Defilers and the Kingdom

 Matthew 15:1-20

 

The past couple of weeks have been an important time to consider the nature of political power in our nation. As a democracy we say that this power should reside with the people – each individual having an equal say in choosing who the leaders will be at all levels. But we have all seen how some votes matter more than others. It’s a complicated, messy business, where the ideals of equality and freedom do not work out the way they should. The leaders in a democracy are not always accountable to the people. Important, balanced information may not be readily available for making good decisions. So much happens behind the scenes that we never really hear the truth about. And would-be leaders on all sides often try to assume more power than they should, aided by efforts to make their opponents look bad.

 

We could all probably point out examples of how easily power corrupts. This happens in the religious as well as the political realm. History shows in particular how the mixing of religious and political power has been a toxic combination. Examples range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Islamic State. The Christian church has been at its most corrupt when it has had the most political power.

 

Having power encourages selfish motives, especially directed at holding onto to that power when it is threatened. In Jesus’ day the Pharisees and teachers of the law were powerful people in the Jewish society. People looked to them to determine how to approach and obey God. So Jesus represented a major threat when he came and contradicted their teaching and way of life. Their power and their honor were at stake, so they strongly opposed Jesus.

 

Jesus didn’t come with just a new interpretation of the law. He announced a whole new power structure. He talked about the kingdom of God as though he were the king, in control. In a democracy, the leaders are supposed to be accountable to the people. In a monarchy the people need to be accountable to the king. Jesus announced the kingdom of God, a kingdom “not of this world,” he would later tell Pontius Pilate. Jesus did not become a political leader nor try to exert that type of influence. Instead he would urge his followers to submit to earthly authority, to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Even as he refrained from challenging the corrupt Roman government he definitely asserted his authority in confronting the religious and spiritual powers of his day.

 

The kingdom of God – or the kingdom of heaven, as Matthew commonly refers to it – was a difficult concept for people to grasp. So Jesus spent a lot of time explaining it. Chapter 13 has a particular series of parables describing what the kingdom of heaven is like. It is a kingdom that one joins by faith, not by an accident of birth or as a consequence of human conquest. Faith is the hallmark of this kingdom, and there is a thread of faith that ties together this part of Matthew. What does it mean to have faith in God? For example, take the pearl of great price. When the merchant found this amazing pearl he sold everything he had and bought it. He was willing to take a step of faith – not a small one either. He gave up everything else to be able to enter the kingdom. That is radical faith, a faith that puts God first.

 

The end of chapter 13 describes how Jesus was rejected in his hometown. People took offense at him because he was too familiar. It says that he was not able to do many miracles there “because of their lack of faith.” The people could not get beyond their preconceptions of what a prophet should be like, and that hindered the growth of faith in their hearts.

 

Faith is called into question in Chapter 14 in the death of John the Baptist. We have talked about the crisis of faith that John apparently had in prison. Was Jesus in fact the Messiah? Why wasn’t he acting like a great political leader who would throw off the yoke of Rome? Jesus sent back a message that explained how his kingdom was being established in the lives of individuals: the blind who could see, the lame now walking, and the dead who had been raised. Jesus was doing all these miracles as signs of the kingdom of heaven. He had the power to deliver people from any kind of suffering.

 

So how do you think John felt when his executioner appeared that night with the sword to remove his head? Jesus was going around saving all these other people, why couldn’t he save me? How does one hang onto faith at a time like that? Christians are still being killed today, too, facing that same question. Does God really care? Where is his deliverance? Is he really worthy of my faith?

Further on in chapter 14 we have the story of Jesus walking on the lake. He instructs Peter to walk on the water, too, and Peter sets off, full of faith, but then he looks around, feels afraid, and begins to sink. He calls to Jesus to save him. When Jesus reaches out to catch hold of him Jesus asks, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” The reason Peter began to sink is that he took his eyes off Jesus and looked at the storm around instead. Our faith is strengthened when we focus on Jesus and what he has told us to do. As soon as our attention shifts instead to our circumstances and fears and worries, our faith will begin to falter.

 

Jesus rescued Peter as he was sinking, and as they climbed into the boat, the storm was stilled. The disciples then worshiped Jesus, it says, and confessed him as the Son of God. That was a statement of faith. They had seen Jesus do something amazing and realized what that meant about his identity and how they should respond – in worship. The seed of faith in their hearts was beginning to grow and find expression in what they did and in what they said. That is the nature of faith.

 

So with that as introduction, let’s turn to today’s passage: another of the many confrontations between Jesus and the religious power structure of his day, represented, as I said at the beginning, by the Pharisees and teachers of the law. They came to Jesus from Jerusalem, the Washington DC of Israel, because they felt like their power and control was being threatened. They needed to make a statement to the people that they were right and Jesus was wrong. The ordinary people around may not have had any voting rights, but the crowds were making a choice to follow Jesus and listen to his campaign for the new “kingdom of heaven” party. The Pharisees were outraged and wanted to expose the “fake news” of Jesus.

