Matthew 15:1 - 20
Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”
3 Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’[a] and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’[b] 5 But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ 6 they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
8 “‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’[c]”
but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’[c]”
10 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. 11 What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
12 Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”
13 He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. 14 Leave them; they are blind guides.[d] If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
15 Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”
16 “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. 17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? 18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20 These are what defile a person;but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”
Questions:
ReplyDelete- Did the pharisees have a reasonable question? Why was Jesus' answer so harsh?
- Did Jesus just nullify all cleanliness laws then and there?
- Why were the disciples concerned that Jesus offended the Pharisees?
https://bible.org/seriespage/22-jesus-and-traditions-elders-matthew-151-20 says:
ReplyDeleteMatthew omits Mark’s interpretation that Jesus made all foods clean.
The men who bring the accusation are from Jerusalem, meaning that they were the best trained and most highly respected teachers in the land. They also had a good deal of zeal to be this far away from home. Their appearance here must be a deputation or mission of some kind. Whatever the reason for their presence, they were the source of the most direct confrontation and personal attack that Jesus had to endure.
Their attack came because of the activities of the disciples (but see, the disciples were doing what Jesus did [Luke 11:37-41]).
The point of their accusation is telling: Jesus and his disciples had violated the “traditions of the elders” (Mark: “tradition of men”), as if those traditions were now authoritative and could be sinned against. These traditions were still oral in Jesus’ days, but were written down a couple of centuries later. The traditions about washing would be found in the tractate called Yadayim or “Hands” (see Mishnah Yadayim 2:1). What this means is that the traditions of men had been elevated to the status of Scripture, so that one could be guilty of violating them.
The reply of Jesus is more a counterattack than a reply to their question. He first accuses them of breaking the commands of God in order to keep their traditions. This puts the issue back to them—they were the sinners, not Jesus and his disciples, because they had broken God’s commands and not just some teachings of elders.
If because of greed, for example, a man did not want to help support his aging parents, he would announce “Korban.” That would mean the money was frozen, and could not be used for taking care of the parents. Thus, they could use their traditions to get out of taking care of their father and mother (which the Law required). Then, they might find a way of nullifying the vow so they ended up keeping the money. A clever tradition of swearing or taking oaths had grown up as a way around a clear cut teaching of the word of God.
This, Jesus says, is hypocritical, and thus they fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. They said all the right things, giving the impression they were pious; but their hearts and wills were not obedient at all (they would not honor father and mother, for one example).
https://bible.org/seriespage/22-jesus-and-traditions-elders-matthew-151-20 continued:
ReplyDeleteThe Old Testament had a lot to say about clean and unclean. Everything was classified as either clean or unclean, and what was unclean was not allowed in the temple. So defilements, diseases, sins, contaminations, discharges and the like made a person unclean. The Pharisees were rigid in observing the laws of cleanness as well as the sabbath observances and the tithes. In the process they were so concerned with the outward observance of these defilements and contacts with things unclean that they failed to realize that the real defilement was sin. The diseases, discharges, and defilements that made a person unclean were things in life that were the result of the presence of sin and death. To observe the outward rituals and miss the connection with sin was a waste of time. The real source of uncleanness was the human heart, as Jesus will say shortly. To harbor sin (such as hatred and murder for Jesus) and wash hands with ritual washing was hypocritical.
In essence, then, the sayings of Jesus here agree with Mark’s conclusion in his account that Jesus was saying all foods were clean. The ceremonial laws, including the dietary laws, were given to keep Israel distinct from the nations, but in the coming of the Messiah the believers from the nations would be united with believing Israel in the new covenant. Here Jesus would address the real source of uncleanness, which got to the heart of the matter. They were holding to externals and missed the real spirit of the law and the reason for the washing.
The people held these teachers in high regard, and so the disciples were worried that Jesus was too hard on them. They wanted to be exactly clear on what Jesus had said and meant that offended them; and Jesus wanted them to be clear on the unreliability of the Pharisees’ teaching. The basic issue was their misunderstanding of the Law—they dwelt on the externals as the source of uncleanness and did not realize that the source of the defilements was sin in the world, so uncleanness originated in the human heart.
