It’s amazing how fast kids can get dirty! One minute they and their clothes are clean and spotless; the next minute they’ve just spilled juice and food all over themselves. Or you take them outside to play, and it’s almost as if they attract dirt. You turn your back on them for just a few minutes, and before you know it, they’re playing in the mud, rolling around in the grass, kicking up dust, or throwing sand at each other. With my little three-year-old nephew, if there’s even one little puddle lying around, he’ll fall into it. It’s almost like some invisible force pulls him in like a tractor beam. He can’t seem to avoid it.
It’s virtually impossible to keep kids clean. You can try by keeping them away from any and all sources of contamination. If you could do that, then they might possibly stay cleaner longer. But then again, diapers must still be changed at least four or five times a day. If children aren’t dirtied from without, they’ll be dirtied from within.
And that’s the way it is with us, too, in a spiritual sense. There are many things that can get us dirty before God. All sin defiles us in His eyes. The problem is that by nature we believe that, like children, the more we avoid playing in the mud, the cleaner we’ll be. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” as the saying goes. The cleaner you look, the cleaner you are, the more God is pleased with you.
Such was the belief of the Pharisees in today’s Gospel text. God had in fact told His people in the O.T. that certain foods were off limits to them. Certain creatures could not be eaten, because God had declared them unclean and detestable. If anyone did eat of them, they would defile themselves before God. The Pharisees, however, went one step further and taught that one got dirty simply by coming into contact with such foods, and not with the food alone, but also with the unclean people who sold and ate such food. So, they came up with the tradition of washing their hands after visiting the marketplace and before they ate any food that was bought there. Like parents who try to remove all sources of contamination from their children, so these Pharisees tried to avoid all contact with anything that might soil them spiritually, washing themselves if and when such contact occurred.
And again, this is the way we all think by nature. If it works in the natural world, it must also work in the spiritual world: If we avoid playing in the mud, we won’t get dirty. Now, we don’t have to worry about certain foods that are off limits anymore; Jesus has declared all foods clean for His people today. But He hasn’t abolished the 10 commandments. He hasn’t said that it’s now all right to sin. So, instead of avoiding certain foods, many of us now operate on the notion that the more we avoid certain sins, the cleaner we’ll be before God. In doing this, however, we forget about the filth that comes from ourselves. In our attempt to avoid certain sources of contamination, we are ignorant of the source of all sources of contamination - our sinful heart. According to Jesus, our heart is a cesspool of filth, producing things like evil thoughts, sexual immortality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and yes, even foolishness. Try to avoid all the sin you want; you will never be able to avoid the sin that wells up from within you. Try your best to get clean before God; the fact is you are dirty no matter how clean you might look. A dirty mop cannot clean itself. It’s not that we get dirty from things we come into contact with; we are dirty to begin with, getting other things dirty as they come into contact with us.
We are the mud puddles ourselves. And like children who seem to enjoy getting dirty, so we often enjoy frolicking around in the mud of our sin. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll have to admit that though in most areas of our lives we try to live clean and sin-free, there’s always that one mud puddle that we especially love to play in, something to which we return over and over again, as we feel irresistibly drawn to it. Oh, no, we may not have murdered anyone or stolen anything. But we like to indulge in evil thoughts and sensuality. And so, not only are we not clean before God, but we don’t even want to get clean (at least, not all the way clean; maybe just mostly clean).
