In Matthew 15, the Pharisees confront Jesus about the table
manners of his disciples.
By this point in Matthew’s gospel, the Pharisee’s have taken
an openly hostile stance toward Jesus. In
our passage today (v. 1) the Pharisees and scribes come to Jesus from Jerusalem.
One commentator says it’s as if they are
on “religious patrol.”[1]
(v. 2) They ask Jesus why his disciples “break the tradition of
the elders,” and eat without washing their hands. This hand washing rule doesn’t come from
God’s law. It is a rule built around God’s law, like a fence which
doesn’t let people get close enough to God’s law to break it.
In the law of Moses, if a person touched certain things – a
dead body, certain foods, a diseased person, etc….. it made you ceremonially
unclean, and you couldn’t enter the temple for worship until you went through
the proper cleansing process. This hand washing rule was likely originally created out of a desire to honour God whole heartedly and to ensure holiness. Traditions are not bad per se - they are actually necessary for people to live together in community and to function as a church or family. Kept in their proper place, they can serve ends greater than themselves. But the
tradition, the extra rules created around God’s law, became more authoritative than
God’s law for the Pharisees. It
effectively replaced God’s law for them.
Jesus will have none of it.
(v. 3-6) He pushes back and asks the Pharisees why they break God’s commandments (stronger than in Mark: “law of
Moses”) in order to keep their man-made traditions. God commanded to “honour your father and
mother” and that “whoever reviles his parents must be put to death.” But the Pharisees have invented a tradition
that allows them to neglect their parents.
If they make a vow to God, they can
dedicate to him (korban) what they ought to have used to care for their parents. The scribes and Pharisees have circumvented
God’s Word with their own traditions.
Jesus calls them on this. “For the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God.”
(v. 7) He calls them “hypocrites” – religious phonies. The scribes and Pharisees are supposed to be
the interpreters of Scripture and the teachers of Israel. But by their human traditions they break God’s
commandments and teach others to break them. Ironically, this they do all in the name of
holiness.
(v. 8-9) Jesus applies Isaiah 29:13 to the Pharisees. They honour God with their lips – – but their
hearts are far from God. Their worship
of God is vain; they teach man-made commandments as if they were God’s
Word.
Further along, in Isaiah 29:16 it speaks
of those who “turn things upside down.” The
Pharisees break God’s law and substitute their own rules in its place.
Isaiah 29:18-19 speaks of the
Messiah, who will heal the deaf and blind. This is exactly what Jesus has been doing. Isaiah speaks of the meek and poor being
blessed by YHWH and by the Holy One of Israel. Recall the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus
pronounces, “blessed are the meek….blessed are the poor in heart.” The
Holy One of Israel is Jesus. In Jesus, YHWH is healing and blessing. But the Pharisees have set themselves against
Jesus, and therefore they oppose YHWH.
Isaiah 29:21 speaks of those who “by a word make a man out to be an offender,
and lay a snare for him who reproves in the gate, and with an empty plea turn
aside him who is in the right.” That
is exactly what the Pharisees are
doing to Jesus. They are trying to lay a
snare for him, even as he is reproving them and calling all people to
repentance - calling Israel to trust in him.
Jesus sees through the Pharisees.
He points out their hypocrisy. The
scrupulous “holiness” of their traditions is really a way of disobeying and
dishonouring God….
Its really a way of rejecting Jesus, God’s Messiah.
**And this is what our passage today is all about. It’s
about two contrasting visions of holiness: that of the Pharisees and that
of Jesus.
The Pharisees and scribes have a negative application of holiness. The Pharisees think holiness is all about what to avoid. They believe that by washing their hands
before eating, they will avoid becoming unclean.
They’re not talking about dirt or germs, but about ceremonial
uncleanness, religious defilement, about coming in contact with something, or
someone, that will prevent them from being able to enter the temple.
Jesus’ application of Isaiah to the Pharisees brings their
idea of holiness up short. It is a man-made holiness; it
turns true holiness upside-down. The Pharisee’s idea of holiness is
idolatrous and false.
Calvin called the sinful human heart
an idol factory. We know this to be true, don’t we? We prefer our own ideas and standards of
holiness to those of God’s Word.
God’s Word is a mirror, and we look
into it and see the reflection of our sinful hearts, and we don’t like what we
see. So, we make up our own standards of holiness. Those standards usually look an awful lot
like what we already do, and who we already are. Its only others that don’t measure up to the
standards we make!
We replace the mirror of God’s Word
with a self-portrait of our own making, and we are pleased with how well we
measure up. But it’s a false standard;
it’s a false vision of holiness, one which we’ve created in our own image.
Our false standards of holiness are
nothing more than idols.
But Jesus vision of
holiness comes from God’s Word. He calls the people
to him (v. 10) and tells them, “its not what goes into your mouth that defiles
a person”, but what comes out of your mouth.
