The first 23 verses of Mark 7 tell us about Jesus’ confrontation with a group of scribes and Pharisees that had come from Jerusalem to observe Him. They heard Him teach, they saw Him work miracles and then they confronted Him as to why His disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate bread. “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashed hands?” The question was one of accusation and not interest; they implied that Jesus was teaching His followers to break their traditions which they held to be equal to the Word of God. This was a serious charge and ultimately was, for them, the proof that Jesus was not sent from God and was not to be followed. After their accusation Jesus revealed that the issue was not His keeping their traditions but their replacing God’s Word with their own, that they had elevated their traditions to a place in which they didn’t just stand alongside the Word of God but in many ways had surpassed it. He told them that Isaiah had written of them when He said “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Traditions are not wrong of themselves but they have to be seen as what they are; man’s ideas of how we can bless God and make Him known, not God’s commandments as to how He can be reached or pleased. Jesus went from responding to the Pharisees accusation to teaching the multitudes that had continued to follow them. What Jesus did, while possibly not understood at the time, was He began to take the yoke of traditions off of man, He revealed to them that “there is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come of him, those are the things that defile a man.” He changed all of the attention of man from their rituals and traditions to the condition of their hearts. Just as He would do in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus began to teach that “surpassing righteousness” is not about the actions men can see but rather from the heart, which God alone looks at. After yet another day of controversy, opposition and revelation Mark then tells us that Jesus left that area and went to find a place to rest.