This is a short devotion based on Matthew 15:1-9.
Then 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.”
The Pharisees’ beef with Jesus is technically a legal one: The elders have a tradition of hand-washing, why would anyone — especially one as young and unestablished as Jesus — ignore that tradition? The not-so-implicit accusation: You, Jesus, are an antinomian rabble-rouser who shits on traditions out of rebellion towards God and disrespect for the purity of His religion.
(It’s always a good time to remind oneself that Christ, too, was accused of being antinomian. On the other hand, those who spend most of their ministry accusing others of antinomianism also have a biblical analog: the pharisees and scribes!)
This beef also strikes me as a jab at the socioeconomic and culturally unrefined circumstances of Christ’s fans and followers. Perhaps I’m over-applying my 21st century lens onto the text, but consider that Jesus himself grew up in poverty and walked around homeless. “You don’t wash your hands!” We all remember that searing accusation in Kindergarten — the guilty party, without excuse, scrambling to hide their bright red face.
Christ’s response will annoy the pharisees for the same reason that all of Christ’s responses annoy the pharisees: He reframes the issue entirely. Einstein said: No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.
Jesus never hesitates to take the beef to a whole new level.
3 He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and,‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 5 But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,”[a] 6 he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word[b] of God.
Wait a second: I thought this was about hand-washing? Christ’s message to the religious throughout the New Testament is that you can’t pick and choose if you live your life by the law.
Christ drives a wedge between two concepts that were critical to every religious power-holder (ever): Human Tradition versus the Word of God. Both Paul and Luther spent much of their ministries hammering this same wedge between the laws of man and the laws of God.
The pharisees, you see, couldn’t see the distinction. The man-made laws had consumed so much of their daily thought and action that it had merged itself with the Holy of Holies — the Word of God. This is the fundamental error, and the most easy for the church to fall into.
The root of all idolatry is when something that is NOT God’s Word pretends it is God’s Word. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You[a] shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)
The only thing that a Christian should trust with his life is the promise of God — the Words of God. The Logos. God in Christ. It is finished.
Where trust is placed in human tradition for one’s eternal salvation, then God is necessarily distrusted.
In case it wasn’t clear that Christ was piercing a primary artery in the organism of first century pharisaical legalism, he continues with the fire of our favorite Old Testament prophet:
7 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:
8 “‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
9 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
Anywhere that the commandments of men are taught as doctrine, worship is in vain.
The scourge of legalistic terror on the hearts of those whose faith is in the Risen Christ was not contained to the first century.
Legalistic terror still flows quite abundantly from American pulpits almost 2,000 years later. Self-improvement sermons. Calvinistic or Lutheran pietism. Half-baked theologies about God’s wrath. Activist churches that make people vote one way (or else) but couldn’t care less about the proclamation of Christ’s infinite love for desperate sinners.
Rest is found in the sufficient righteousness of Christ alone.
“Take courage, it is I. Do not be afraid.”