Green Baggins

Matthew 15:10-20

5/24/2009

Dutch people are known for their cleanliness. I still remember with astonishment when I heard that some people in our community even wash the walls of their garage! I do not believe I have ever done that in my entire life. I have heard that there are people who will wash and polish their tractors before going out into the field. Cleanliness is a great thing. The old adage is true “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” What I would like to do is to expand that idea so that we are talking about all forms of cleanliness, not just outward cleanliness, and also so that we can make sure that we have them in proper priority. Jesus is going to help us do that in our passage here.

Remember from last time that the Pharisees had accused Jesus of breaking the traditions of the elders by having the disciples eat with unwashed hands. The reasoning went like this: if you ate with unwashed hands, then the food you were eating would become unclean as well. If unclean food goes inside you, then your whole body becomes unclean. The Pharisees hated dirtiness almost as much as Dutch people! So they wanted to avoid that at all costs. Unfortunately for them, they tended to neglect other kinds of cleanliness. This is what Jesus is going to tell them in our passage. There is a more important kind of cleanliness, and that is of the heart.

Verse 10 is really quite remarkable. Jesus is saying that there is a fundamental error of direction in the teaching of the Pharisees. The Pharisees are all concerned about what is going in the mouth. Jesus says that that’s wrong. What makes a person really unclean is not what goes in, but what comes out. It’s a question of direction. It is important to realize just how revolutionary this would have sounded to a Pharisee. What about all the dietary laws of the Old Testament? Didn’t those count anymore? To the Pharisees, Jesus was not just attacking the traditions anymore. Now He was attacking the Old Testament. But of course, Jesus was not attacking the Old Testament. He was saying that the OT food laws no longer apply to Christians today. But the reason for that is that the line of demarcation was changing. The food laws existed in the Old Testament to mark out the people of God from the world. The worldly people ate everything, whereas the people of God ate only what was clean. The purpose of all those kinds of laws in Leviticus particularly was to mark out the people of God as different from the world. Of course, that physical difference was supposed to point to a spiritual difference as well. Circumcision also functioned this way, marking out the Israelite males from the world’s males. But circumcision was not merely a physical sign. Even the Old Testament said that circumcision was always supposed to be a matter of the heart. Circumcise your hearts, and not your flesh, says Deuteronomy. That didn’t mean that they should no longer circumcise. Rather, it meant that the Israelites were always to be thinking about the spiritual reality behind circumcision. The same is true of the food laws. What is really clean? Who may ascend the hill of the Lord, as the Psalm asks? He who has clean hands and a pure heart. When Jesus comes, then, He is saying that the thing that will now mark out the people of God is a clean heart. Jesus is simultaneously saying that what defiles a person comes from inside the person.

In verses 12-14 we have a somewhat humorous little diversion, as the disciples think they have to explain something to Jesus. They think that Jesus didn’t really know that He had offended the Pharisees! Jesus responds with a statement about God the Gardener. God the Gardener is the one Who plants and Who digs up what is planted by someone else. Jesus is saying here, in effect, that the Pharisees are nothing but weeds. If we remember the parable of the wheat and the tares, I think we will see that Jesus is reminding us of that parable here, and that the Pharisees will be uprooted in the day of judgment. Verse 14 tells us to leave alone such teachers. We shouldn’t have any dealings with such people, for they are blind guides. The Pharisees thought of themselves as guides of the blind, but Jesus says here that they themselves are blind. So if one blind man leads another blind man, they will both fall into a pit.

After this short diversion, Peter gets back to the question at hand by asking Jesus to explain. You see, the disciples were having trouble understanding this as well. Is Jesus really saying that we can eat pork now? Interestingly, Peter, who asks Jesus to explain here, still won’t get it until Acts 10, where he sees the sheet with all the supposedly unclean foods on it, and the Lord tells him to eat of those now clean foods. In fact, Mark tells us that that is exactly what Jesus means here. Mark says, “In so saying, Jesus declared all foods clean.” The fulfillment of those dietary laws is at hand in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is a little exasperated with the disciples. He says in effect, “You still don’t get it, do you? Why are you so slow? This isn’t rocket science!” Verse 17 says it all. What you eat does one of two things. Whatever is useful in your food is retained by your body to be used for the cells in your body. Whatever is not useful is expelled into the toilet. Jesus actually uses the word toilet here, and we will shortly see why. The point is that nothing unclean remains in the body! The body already knows what to do with useless materials. It just expels useless materials.

