#matthew 15

Tradition and Faith

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands before they eat.”

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever you would have received from me is a gift devoted to God,’ he need not honor his father or mother with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied correctly about you:

‘These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. They worship Me in vain; they teach as doctrine the precepts of men.’”

Jesus called the crowd to Him and said, “Listen and understand. A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it.”

Then the disciples came to Him and said, “Are You aware that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”

But Jesus replied, “Every plant that My heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by its roots. Disregard them! They are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

Peter said to Him, “Explain this parable to us.”

“Do you still not understand?” Jesus asked. “Do you not yet realize that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then is eliminated? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things defile a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him.”

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And a Canaanite woman from that region came to Him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is miserably possessed by a demon.”

But Jesus did not answer a word. So His disciples came and urged Him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before Him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

But Jesus replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Yes, Lord,” she said, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

“O woman,” Jesus answered, “your faith is great! Let it be done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

Moving on from there, Jesus went along the Sea of Galilee. Then He went up on a mountain and sat down. Large crowds came to Him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and laid them at His feet, and He healed them. The crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled restored, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel.

Then Jesus called His disciples to Him and said, “I have compassion for this crowd, because they have already been with Me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may faint along the way.”

The disciples replied, “Where in this desolate place could we find enough bread to feed such a large crowd?”

“How many loaves do you have?” Jesus asked.

“Seven,” they replied, “and a few small fish.”

And He instructed the crowd to sit down on the ground. Taking the seven loaves and the fish, He gave thanks and broke them. Then He gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.

They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. A total of four thousand men were fed, in addition to women and children.

THE BLIND (leading the blind) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, completed in 1568.

Brueghel's masterpiece is based on the teaching of Jesus Christ from Matthew 15, where Jesus warns against following those who say they know what they're doing (but they lead us into a ditch!).

Brueghel was likely using Christ's illustration to amplify the message to those in The Netherlands. The Spanish rulers of his nation had unleashed a version of the infamous Spanish Inquisition - to secure their rule and eradicate Protestantism (the Inquisition ran from approx 1545-1566).

Brueghel's work is comprised of 9 parts, with many opaque references to his disliked Government, other than the obvious characters. The Blind men all have a variety of blindness and are in the process of collapsing.

But He answered and said, ‘It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.’ 

And she said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.’ 

Then Jesus answered and said to her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed from that very hour.” 

I recently reblogged a post reminding Christians that we need to proactively call out anti-Semitism in our communities and within our scripture and I figure I need to practice what I preach.

I made a post on how today’s Gospel reading on the Canaanite woman who challenges Jesus to reconsider his exclusive viewpoint can be applied to today’s battle against white supremacy...but such a conversation would not be complete without addressing how Matthew 15 contains anti-Jewish views that Christianity has used to fuel both casual and overt and violent anti-Semitism for far too long. So here goes!

***I invite Jewish folks to correct anything I say if they want to do so. I’m trying to simplify and condense what could fill a whole book, and that increases the risk that I’ll word something wrong / just completely screw up.*** 

General Overview: Anti-Semitism in the New Testament??

Many if not all of the Gospel writers and letter writers were Jewish themselves -- yet their writings hold a lot of harsh content against the Jewish people, especially against the Pharisees and Sadducees.

How we as Christians address this content makes for a difficult and nuanced discussion; my argument is that while there is leeway for suggesting that what we see in the Gospels and letters isn’t exactly “anti-Semitism” in itself, we need to recognize that this content has fueled and been used to justify anti-Semitism throughout Christian history and thus must be challenged. 

So. If a lot of these authors were Jewish (and those that were Gentiles worshipped alongside Jewish "converts” to Christianity), why are they so harsh against Jesus’s fellow Jews and especially against Jewish leaders?

The short answer is that in the time following the destruction of the Temple by Rome in 70 CE, hostilities had grown high between Jewish and Christian groups. From the very beginning of what would come to be called Christianity, tension started to grow between those Jewish people who became followers of Jesus and those Jewish people who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah / God / of any religious importance. Many of the former group wanted to keep worshipping in the Temple / attending synagogues, and the debate among the latter group about whether to let them do.

The eventual decision was to refuse to let these Christ-followers worship in synagogues: “In the post-70 period, when Christian writings spoke of Judaism, the censure was harsh. Local synagogues at different times in different places no longer tolerated the presence of Christians” (Brown, p. 29). 

I understand why these early Christians were upset about no longer being allowed to worship where they’d always worshiped; but I also don’t blame the Jewish people for deciding they didn’t want Christians worshipping with them. After all, many Christians considered Jews to have failed recognize Jesus as being the Messiah they were awaiting; I wouldn’t be happy about my beliefs being held in such a disrespectful light either! Meanwhile, “Jews simply found the Christian’s arguments incomprehensible if not blasphemous... [and] rejected the claims of the Nazarene party that Jesus had fulfilled the requirements of being Israel’s messiah” (Irvin and Sunquist, p. 130). They didn’t see themselves as “attacking Christianity,” but simply trying to keep on preserving Judaism’s integrity. Still, their methods for kicking Christians out of their worship spaces sometimes got rough -- hence the angry response from Christians. 