(to be continued)
https://bible.org/seriespage/22-jesus-and-traditions-elders-matthew-151-20 continued:
ReplyDeleteIn short: the human heart produced sin, and sin brought the curse, and the curse brought disease, defilement and death. God legislated rituals to deal with the defilements and the death as a way of reminding Israel of the fact that they were defiled by sin. And Jesus often healed people as a way of showing that He could deal with the cause of the sickness, sin, as well as the results.
To answer the disciples Jesus used a couple of images. The first was that any plant that the Father had not planted would be rooted up (v. 13). Jesus was not saying that false teaching would be rooted out, but false teachers. In other words, the Pharisees are not part of God’s planting.
The second image is that the teachers of Israel saw themselves as guides for the blind. The leaders were blind because they failed to understand the Scriptures that they taught, and so majored on externals and missed the reality. And, since they were so weak in spiritual understanding, they also failed to perceive who Jesus was and failed to follow Him—that is the ultimate spiritual blindness (see John 5:39-40). Therefore, as leaders they will lead people away from Christ, because they do not rightly discern the Scriptures.
The external laws of cleanness and uncleanness if properly understood to reflect the effects of sin in the world were helpful for a devout Israelite to avoid the impurities as a way of following a life of purity. But as is so often the case, it was easier to focus on the external rituals and forget the spiritual reality behind them. Jesus is teaching that true religion must deal with the true nature of men and women, not just the outer performances. The teachers would have known this if they had been concerned about inner purity.
https://bible.org/seriespage/22-jesus-and-traditions-elders-matthew-151-20 continued:
ReplyDeleteJesus finally ends this teaching by saying that eating with unwashed hands does not make a man unclean, but what comes from the heart does. This is a radical departure from not only the traditions of the elders but also the details of the Law. But Jesus has already made it clear (see Matt. 5:21-48) that He has fulfilled the Law, and therefore whatever the laws teach must be determined by their relationship to Him. Not only had Jesus rejected the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law as the authentic teachers of his day, but he had assumed that role for himself—he is the teacher. But now that the Messiah has come and fulfilled the Law, every detail of the Law has to be seen in that way, in the light of the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Him. And that usually means that the external regulations of the Law are no longer binding, but what it revealed about God and about His will are. After all, the spirit of the Law was to develop righteousness, not to provide a number of binding external regulations. Jesus was more concerned that people understand that to develop righteousness they would have to be transformed in their hearts so that they would produce righteousness and not uncleanness. Washing hands, therefore, ceased to be a significance step in that direction when the heart was unclean. And the only way that people could be transformed in their hearts was to turn to Jesus as Lord and Savior and find forgiveness. But the Jewish teachers would have none of that.
One clear lesson, then, for this passage would concern external rituals. Ritual without the reality of faith is worthless.
A second lesson is that there is a real danger to replace the true meaning of the word of God (the letter and the spirit of it) with traditions. We are more concerned that people might violate our man-made rules for the running of the church, the institutions of baptism and communion, or the set of rules that our particular group follows in the name of holiness, than we are about righteousness. We are more concerned about which way to stand at the communion rail than we are about meeting the needs of people in the community. If we are not careful, these traditions quickly achieve the level of canonicity, and we might even forget what the word of God actually says about some of those things we do.
I am not saying ritual and tradition should be shelved; I am saying, however, they must retain their proper place.
http://www.crivoice.org/biblestudy/bbmatt12.html says:
ReplyDeleteScribes were people skilled in reading and interpreting the Law and in writing their conclusions. The Pharisees were the major religious group in Palestine at that time. They were a lay group committed to the study of Scripture while most of the Sadducees were of priestly families devoted to caring for the temple and its worship. It is possible that the Greek construction should be translated, "Pharisees who were scribes," since most scribes were Pharisees.
Some scholars have questioned whether the religious leadership in Jerusalem would have been interested enough in Galilee to send an investigating group. However, the ministry of Jesus was making even more of an impression than the ministry of John the Baptist had and John 1:19-25 indicates that John had been investigated by representatives of the religious leaders of Jerusalem.
Exodus 30:17-21 required the priests to wash their hands and feet before entering the tabernacle. Leviticus 15:11 implies that washing one’s hands after becoming ritually unclean kept the uncleanness from being transmitted to another. However, nothing in the Old Testament suggests that washing of hands was necessary before eating.