But physical uncleanness is not really Jesus’ top priority here. He is more concerned about spiritual uncleanness. Verse 18 says it very clearly: what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. The Pharisees were making the same mistake that my professor once made. His wife looked outside at their apple trees, and there wasn’t any delicious-looking fruit on it. The fruit was all ugly and rotten. His wife asked my professor if there was anything he could do about it. One week later, she looked out of the kitchen window to see her husband with a ladder, a stapler, and a bushel basket of apples! He then proceeded to staple these apples on to the tree. Looked great for a while. But those apples were not part of the tree. The heart of the tree was still bad. This is the problem with much of modern counseling, by the way. We are frantically trying to change outward behavior. We just want the person to behave. And yet, no attention is paid to the root (pun intended!) of the problem: our hearts! If no change happens in the heart, then no permanent change will occur in the behavior. We must recognize this fact about ourselves, or there is no hope, because we will look for solutions in all the wrong places.

Jesus tells us in this passage that we should be more bothered by what comes out of our heart than we should be by what happens in the toilet. This is because our hearts are dirtier than any toilet. And we cannot be cleansed until we realize this fact. Jesus tells us in verse 19 how this happens: every sin that we can imagine starts in the heart. Even our outward behavior stems from the heart. This is the point of mentioned murder and adultery, theft and slander. Those are all supposedly outward sins: but Jesus here tells us that they all start in the heart. And a sin that starts in the heart will eventually come out. You know, the Bible tells us that drunkenness is a sin. Sometimes we like to think that a person who is drunk sort of becomes a different person. But this same professor once told me that there is nothing that comes out of the mouth of a drunkard that wasn’t in his heart when he was sober. All drunkenness does is remove the restraints so that what is in the heart comes out without any hindrance at all. Sin always starts in the heart, and moves outward from there.

What can cleanse such hearts! Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse our hearts. This is what baptism represents. Baptism is a sign of water that points to a spiritual reality of Christ’s cleansing blood. When God gives us faith in Christ, then, our sins are cleansed by the blood of the Lamb, and that makes our baptism complete. It happens when we have faith. It is not the mere outward sign of water, as we ought to know. Outward water cannot wash away sins, anymore than having clean hands means that you have a pure heart. The one who can enter the presence of the Lord must have clean hands AND a pure heart. Only God can make that heart pure. Psalm 51 is so important in this regard. It says “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! Pure me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow…Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” You see, that Psalm was written after Nathan had confronted David with David’s sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. David understood that it was not just the outward sin that was the problem. It was the inner heart that was the problem. So, when he prays, he does not pray for the outside to be clean only. He prays for his whole person to be cleansed from sin. Most importantly, he prays for a clean heart.

We all need to pray for clean hearts. We are cleansed once and for all when we come to faith in Jesus’ cleansing blood. However, there is also a sense in which we need daily cleansing as well, in order to keep our relationship with God clean. How often do we repent of our mental sins? How often do we think about how we have offended God in our hearts? I would challenge us this week to consider the sins of the heart. Ask the Lord to show them to us. Be limp and malleable under God’s searching gaze, knowing that when the truth comes into the open, cleansing can happen. When we don’t confess, then our bones rot away, as the Psalmist says in Psalm 38. But when we confess our sins to our God, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. As David says, “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” The Lord despises hypocrisy. It seems that the more a person is focused on merely outward things, the more he ignores his inward heart condition. The Lord is telling us to reverse that priority.

There is, of course, a danger in all this. When you look too much inside yourself, you can become lost in the maze of your own heart. The point here is not to lose yourself inside yourself, but rather to acknowledge the sin that is there, and then immediately to look to your Savior. For the strength of our salvation does not depend on how strong our faith is, but on how strong our Savior is. Look to Him for cleansing! And you will be healed.

Matthew 14:34-15:9

5/17/2009

The Pharisees were all about the law. They loved the law. They loved the law so much that they wanted to provide easy ways to avoid breaking the law. So, they started adding what they called a “fence” around the law. If you weren’t supposed to break the Sabbath by working, for instance, then we need to define what work is. They eventually came up with a rather detailed discussion of what does and what does not constitute work. For instance, if someone were to give a gift to someone, they couldn’t take it out of their house, because that would be work. Nor could the receiver of the gift cross the threshold in order to receive the gift. What they came up with was that the giver would extend his hand only beyond the threshold and the receiver would take it out of his hand. That way no act of work could be said to have taken place. Similar laws sprung up around each one of the laws. Eventually, it got written down in what is called the Talmud, a gigantic collection (about 30 plus volumes) of advice and laws put in place to keep people from disobeying the law. They had good intentions, maybe. The unfortunate effect of all this was that they got preoccupied with these additional laws that they had set up, and had forgotten about the law itself. As a result, their form of religion became quite preoccupied with external things, and neglected the weightier matters of the law. In this passage, we see a clear instance of this happening. It is very instructive for us, especially if we are careful to see the passage in its proper context.

