcended your need for performance. He is the one who reaches the place where the problem actually lives, because he’s the only one who can.
You’re not made right with God by what you do. You’re made right with God by what Jesus has done. That’s the foundation under everything else. Once it’s settled — once you actually believe it — the religious activity stops being a way to construct a self that God will accept, and starts being a response to having already been accepted. The traditions, where they’re useful, become servants of grace rather than substitutes for it. And where they’re not useful, you can let them go without the panic of thinking your standing depends on them.
Coming with dirty hands
The closing image from Mark’s chapter is a kind of permission.
You don’t have to clean up before you come. You don’t have to perform a holiness you don’t possess. You don’t have to pretend the heart matches the appearance. You don’t have to choose between religious performance and religious dismissiveness as your way of being acceptable to God.
You can come with dirty hands.
Luke 15 says it in another image. The prodigal son comes home from a long story of his own failure, with a speech rehearsed and ready, and the father runs to him before the speech is finished. The son is filthy. He’s been with pigs. He hasn’t earned anything. And the father doesn’t wait for him to clean up. He doesn’t wait for the speech. He runs.
That’s the picture Jesus’s whole ministry is pointing toward. The dirt doesn’t disqualify you. The pretending doesn’t help you. The grace runs out to meet you in the mess and brings you home anyway.
The hands stay dirty for a while. The welcome doesn’t wait for them to come clean.
That’s not a license to stop caring about how you live. It’s the foundation that makes actually caring possible — not as a performance, not as a substitute, not as a way of constructing your own righteousness, but as the natural response of someone who’s been welcomed home before they figured out what to say.
