“Missing the point”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Saturday, June 8, 2024
Matthew 15: 1-20 (Forward, p. 41) CEV p. 1002
Many commentators have pointed to today’s passage to say that Jesus thereby dispensed with all the Jewish dietary laws and what was considered Kosher and what was not. He wasn’t denying that what we eat is important but rather making the point that it is our attitudes, and particularly, our words that render food clean or unclean. And, furthermore, He was telling us that the rules, human made rules, are not the be all and end all. Keeping these human rules do not earn us merit, nor do they get us any closer to God. Instead, Jesus says, it is divine laws, God given laws that really count.
The Pharisees and teachers of the Law had criticized Jesus’ disciples—and by extension, Jesus--for ‘not washing their hands’ before they eat. Or all probability, they had indeed washed their hands, but not in the intricate and time-consuming way that it was ‘supposed’ to be done. The ‘official’ way of washing hands, that propagated by the Pharisees and teachers of the Law, was something that would pale even before today’s elaborate processes of a surgeon readying him or herself for surgery.
And, as for the Pharisees not really obeying God’s commands, particularly those about honouring and helping one’s parents, they were quite crafty and ingenious about how they managed to circumvent the Law. They could declare something, such as money or other possessions, korban, that is, dedicated to God, which meant that it now belonged to God and couldn’t be used for someone else. But according to this ‘legal fiction’, it could still be used by the original owner until death—a nice way of escaping their responsibility to care for the parents!
However, lest we allow our thinking to be clouded by such considerations, the main point Jesus is making is that it our hearts, our most inner beings, and then the words that come from there, that really render us clean or unclean. He alleges that there are all sorts of things deep within our beings that pollute us and make us unclean, things like evil thoughts, murder, adultery, vulgar deeds, theft, lying and insults. These are the things that make us unfit to worship God properly. So, rather than clean our hands, we need to clean up our intentions, our thought life and our words. That is
where action needs to be. Anything else just misses the point. So be it. Amen.
Forward notes: “You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ‘This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me’” (verse 7-9a).
“Pastor Shirley would say of her sermons, ‘If I don’t make you take a hard look at yourself, I haven’t done my job.’ I would sit among addicts and prostitutes with my arms smugly across my chest thinking her words were for ‘those’ people, not me. One Sunday, her words pierced my heart, revealing my hypocrisy and vain worship. Pastor Shirley’s words, God’s words, were for me to hear. My prideful heart was far from God.
“Jesus’s words bared the Pharisee’s hypocrisy. Their defiled hearts were defiling their values, words, and actions. I would like to believe that at some level, at least one Pharisee realized Jesus’s words were for him.
“For me, it’s vital what happens when I realize my heart is defiled. That’s when God’s teaching moments appear. It’s when God reconstructs the fragments of my shattered self into a new wholeness. It’s when I hear God’s words for me with a new heart and move forward.: Moving Forward: “Are Jesus’s words for you or ‘those’ people?”