The trouble is, before God to be just a little bit dirty is to be completely dirty. There’s no such thing as being only partially defiled before God. You’re either defiled, or you’re not. And here Jesus tells us that we are completely dirty, unclean, and filthy. Our heart is contaminated with sin; it’s been that way from our conception, a condition we’ve inherited from Adam and Eve, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t clean ourselves; any attempts to do that just gets us dirtier. Instead, we must be cleansed by someone else. That someone else is Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the only human being to come into this world with a clean heart, untainted by sin. The contamination of original sin was not passed on to Him, conceived as He was by the Holy Spirit and not by a sinful man. Jesus is God in the flesh and therefore cannot sin. Though tempted to sin, He overcame those temptations with the Word of God and perfectly obeyed His Father’s commandments. This He did not for Himself, but for you and me, so that He might give His perfect obedience to us. That obedience was given to us in our Baptism. That is where He washed and cleansed us of our sin. That’s where the stain of all these things that Jesus lists as coming from our sinful heart was removed and we were clothed with the spotless garment of Christ’s righteousness. Not only that, but there we were also given a new heart, a clean heart, which is what David prays for in Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me...” Through Baptism God has made us new creatures, as the Apostle Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” As far as God is concerned, you are clean and undefiled as you stand before Him in Christ; He does not see all these things that come from your sinful heart, because Christ has “cleansed His Church by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present her to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such things, so that she might be holy and without blemish.”
Yet, though we stand before God holy and blameless as new creatures in Christ, in this life we still carry around the old Adam that loves to get dirty and roll around in the mud of sin. At one and the same time the Christian is both a sinner and a saint; he lives with his old defiled heart inherited from Adam and with the new heart given him in Christ. According to your new heart, you struggle in this life against the desires of your old heart. But often times it appears that the old heart has its way over the new, and the feeling of defilement returns. You don’t need to despair, however, because the Holy Spirit continues to cleanse you daily with the blood of Jesus and crucifies that old heart, drowning it in the waters of your Baptism, so that you don’t stand before God defiled and therefore subject to His wrath.
The Gospel is that the One who was not defiled allowed Himself to get defiled with your sin, so that you might get clean. In Jesus’ case, it’s not what came from His heart that defiled Him, but what came from our heart that did. Jesus, who was not dirty, got Himself dirty in the waters of His Baptism, not simply with the mud of the river, but also with the mud of your sins, so that He might take them to the cross and wash them away there with His blood. He who was in heaven and had never come into contact with anything unclean, came down from heaven and took on human flesh, in order to allow Himself to be touched by us who are unclean. Unlike the Pharisees who guarded themselves against touching anything unclean, Jesus touched us, thereby transferring our uncleanness to Him, so that He might remove it from us. Throughout the Gospel accounts we constantly see Jesus touching people, taking away their sins, taking away their ailments, and then eating with them at their tables. Having received His cleansing touch ourselves in our Baptism, our sins and ailments too have been taken away and we are granted not only to eat at His Table now, but also in the age to come for all eternity. It’s not what we deserve. We deserve what Jesus experienced on the cross, including not only the physical anguish He suffered, but also the wrath and separation from God that He underwent. When you look at Jesus on the cross, you see what the defilement of your heart deserves, but you also see Jesus taking it upon Himself in your place, so that you might not perish but have eternal life.
So, then, how do we use Jesus in this life now that we’re clean? In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.” In other words, don’t use the cleansing of Christ as an excuse for playing in the mud of sin. Don’t say to yourself, “Oh, it’s okay now for me to live out the lusts of my heart, since Jesus will purify me.” In his first letter to the Corinthian congregation Paul writes, “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” You were bathed in the blood of Jesus. Don’t use that cleansing as a license to sin. Still, you need to realize that you sin every day, no matter how much you might try to avoid it. You and I are both like my little nephew, who always seems to be pulled into dirty puddles like someone caught in a tractor beam. Don’t despair when you find that that happens to you. You will always remain a sinner in this life - a cleansed sinner, a justified sinner, but a sinner nonetheless. But you live as a new creation under the mercy of God in Christ, who daily washes and cleanses you of all sin.
And that’s what you’re doing here today - receiving again the cleansing that God gives you in the blood of Jesus. Here the washing of Baptism continues to go on as God absolves you of your sins. Here your dirty garments are changed, and you’re given the clean garments of Christ. And here you are given to eat of the most holy food of Christ’s body and blood in His holy Supper, by which He conveys His holiness to you. Your defilement has been taken away, you’ve been given a clean heart. Your sins have been eliminated, and you stand before God holy, righteous, and blameless for Christ’s sake. Amen.