Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 15-17.

There is a lot I want to write about in today’s passage, and there is even more I could write about.  When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about His disciples failure to follow the tradition of ceremonially washing their hands before eating, Jesus called them hypocrites.  After the encounter was over, Jesus’ disciples asked Him if He realized that the Pharisees were offended? To which Jesus replied that His disciples should ignore their feelings and teachings.  Jesus was not concerned if His words offended people.  At least, not people who claimed to speak for God, but I think He was not concerned about offending people.  We should not be afraid of offending people by telling them the good news of the kingdom of Heaven.

Next we come to the story about the Canaanite woman who approached Jesus.  I was struck by this because I have been listening to a Christian apologist who regularly debates Muslims lately.  One of the claims made by the Muslims is that Jesus’ ministry was only to the people of Israel and that Paul went against His teachings by reaching out to the Gentiles.  Interestingly enough, I have never heard them use today’s passage.  The reason I find that surprising is because Jesus says something in this passage which would better support their arguments than the passage which they do use (especially the way they like to use Scripture.  Jesus says to the Canaanite woman, when His disciples asked Him to send her away, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”  From that one could make the argument that “See, Jesus came right out and said His ministry was only for the people of Israel.”  Of course, the problem with this is what Jesus DID.  After the woman said, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table,” He told the woman she had great faith and healed Her daughter.  So, we see that while Jesus may have said that He was sent only to the people of Israel (I could make a case that “the lost sheep of Israel” actually means all of those who genuinely seek the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), He demonstrated that when they rejected Him He would move on to any who would put their faith in Him.  Then if we look at Paul’s ministry we find he followed Jesus model.  When Paul went into a new city, he first went and preached to the Jews.  It was only after the Jews rejected his teachings about Jesus that he went to the Gentiles in that city.

Finally, and this is getting much longer than I prefer, we come to the story of the four thousand.  This account says that He went up on a mountainside and sat down.  Just like He did at the beginning of the “Sermon on the Mount.”  Further, it does not mention that He taught the crowds.  It says that great crowds came to Him bringing those in need of heeling, and He healed them.  This healing resulted in the people praising God.  As I read this I kind of want to see what it looked like.  I imagine the people coming to Jesus in despair either because of their own suffering or because of that of their family or friends.  Then, after experiencing or witnessing Jesus’ healing they began to sing and shout and praise God.  And there is one more piece to this picture.  It tells us that after three days Jesus called His disciples to Him.  So, where were they this whole time?  It seems to me that they were likely dispersed among the crowds answering the eager questions of the people who had experienced, or witnessed Jesus’s healing who wanted to know what Jesus’ teachings were.  So, here is the picture, people coming in despair with little hope.  Their despair turned to joy and praise.  Finally, they turned to Jesus’ disciples to learn how they could be part of this wonderful ministry.

I want to end a question: are we so excited about being part of Jesus’ ministry that we forget to eat?  for three days?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

I am going to start today by commenting on the story about the feeding of the four thousand.  The main thing I want to point out is that Matthew does not speak about what Jesus taught that day.  He does tell us that Jesus healed many who were brought to Him that day.  So, perhaps Jesus spent those three days just healing people, but I think it more likely that He spent those three days repeating things He had said during the Sermon on the Mount.  My point is that we often interpret the Gospel accounts as if the only things Jesus said were those the Gospel writers recorded.  We need to realize that just because a teaching in one of the books of the New Testament is not directly based on the “red-letter” words of Jesus does not mean that it is not based on Jesus’ teachings.  Having written that I want to go back to the beginning of today’s passage.  When Jesus explained to His disciples why eating with unwashed hands does not defile us, He said that evil thoughts which come out of the heart are what defile us.  He listed murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander.  Now what is interesting is that most of those are not thoughts as we normally think of them. For example, murder is an action.  Which brings me back to my point about Jesus not only teaching at the times when the Gospel writers recorded that He taught.  If we go back to the Sermon on the Mount, we see that Jesus taught that hating someone is just as much of a sin as murdering them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