This offends the Pharisees (v. 12) – but Jesus doesn’t
care. (v. 13) He says the Pharisees are
like plants that are not planted by the heavenly Father. This echoes Matt. 13, the parable of the
wheat and the tares. The Pharisees are
weeds sown in the wheat field of the kingdom.
They will be rooted up eventually, separated, and cast out. Jesus says, don’t have anything to do with
the Pharisees and their version of holiness (v. 14). They are blind and whoever follows them will
be blind too, and will come to disaster.
Peter asks Jesus to explain the parable (v.15-20) and Jesus replies,
“are you still so thick?”
Clean and unclean,
holiness and defilement – these are not about what you put into your mouth. Holiness is not about avoiding particular
things that we decide are unclean. Holiness
is not about keeping a set of rules or traditions we ourselves have
created. Holiness and defilement is
based on God’s Word.
Jesus is the measure of holiness. This is a positive view of holiness.
The Pharisees’ tradition of washing
their hands before eating so they won’t be defiled is a farce. You can put a gold ring in a filthy pig’s
snout, but it won’t make it beautiful.
You can paint a tomb white, but it still has rotting bodies inside. Jesus knows the Pharisees’ hearts are far
from God.
And that’s what holiness is all about: nearness to God. Holiness is
about what is inside you.
Defilement comes from what is inside us; its in the sinful
human heart. What you put into your
mouth doesn’t much matter, Jesus says (Mark’s gospel notes that in this teaching Jesus declared all foods
‘clean’). Its what comes out of
our mouths that defiles us; that proves we are unholy.
That’s because “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the
heart.” It is what is in our hearts that determines whether we are clean or
unclean; whether we are holy or defiled.
Back in Matt. 12, Jesus had a
confrontation with the Pharisees. They
accused him of casting out demons by the prince of demons. In response Jesus called them a “brood of
vipers.” He said (12:34) that a tree is known by its fruit: a good tree
produces good fruit and a bad tree produces bad fruit, “for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
That is what Jesus is teaching here as well. We produce fruit in keeping with what is in
our hearts. Jesus says that out of the
heart comes “evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false
witness, slander,” just as we read in Ephesians 5:1-6 this morning.
These are things that God’s Word calls sin.
And in case you or I feel good about
ourselves -- -- Jesus reminds us, as he did in the Sermon on the Mount, that
evil thoughts also defile us. Evil thoughts are the seeds of all those
other sins.
It is out of the abundance of the
heart that we speak and act.
Let’s think about the Pharisees actions. Jesus says they refused to care for their
parents under the pretense of dedication to God.
In this they were breaking God’s Word. The Pharisees were claiming to love God by failing to love their parents.
1 John tells us that this cannot be. We can’t claim to love God and hate our
neighbour. If we truly love God, we will
love others.
And this is the kind of holiness Jesus shows us all through
the gospel of Matthew – the holiness of love.
(Matt 9:20-22) A woman with a flow of
blood – something that would have made her ceremonially unclean – touches the
hem of Jesus’ garment and it doesn’t defile Jesus, it makes her well.
Jesus eats with sinners and tax
collectors and it doesn’t defile him.
Instead, they repent and believe in him.
(Matt. 8:5ff; 15:21ff) Gentiles come
to Jesus for healing – a Roman centurion, a Canaanite woman, and Jesus heals his servant and casts a demon out of her daughter.
Jesus touches lepers – but he doesn’t
become unclean; the leper is healed – made clean.
(Matt 8:28-34) In a Gentile region, in a grave yard,
among a herd of swine, Jesus casts “unclean spirits” out of two men. This scene can’t get any more defiled for a
Pharisee: unclean 4 times over. And
what happens? Jesus doesn’t become
defiled >> the demon-possessed men are made clean, restored.
Again and again Jesus reaches out in love, restores broken people. Over
and over Jesus forgives people’s sins.
He is not defiled by sinful or broken people. Instead,
those who come to him in faith are made clean, restored, healed, forgiven.
This is true holiness. It comes from Jesus. It can only
dwell in us when Jesus dwells in us.
Jesus’ love and grace and forgiveness makes people holy. He must graciously replace our sinful heart
with a new heart full of his own love, full of his own Spirit. Holiness comes when Jesus makes his home in us
/// when he writes his own law on our hearts.
Jesus is the one who takes the defilement from our hearts
upon himself, and takes the penalty for our unholiness, for our sin. He
takes that on himself on the cross. And
in exchange, he gives us his own righteousness; he gives us himself.
We come to him like the crippled, or the lepers, or the tax
collectors, and in faith we ask Jesus to forgive us, to make us well….
….And he enters in. When
Jesus dwells in us, then our hearts are filled with him, with his Holy Spirit.
He takes away our sin and defilement and he gives us a heart
after his own heart. Only then, in the
new life he gives, out of our mouths, and through our actions, proceeds his
love and his holiness through us.
Jesus, the Word of God incarnate, dwelling in us >>>
that is the only true holiness.
AMEN