 

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” – Matthew 15:1-2

 

What was the tradition of the elders that these religious leaders appealed to? It was something that had developed over time. Long before, God had given the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. This is what was written down in the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah. As this was taught and passed down from generation to generation various religious teachers felt the need for these laws to be interpreted more closely and applied to specific situations in daily life. If the way to please God was by observing the law as fully as possible, then the more detail the better. Over the 500 years or so between the Babylonian captivity and the appearance of Jesus, rabbis expanded and systematized this oral tradition of detailed laws, and eventually, around 200 A.D. it was put down in written form in what is called the Mishnah.

 

The intent of these laws was to help people obey God better, but they went far beyond what God had originally said. A simple statement like “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk,” from Exodus 23:19 became a general prohibition against any combination of milk and meat together. Sabbath laws, as another example, came to be prescribed in such detail that even today, some Jews will only ride in an elevator on the Sabbath if someone else presses the buttons. They do not want to be guilty of working on the Sabbath.

 

The tradition of the elders was the very foundation of the Pharisees’ lifestyle and practices. They believed that only their specific interpretation of what God had said was correct. Jesus had three problems with this. One was with their intolerance. They looked down on anyone who disagreed with them or who didn’t measure up to their standard. Jesus spoke out many times against their pride and hypocrisy. The second was with their assumption that they could satisfy God with their own performance. They thought they could be holy by their own effort. There was no need for God’s grace to forgive their sins or to compensate for any weakness. They had their own set of rules that they could and did follow, and that was enough. Jesus condemned their arrogant self-righteousness. Third, they were concerned only with outward appearances. They tried to look good in front of other people, even if their hearts were not right before God. If it did not hurt their public image they would try to get away with what they could. Jesus called them “whitewashed tombs” and pointed out that God would judge what they were like on the inside, full of greed and self-indulgence, as we will see in Matthew 23.

 

In this particular confrontation with Jesus, the Pharisees brought up the issue of handwashing. We understand the science behind handwashing for infection control, particularly in this time of the coronavirus pandemic. But this principle was first suggested less than 200 years ago by a Hungarian doctor and not widely accepted until much later. We know now that washing your hands frequently is one of the most important things you can do to keep from getting sick. God obviously knows that too! But the Pharisees are concerned here about ritual impurity. They are talking about a religious law, not good hygiene. Mark’s version of this passage adds that their rules for washing extended to cups, pitchers, and kettles.

 

Ritual impurity is still observed in many cultures around the world. I remember one time in Nepal I took a drink and set my cup down on the fully enclosed lid of the water filter. A friend told me that in doing so I had defiled all the water in the filter. I removed the cup immediately, and he said that it didn’t matter, because no one else had noticed it. I learned that purity is not an absolute condition but is based on appearances. But I also heard of low-caste people getting beaten up for taking a drink from the common water tap in a high-caste village. So defilement can be a serious business. It wasn’t so long ago even in this country that a black person could be prosecuted for drinking from a whites-only water fountain. That was not a hygiene issue either, but more like what the Pharisees were concerned about.

 

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’  they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. – Matthew 15:3-6

 

Jesus does not deny that handwashing is a good idea. He takes issue with their trusting in a ritual that does not have any spiritual benefit. Even more so, he condemns the way they put their traditions above the law of God. The Pharisees would make excuses to avoid what was really important, namely obeying what God had actually said. To circumvent a material obligation to their parents they had created this loophole: they could promise to God whatever they should have given their parents. That would allow them to continue to pursue their own selfish purposes. They would only be pretending to put God first.

 

Jesus makes it clear elsewhere that love for one’s parents should be subjugated to one’s love for God and commitment to Jesus. You may recall the verse from chapter 10 where he says, “Whoever loves their father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” There may be times when God expects us to disobey our parents to be able to obey him. But that does not mean we cease to honor our parents. Sometimes we honor our parents best when we obey God first. What Jesus is condemning in our passage today is pretense and selfishness.

 

You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

 “‘These people honor me with their lips,

    but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain;

    their teachings are merely human rules.’” – Matthew 15:7-9

 

The reason Jesus spoke out so strongly against hypocrisy was not just because it hardens a person’s heart against the redemptive work of God in them, but it is also devastating to others who see through the façade of the person’s behavior and realize just how corrupt they actually are. A prime example of this is when we condemn something in someone else that we actually do ourselves. This can be so damaging to our witness as Christians and another reason why we need to be extra-careful in how we present ourselves in the current climate of political polarization. Someone has observed that when we point our finger at someone else, we still have three fingers pointing back at ourselves. Those fingers should remind us to examine ourselves for whatever we are accusing someone else of.

 

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Our words need to reflect what is actually in our hearts. We may say what we think we believe, but our behavior will indicate what we actually believe. You may have seen the internet meme making the rounds in various forms that says, “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” This is basically just another way of saying that actions speak louder than words. Actions reveal what is in our hearts, and that is the part that God is concerned about. Honoring him with our lips is not enough. If our hearts are not in the right place our worship becomes meaningless, this says. We may follow some rules that we feel capable of following, but we will not be loving God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves – something that is impossible except by the power and discernment of the Holy Spirit living within us.