Today’s passage begins with the Pharisees confronting Jesus over the fact that His disciples don’t follow the tradition of washing their hands before they eat.*  Then later, when Jesus and His disciples are crossing the lake in a boat, Jesus tells His disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees.  When Jesus explained to His disciples what His response to the Pharisees meant, He told them that what defiles us comes from inside us, not from outside us.  In this particular case, Jesus says that what we eat does not defile us, because it just passes through our digestive tract.  However, I do not think His teaching here applies only to what we eat.  Which brings me to what I think Jesus was referring to when He warned us to beware of the “yeast” of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  All too often we excuse our words or actions because of things which happened outside of ourselves.  Jesus tells us that we must take responsibility for our actions if we want to be better.  The evil thoughts which we have, which come from within us, defile us, not the things which happen to us from outside.  If we want to be pure, we must acknowledge that our desire to harm others comes from within us.  The “yeast” of the Pharisees and Sadducees is the idea that sin comes from outside forces working on us.  It was not our circumstances which led us to do wrong, it was our heart.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

I am going to try to connect what Jesus says in His debate with the Pharisees at the beginning of today’s passage with His comment to His disciples in chapter 16 about being on guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about His disciples failing to wash their hands before eating, He responded by pointing out how they had developed traditions around one of the laws of Moses which functioned as a loophole against the requirements of a different one of the laws of Moses.  After He did this, His disciples were aghast that He had risked offending the Pharisees.  And this is where it gets interesting.  Jesus was not the least bit concerned with offending the Pharisees.  This deserves a bit of unpacking.  Who were the people whom Jesus was unconcerned with offending?  They were those who had just attempted to shame Him by pointing out that His disciples did not live up to their standards of righteousness.  And what had Jesus done which offended them?  He had pointed out that their standard of righteousness did not measure up to the one laid out in the Law of Moses (or perhaps just His interpretation of that Law, since I am sure they would have had an argument making their interpretation the right one).  The point being that they were not concerned with offending Him, why should He be concerned with offending them?  Which brings me to the point about the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  Those two groups operated from the assumption that they were the arbiters of righteousness and offending them was a sin against righteousness, but if you were offended by them, it was merely a sign of your unrighteousness.  And this allowed them to fool both themselves and others into thinking that anyone who opposed their selfishness was unrighteous.

That did not go where I thought it would, but I am going to stick with it.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

As is often the case, there is a lot of things in this passage of note and I was planning on touching on many of them.  So, I went back to the first story in this passage to begin.  And I was struck by the question Jesus’ disciples asked Him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”  Jesus was not even a little bit apologetic about offending the Pharisees.  His response to His disciples made it clear that He was not concerned about offending them.  I want to note that this was not the first time where Pharisees had confronted Jesus over details in a way that suggests they were looking for something “wrong” rather than listening to see if He was correct.  In His response to His disciples Jesus makes it clear that He is not going to spend any time worrying about offending people who are busy looking for reasons to be offended.  The Pharisees were not worried about offending Jesus, or His disciples, but Jesus was supposed to worry about offending them?  But Jesus’ reason for not worrying about offending them was even more basic: in their hunt for reasons to find fault they had lost track of the basics.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees here goes back to what He said in the beginning of Chapter 7 of this Gospel when He told us, “Do not judge,…”  There He went on to talk about addressing the major issues in our own lives before we confront others over minor issues in their lives.  Here He points out that the Pharisees are focusing on a minor issue in other people’s behavior while overlooking a major issue in their own lives.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 15-17

There is a lot to be learned from this passage, but I want to focus on what Jesus says about following man-made traditions and rules instead of following the commands given by God.  I will first note that the traditions which Jesus calls out were not invented from whole cloth by the Pharisees.  They developed these traditions as an interpretation of certain instructions which had come from God,  However, we must keep in mind that doing this is a human tendency.  We all have a tendency to make complex rules that allow us to justify serving our own interests rather than obeying God.  We should be careful about listening to the guidance given by religious leaders who are willing to tell us what we want to hear.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 15-17

When the Pharisees confront Jesus over the failure of His disciples to follow their traditions, He points out how traditions often en up being used as an excuse to not follow Go’s commands.  Then a little later in the passage, Jesus compares such traditions to yeast.  It just takes a small seemingly harmless tradition but which can be used to avoid taking responsibility for doing God’s will to undermine the good intentions of people.  One other important point regarding this: what we say influences whether we do God’s will, while what we eat does not.    Therefor we should put more effort into choosing our words than we do into choosing what we eat and how we prepare it.