The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

On Being a Minority in a World Set Against God:  Mt.14:34 – 15:20

^14:34 When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret. ³⁵ And when the men of that place recognized him, they sent word into all that surrounding district and brought to him all who were sick; ³⁶ and they implored him that they might just touch the fringe of his cloak; and as many as touched it were cured. ^15:1 Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, ² ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.’ ³ And he answered and said to them, ‘Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? ⁴ For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.’ ⁵ But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,’ ⁶ he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. ⁷ You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ⁸ ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me.  ⁹ But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’’ ¹⁰ After Jesus called the crowd to him, he said to them, ‘Hear and understand. ¹¹ It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.’ ¹² Then the disciples came and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?’ ¹³ But he answered and said, ‘Every plant which my heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. ¹⁴ Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.’ ¹⁵ Peter said to him, ‘Explain the parable to us.’ ¹⁶ Jesus said, ‘Are you still lacking in understanding also? ¹⁷ Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? ¹⁸ But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. ²⁰ These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.’

Jesus crossed over the Sea of Galilee once again with his disciples to a different region of the Jewish community.  Matthew repeats language from earlier parts of Jesus’ ministry.  The Jewish woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years had wanted to ‘touch the fringe of his cloak’ (Mt.9:20).  These inhabitants did the same (Mt.14:36).  Not only was the people’s posture towards Jesus similar, it is implied from the narrative that Jesus intended to do this.  He allowed people to become familiar with him.  Hence, ‘they recognized him’ (Mt.14:35) and ‘sent word into all that surrounding district’ that he had arrived.

The Pharisees and scribes, however, came to Jesus from Jerusalem.  The interaction here is not an easy one, and it portends more hostile interactions in the future.  Earlier, the Pharisees had brainstormed how to ‘destroy’ Jesus (Mt.12:14).  Jerusalem’s future rejection of Jesus is being hinted at.

The question about not washing hands before eating bread, which sounds rather trivial from our cultural standpoint, was obviously not trivial to Jesus and the Jewish leaders.  While it is not directly commanded in the Mosaic Law itself, the tradition nevertheless reflected deeper principles at stake in the life of the Jewish community and their interaction with the Hebrew Scriptures.  For the Pharisees, washing hands was important because it was a reapplication of the holiness code intended for Jews at the Temple.  Most Pharisees regarded Jerusalem and the Temple, along with its Sadducee priestly elite leaders, to be unclean because of their affiliation and compromises with the Roman Empire.  In response, they extended into their daily lives some of the guidelines for ceremonial cleanliness that Scripture expected of them at the Temple sanctuary.  The Pharisees were therefore a bit of a ‘populist’ movement to revitalize Jewish holiness in response to a general feeling that Israel was being contaminated from the Gentile world outside them.  This was as much a cultural and ethnic statement as it was ‘religious.’  In their world, such things were all bound up together and inseparable.

Similar questions have been asked by ethnic minority groups in difficult situations.  In the U.S., there is a general awareness among ethnic minority groups when a person from their own group has become too ‘white’ or ‘westernized.’  While opinions may vary about when a person goes too far in that direction, the question nevertheless remains in force.  Throw religion into the mix with culture and ethnicity, and you have a very emotional flash point.

Jesus would not have perceived the question of washing or of any other ‘legalism’ on the individualistic level.  It was a community question.  Nor would Jesus have thought about this as merely a ‘religious’ question.  It was after all a cultural and ethnic question as well.  The larger question behind it was about how to be faithfully Jewish and faithful to Israel’s God in a world dominated by the Gentiles.  Of course, Jesus had an opinion about such matters. 

Jesus first criticized another example of a Jewish tradition going farther than what the text of Scripture called for (Mt.15:3 – 6).  The practice of withholding financial or physical resources from one’s parents in order to devote those resources to the Temple sanctuary violated God’s earlier commandment to honor one’s parents.  It was a misuse of resources, in Jesus’ view.  But because of the political and cultural context, this was not just Jesus’ critique of an individualistic ‘legalism.’  Jesus’ original hearers, and Matthew’s as well, would have heard far more in Jesus’ reply.  It was as if Jesus critiqued a modern policy of extending tax benefits to people who made a donation to refurbish the nation’s capital.  Was Jesus being unpatriotic?  Was he committed to the capital or not?  To its renewal?  These were some of the questions that Jews would have felt in Jesus’ response.  To Jesus, this was not only another bad example of pious innovation that created a big loophole somewhere else, it reflected the same spirit of elevating the Jerusalem Temple higher than it should have been elevated.  Even though Jerusalem was, at the time, the focal point of Jewish resistance because it was politically and militarily occupied by the Roman power, and because the Jews were culturally under siege by foreign influences, that did not merit the Pharisees’ felt loss of the purity of Jerusalem or its Temple.  The Temple was simply not as important as the Pharisees thought it was, and on this point Jesus disagreed with them vehemently.  For Jesus was also critiquing the Pharisees’ spirit of extending the ceremonial cleanliness required only at the Temple.  In fact, in Jesus’ view, the Pharisees had it all wrong.  In other words, in response to the cultural, ethnic, and theological questions, Jesus also gives a reply with cultural, ethnic, and theological implications.

Then, Jesus went a step further.  He traced a different route through Israel’s Scripture of what it means to be Jewish and faithful to God even in a world dominated by the Romans and the pagans.  Jesus insisted that Israel’s Scriptures pointed the Jews towards the necessity of heart transformation.  The reason for Israel subordination under Gentile powers in the first place was because of Israel’s sinfulness, a sinfulness that led Moses and the Prophets to look to God transforming people’s hearts (Dt.30:6;  Jer.31:31 – 34; Ezk.36:26 – 36).  Even King David had said, ‘Create in [or ‘for’] me a clean heart’ (Ps.51:10).  Yet if Israel needed the same heart level transformation as the rest of the Gentile world, and if Israel’s prophets had also foreseen the Gentile world benefiting from the transformation of Israel when Israel’s God finally acted in such a way as to bring that heart level transformation about, then the Jews would have to look hard at their past attitudes towards the Gentiles and completely reevaluate what it meant to be ‘separate’ from them.  It’s not that such a distinction would no longer exist, but that the way it was defined would be reoriented fundamentally.  In truth, it would be reoriented around Israel’s Messiah Jesus and redefined by him.  For Jesus was the one bringing about the radical heart transformation that the Scriptures longed for.  He was transforming the human heart he had, perfecting that process through his death and resurrection, in order to share his new heart with his followers by his Spirit.  This was a very different trajectory Jesus argued for; he and the Pharisees were at loggerheads about it.

What was at stake for Jesus and the Pharisees, as well as for us in the present, is the question:  What does it mean to be faithful to God in the midst of a world that is not?  Do we give into the temptation to diminish our own evil and project more evil onto others, so that the dividing line between good and evil runs between people rather than within them?  After September 11th, 2001, President George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the ‘axis of evil.’  The rest of the Muslim world and communist China were subtly warned, too.  That is not the only example of this kind of oversimplification, but it is a prominent one.  Do we then assign cultural and perhaps ethnic superiority to our own group for being ‘closer to God’ than other people?  Do we then think of ourselves as ‘the righteous, beleaguered minority’ in a world set against God?  All the while, Jesus is trying to love and transform the whole world.  And if we give into the temptation to oversimplify the world at other people’s expense, are we not distorting the Scriptures, obstructing God’s love, and confounding His mission?  We will explore these questions in the coming reflections.