Jesus had just finished healing a whole bunch of people at the end of chapter 14. It didn’t matter what state they were in, Jesus healed them. Now, it is quite certain that many of those people that Jesus healed were ceremonially unclean. Maybe some of them had open sores. Maybe some of them had fevers. Some of them probably had leprosy. Many of them were ceremonially unclean, according to Old Testament law. At any rate, if Jesus touched these people, then it could supposedly be assumed by the Pharisees that Jesus also was ceremonially unclean. Then, in the beginning of chapter 15, they actually start eating without even washing their hands! This really upsets the Pharisees and scribes.

Now, the Pharisees and scribes had come down specially from Jerusalem to check out this Galilean preacher and to see what His practices were, and what He was teaching His disciples. This probably indicates that the powers that be in Jerusalem were starting to become alarmed by all the things that Jesus was doing. So they sent down an official delegation to investigate. This is not a small thing. They were intentionally investigating Jesus to see what His teaching and practice was. They wanted to make sure that it all fit with their views on the law.

It didn’t take them very long to see that Jesus and His disciples were not doing everything in a kosher fashion. They weren’t washing their hands! And thus they were breaking the traditions of the elders, as it says. The traditions of the elders refers to the wall built up around the law. It was thought, again, that if you obeyed the wall around the law, you would have no chance of breaking the law itself. The Pharisees do not accuse Jesus of breaking the law, but of breaking the traditions of the elders.

One of those traditions was the washing of hands before every meal. This was a very elaborate washing ritual that had been set up. Alfred Edersheim, in his magnificent two-volume set entitled The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, describes the ritual this way: The water was poured on both hands, which must be free of anything covering them, such as gravel, mortar, etc. the hands were lifted up, so as to make the water run to the wrist, in order to ensure that the whole hand was washed, and that the water polluted by the hand did not again run down the fingers. Similarly, each hand was rubbed with the other (by the fist), provided the hand that did the rubbing was already washed: otherwise the rubbing might be done against the head, or even against a wall. But the water had to run down to the wrist. If the water remained short of the wrist, the hands were not clean.” By the way, the water used had to be very clean water. Nothing could be allowed to have fallen into the water, or the water would be unclean, and thus the washing wold be of no effect.

Now, the reason why the Pharisees thought this way was that if you eat with unclean hands, then the food you eat would become unclean, since you used your hands to eat: they didn’t have silverware in those days! Uncleanness was contagious, you see. So, if your hands were unclean, then the food you ate would become unclean, and then your entire body would become unclean. The Pharisees wanted to avoid that at all costs. Hence this elaborate ritual.

Incidentally, in accusing the disciples of eating with unwashed hands, they are really accusing Jesus of teaching them wrong things. For the rabbi was responsible for the conduct of his disciples. So, this is not an innocent little question that is just about the disciples. They are challenging Jesus’ very understanding of the law. They are accusing Jesus of heresy.

Jesus responds with a devastating argument. Basically, he responds by saying that the Pharisees’ understanding of the law is all wrong, and that all these walls built up around the law oftentimes prevent true observance of the law. The example Jesus uses might seem to be off the point, until we examine it a bit closer. Jesus asks them the devastating question, “Why do you break God’s law for the sake of your tradition?” Notice the contrast here between God’s words and man’s words. The commandment of God is to be affirmed. Let that be firmly understood by us. Jesus says here that it is very important that we obey the law of God. But man-made words are fallible. They do not always fall in line with God’s words. Only God’s Word has the ultimate authority.

Jesus’ example was a particularly hideous breach of the fifth commandment. Imagine parents in need of support going to their son and asking him if he would support them. The son then claims that the money he would normally use to support them has been dedicated to God. How devious and deceptive this is! The son uses religion as a cloak for his sin! I wonder if any of us do that. We play one law of God off against another, like this son does. What was particularly bad about this sin is that, according to Jewish law, all he had to do was promise to give the money to the temple. He didn’t actually have to give the money to the temple in order for it to be dedicated to God. In this way, he could keep the money for his own use until his deathbed, when he would then finally actually give it (whatever was left) to the temple. The oath was called “Corban,” which we see in Mark’s account of this conversation. The Jews at the time thought that this oath was unbreakable. Nothing could break it, even if the oath came into conflict with another part of God’s law. Now, it is quite certain that the Jews were not intending that conflict when they dreamed up this scheme. However, it allowed someone to work the system for his own advantage and pay attention to the smaller matters of the law, while allowing him to neglect completely the weightier matters of the law. In this way, it breaks the fifth commandment twice. The son fails to honor his parents by taking care of them, and secondly, he fails to honor his Heavenly father while pretending to honor God with an oath of consecration.