The scribes and Pharisees correctly call their concern a "tradition" of the elders. In order to make sure that no commandment (positive or negative) of Scripture was broken the scribes were in the process of developing oral traditions that gave specific applications of biblical laws and detailed instructions on how they should be obeyed in every conceivable circumstance. The evolution of these Jewish ritual traditions is difficult to trace with precision, but it appears that the requirement to wash one’s hands before eating had only recently developed. Furthermore, it was only required of scribes and rabbis; it was not required of "ordinary" people. Technically, neither Jesus nor his disciples had been trained as scribes or rabbis and so they would not have been required to wash their hands before eating. However, the Pharisees appeared to take Jesus as a legitimate rabbi and certainly the followers of Jesus did not want to protest that assumption. Since a rabbi was responsible for the behavior of his disciples, the question was fairly put to Jesus.
Jesus’ response was swift and strong. He made three essential points. First, he charged the Pharisees with violating the commandment of God for the sake of their tradition. Second, he gave an example of their violation of the Law and third, he accused them of being hypocrites and used a quotation from Isaiah to condemn them for giving only lip service to God.
http://www.crivoice.org/biblestudy/bbmatt12.html continued:
ReplyDeleteThe first charge was that the Pharisees’ traditions did not accomplish their stated goal of helping people keep the Law. Rather they actually led to violation of the Law and were, in fact, a technique for avoiding parts of the Law one did not like. He introduced the quotations by the expression, "God said, . . " This is much stronger (in Matthew 15:4) than in the parallel passage in Mark 7:10 which states, "Moses said, . . " The shift in Matthew is important. He wanted his readers to understand that the issue at stake in this passage was not just a difference of opinion about interpretation of the Law as Mark presents it. Rather, the issue at stake is the word of God versus human interpretation.
The Pharisees acknowledged the two commandments that Jesus cited, but they had developed a scheme of interpretation that enabled them to avoid certain duties to aged parents. Using the biblical commands against false oaths (Leviticus 19:12) and requiring keeping of oaths (Numbers 30:2 and Deuteronomy 23:21), they had developed a way to make oaths (or vows) to God that effectively kept them from supporting their parents. The process involved swearing that all one’s resources belonged to God, but of course were available for personal use until death. This meant that they could not give money away to support their aged parents, since that money had been promised to God. The spelling out of this process required a whole chapter of the Mishnah when the oral traditions were committed to writing between A.D. 180 and 200. Jesus concluded that this process had effectively nullified God’s intention in the commandment to honor one’s parents.
Further, he charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy indicating that though they claimed the oral traditions were designed to help people keep the Law, in fact, they were designed to help legal experts (like the Pharisees) break the Law. This first section closes in verses 8 and 9 with a quotation from Isaiah 29:13, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far distant from me. They worship me in vain because they teach human commandments as doctrine." The quotation accomplishes three goals. It accuses the Pharisees of mere "lip" service. It uses Scripture to charge them with replacing God’s word with human traditions. And it introduces the central place of one’s heart in determining the right motivation and the right worship.
http://www.crivoice.org/biblestudy/bbmatt12.html continued:
ReplyDeleteVerses 10-11 are directed to the crowd and give an interpretive principle for Jesus, though it needs to be combined with Matthew 12:34 to be understood properly. The parallel passage in Mark 7:19 declares that Jesus had set aside the Old Testament laws regarding clean and unclean foods. Matthew does not make such a radical statement. Rather, he simply points out that defilement in a matter of what comes out of a person, it is a matter of the heart rather than of the diet.
In verse 12 the disciples come and tell Jesus that his statement had offended the Pharisees. Rather than retracting the statement, Jesus made an even more offensive statement about the Pharisees. He declared that they were not of God and had become blind guides for blind people.
Verse 15 makes it clear that the disciples did not understand Jesus’ point about defilement either. The influence of the Pharisees was so strong that Jesus’ different interpretation of God’s word sounded strange and unusual to them. Jesus declared that eating with unwashed hands and even eating food that did not measure up to all the Pharisees’ expectations would not defile a person. Rather, what comes out of the mouth causes defilement because the mouth expresses the content of one’s heart. Verse 19 provides a sample summary of the kinds of sins that issue from the heart. The list is not exhaustive but representative. The point is that our hearts determine the moral quality of what we say and do. It is in the heart that sin and righteousness ultimately reside.