Mark 7

Mark 7 opens with a challenge from the Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem about the disciples' eating with unwashed hands (7:1-5). Mark interrupts his narrative to explain the Jewish handwashing tradition for his Gentile readers — a sign that the community he is writing for is not exclusively Jewish. Jesus quotes Isaiah 29 against them — this people honours me with their lips but their heart is far from me — and introduces the distinction between the commandment of God and the tradition of the elders, giving the Corban practice (declaring a gift to God what might be used to support parents) as the example of a human tradition overriding a divine command. The teaching to the crowd (7:14-23) is the positive statement: nothing that enters a person from outside can defile, because it enters the stomach and passes out; what defiles is what comes out of the heart.

The Syrophoenician woman (7:24-30) is set in Tyre, firmly Gentile territory. Jesus enters a house and wants no one to know, but the woman hears and comes immediately. The exchange — the children's bread and the dogs — has generated more interpretive controversy than almost any other passage in Mark. The dominant reading is that Jesus is testing her faith or following a conventional priority (Israel first) that the woman's answer demonstrates is already overcome; the text leaves the exchange sharp and does not explain it. Her daughter is healed at a distance, on the basis of her word: for this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter. The healing of the deaf man at the Decapolis (7:31-37) is told with more physical detail than any other healing in the gospel: fingers in the ears, touching the tongue with spittle, looking up to heaven with a groan, the Aramaic word. The crowd's amazement — he has done all things well — echoes the creation account in Genesis.