The ultimate result of this, of course, is a formalized religion that has nothing to do with the heart. This is the point of the Isaiah quotation. In Isaiah’s time, the people thought that if they just sacrificed to the Lord, then God would be happy with their religion. They forgot that God cares about the heart. In the beginning of Isaiah, God tells the people that He is weary of their offerings, since it is simply an outward thing. The Lord desires a broken and contrite heart, says David in Psalm 51, not so much burnt offerings. We will see this even more clearly in next week’s passage, which is really a continuation of this week.

In any case, the people of Isaiah’s time did a formalized religion. When Isaiah spoke of them, therefore, he was also prophesying about the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. At the very least, the pattern is the same: outward obedience, but inward rebellion. This is the very nature of hypocrisy.

So how is Jesus’ response relevant to what the Pharisees had accused the disciples of? Well, Jesus and His disciples had just been healing people. They had been loving people, healing the sick. Jesus, therefore, didn’t care one jot whether He was ceremonially unclean. The fact of the matter is, of course, that Jesus’ holiness is contagious and is more powerful than uncleanness anyway. So Jesus made the people clean, rather than the people making Him unclean.

The Lord wants our hearts. He wants our hearts to be clean. He cares more for that than our outward appearance. We need to learn to value what God values. We can start by confessing our heart sins. It is perhaps easier to confess our deeds than our thoughts. We think of sin typically as an outward thing. However, the heart is deceptive above all things, says Jeremiah. It squirms and wriggles, trying to get out from under the true demands of the law, which are to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor. Our hearts love to rest easy when our outward conduct is “fine,” whatever that means, even if our hearts are inwardly seething with sin. So where are our hearts? Are they far from God? Or are our hearts convicted and always turning to Jesus for forgiveness? I would challenge us this week to confess to God our inward sins primarily. Of course, we need to confess our outward sins as well. However, it certainly would not hurt us to confess our inward sins a bit more often.

One word must also be said about God’s words and human words. Human words can often be a summary of God’s words. We hope that is the case in the sermon. We hope that is the case in the confessions of our church and the creeds we recite. There is always a danger that we might elevate man’s words to a level equal to God’s words, and we must resist that temptation with every ounce of our being. However, in recognizing this fact, we must fall into the other extreme, which would be to refuse to recognize that God has spoken to the church in the past. Let’s take confessions as an example here. They are intended to be a summary of God’s word. They are not infallible summaries. But they are intended to be summaries. How are we to view the confessions of the church? What kind of authority do they have? I would suggest that there are two extremes we must avoid. Firstly, and most importantly, we must avoid elevating the confessions to the level of Scripture itself. Confessions are not infallible. However, the opposite extreme is easily forgotten. If we ignore the confessions, then in effect, we are setting up our own private tradition in place of the church’s tradition. We will eventually think that we know better than the church. So the Bible is our final authority. The church’s authority is underneath that of the Scripture, and is based on the Scripture, but the church’s confession is still above our own private opinions. We should have a much lower opinion of our own opinions than we have of the church’s confession, and we should in turn have a lower opinion of the church’s confession than we have of the Bible. But understand that Jesus is not saying that tradition is inherently evil. Tradition is only a problem when it is set in opposition to God’s Word. We must always keep checking our traditions to see if they are in accord with God’s word. We should neither accept every previous generation’s word for it, nor should we ignore the previous generations and their opinion. So, the order is first God’s word, secondly the church’s confession, thirdly, our own opinions. That way we will have the proper order, and we will a proper humility of our own opinion without raising tradition to the level of infallibility. The Pharisees were raising their own tradition to the level of infallibility, and we must not do that.

So what things do we tend to set up around the law? Are there traditions that we do that we have always done that we have never examined in the light of Scripture? We must be willing to admit that maybe some traditions are wrong. Let us all have the humility to recognize that tradition, however much we like it, however much we value it, can never stand next to Scripture. Otherwise, we will wind up with a formalized religion, obeying God in form, but with our hearts in another universe. May we not be hypocrites! God help us.