 

This quote from Isaiah 29 is a call for transparency. A couple of verses further on in that chapter, Isaiah writes, “Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think,   ‘Who sees us? Who will know?’” Nothing is hidden from God. We don’t fool him with our words. He sees right through us: knowing our deepest secrets and our darkest motives.

 

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand.  What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”

He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” – Matthew 15:10-14

 

Jesus flips their understanding of defilement on its head. Ritual defilement had been defined in the Old Testament as something that happens to a person from an external source, for example, if a person were to touch a dead body. Does Jesus intend to nullify all those rules? No wonder the Pharisees were offended and the disciples worried. It appeared that Jesus was abandoning the old covenant. How could he go against hundreds of years of tradition? What the Pharisees could never accept was that Jesus did have the right to rewrite the rules. They refused to accept his authority as king.

 

However, Jesus had said in the Sermon on the Mount that he had not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. In the same way that he was the final, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice that removed the need for further sacrifices, so he would also bear the shame of all defilement, providing true and lasting purification and the restoration of honor. He fulfilled the requirements of the law so that anyone can be acceptable to God through faith in him – sins forgiven and shame removed.

 

God’s truth will ultimately prevail. Every lie will eventually be uprooted. The wheat and the weeds might appear to be growing together with equal success, as we talked about in chapter 13, but in the end they will be separated. Jesus refers to the Pharisees as blind guides several times. They are meant to be leading the people into a right relationship with God, but they are failing in that themselves. Anyone attempting to follow them along their self-righteous path would end up at the same dead end: convinced that they were doing okay but actually heading further and further away from true repentance and salvation by faith.

 

Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”

“Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” – Matthew 15:15-20

 

Peter is so confused by what he has heard that he asks Jesus to explain, even though there is no story to interpret as there would normally be with a parable. Jesus had taught in the Sermon on the Mount that sin originates in the heart (as lust and anger, for example) and can make a person guilty even before they actually do anything wrong. Peter was not making the connection. Jesus was saying something radical here. Defilement comes from inside a person, as a result of their own evil thoughts, rather than being imposed on them by external factors. The sins that Jesus lists here are indeed actions; however, he makes clear that they begin in a person’s mind: anger turns to murder, lust turns to adultery and sexual immorality, greed turns to theft, jealousy and resentment turn to false testimony and slander. These thoughts begin the defilement before the person actually follows through on the sinful action. We are guilty of sin before we even do anything.

 

In getting rid of ritual purification such as handwashing, Jesus is also doing away with all the food laws that had been so rigorously followed by the Pharisees. Mark actually states this as a parenthetical comment in his version of this passage: “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.” (Mark 7:19)

 

We know that Peter still couldn’t quite accept this new definition of clean and unclean. He would need to be reminded of it again much later in Acts 10 when he saw a vision on a rooftop in Joppa. You probably recall the story. The vision was of a large sheet being lowered containing all kinds of four-footed animals as well as reptiles and birds. Some of these would surely have been considered unclean according to the Torah. He heard a voice tell him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Peter replied, “Surely not, Lord, I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and by the end Peter was still wondering what this vision meant. It was only after he was with Cornelius, the Gentile centurion in Caesarea who had summoned him, that he realized that God wanted him to accept all people equally. Gentiles would not need to become Jews to be able to receive salvation through faith in Jesus.

 

Jesus was hinting at this paradigm shift back in Matthew 15. Jews would normally have been defiled by coming in contact with a Gentile. It could be assumed that the Gentile was eating unclean foods and not following all the other practices for ritual purification. So when Jesus stated that defilement could not be passed on by touch, he was, in effect, beginning to break down this barrier for contact between Jews and Gentiles. We will see that our story for next week continues this theme in Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman, a Gentile from whom Jews would normally have kept their distance.

 

So what does this passage in Matthew 15 mean for us today? We have no tradition of ritual purification that we are trusting in to make us acceptable to God. But we do need to be careful that we do not fall into the pit with the Pharisees. I can think of three ways to guard against this:

1. I need to approach the word of God with humility, realizing that I do not have a corner on the truth. Other believers, also earnestly seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit, may have different interpretations on some issues, and I need to be cautious about condemning those who do not measure up to my standards. Jesus wants me to take the log out of my own eye before I take the speck out of my brother’s.
 
2. I need to beware of thinking that I am doing okay as a Christian because I am doing or not doing certain things. My acceptability before God is only because of what Jesus did on the cross. My behavior needs to flow out of my love for him, as I live in daily dependence on his grace and power at work within me. I need to take up my cross daily to follow him, sacrificing my selfish desires and independent self-effort.
 
3. I need to remember that God knows everything about me and loves me anyway. This frees me to be honest with other people and not try to impress them with outward appearances. Christ’s power is made perfect in my weakness. My actions do matter, but they need to flow out of the redeemed condition of my heart. Then my words and actions will align with each other and have integrity. People are repelled by pretense but are drawn to authenticity.