As a quick reminder to explain the above information, the various books of the Second Testament (that’s the term I prefer for the “New Testament”) were all written some time after the death of Jesus. The earliest believers of Jesus were convinced that his Second Coming was imminent, so why bother write everything down? Besides letters like Paul’s that sought to instruct new believers, the story of Jesus was passed along orally until enough decades passed that some Christians were dying of old age. Christians finally realized that the Second Coming might be farther along than they thought, and started writing the story of Jesus down to preserve it. The earliest possible date for any of the four canonical Gospels would be 60 CE (with 68 or later being more likely); and the last of them (John) could have been written as late as 110 CE. Thus they were written after things had developed enough for Jewish-Christian relations to have become tense and even hostile. 

This is an overly simplified and very condense summary of Jewish-Christian relations in the first century CE, but for now that should be enough for this post’s purposes. The next bit of context we need to address is who exactly the Sadducees and Pharisees spoken so harshly of in the Second Testament were. 

There were three major schools of thought in Judaism in the time of Jesus. Not all individual Jewish folks identified themselves as part of one school or the other, but the debates between the three groups were intense and sometimes vicious, especially within Jerusalem and surrounding areas. These schools were: the Essenes (who are interesting but not really mentioned in the Gospels so here’s a webpage if you want info on them); the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. 

The Sadducees identified strongly with the priesthood of Jerusalem’s Temple. This group “became increasingly united with the ruling Hellenized aristocracy” (Brown, p. 27). Most of Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries considered this group to be traitors to Judaism, as they collaborated with the Romans, the oppressors. Howard Thurman puts it this way: the Sadducees “did not represent the masses of the people. Any disturbance in the established order meant upsetting their position. They loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more" (p. 13). These people also held most of the seats in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court that Jesus appears before in Mark 14. So they were powerful, but not popular. 

The Pharisees, on the other hand, were very popular with the Jewish people of Jesus’s day, and they were not collaborators -- Rome considered them a potential threat. Their name shares roots with the Hebrew word for “separate” or “detach” as they had split from the “increasingly secularized leaders” of the Jewish people (Brown, p. 28). This group developed a belief in the oral Law of Moses as an equally important supplement to the written Law, and their theology tended to be more innovative than that of the Sadducees. The Pharisees were careful not to do anything that would bring Rome’s wrath upon all of their people, but held, as Thurman calls it, “only a terrible contempt” for the Romans (p. 15). I would argue that much of their dislike of Jesus, and their plans to get him arrested (if we can trust the Gospel accounts to be accurate and they really did so), stem from the fear of Rome’s wrath. What he was saying could cause a rebellion -- one that the stronger Roman Empire would easily squash, causing death and destruction for the Jews. This fear of the Pharisees was realized some time after Jesus’s death, when Jewish rebellion was squashed by Rome, causing the utter destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. 

So when the Second Testament writings condemn the Sadducees, it’s probably rightly so. This was a group disliked by most Jews, one that collaborated with the oppressor Rome. But when the Second Testament calls the Pharisees hypocrites and portrays them as being in “spiritual darkness,” we must tread cautiously. The Pharisees were hardly hypocrites -- they stood by the Torah, the instructions of God, and sought to interpret them in their own time, leading them to be against Rome’s subjugation of their people. They revered their tradition but also welcomed innovation. In the Gospels themselves we see evidence that some of them in Jesus’s lifetime made the effort to understand where he was coming from -- they didn’t dismiss him without listening to him. I’m thinking of the Pharisee Simon who hosts Jesus in his home in Luke 7, and Nicodemus’s passionate conversation with Jesus in John 3. Overall, in my opinion, they were pretty cool people.  After the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, the Sadducees disintegrated while the Pharisees “fed into the rabbinic movement” (Brown, p. 28) -- their views feed into what would become the Judaism alive in our world today. 

One passage from the Second Testament that actually paints the Pharisees in a pretty good light while condemning the Sadducees is Acts 23. 

Why It Matters

One thing we need to remember about the scriptural content against Pharisees and Sadducees is that there’s a big difference between early Christians’ criticisms of Judaism and such criticism today. For one thing, as aforementioned most of the Second Testament writers were Jewish -- Jews critiquing Jews is way different from Christians critiquing Jews. After all, in our own day Christians are in much of the world the dominant, privileged religious group. When the Second Testament writers were writing, this was not the case -- both Christians and Jews were oppressed under Rome. In some ways, Judaism actually had a slight leg up in that they enjoyed legal status as an official subjugated region of Rome, a religion tied to a land, while the Christians tried and failed to attain such legal recognition for themselves and thus at various points they faced active persecution by the Romans (Irvin and Sunquist, p. 129). 

When the Second Testament writers made their comments against Jews, there was not any immediate harm done to their Jewish counterparts, because the Christians had no power. (However, because their writings were preserved into the age when Christians gained power, their words would bear horrible fruit long after their lifetimes.)

Conversely, when we allow anti-Semitism to exist subtly or overtly in our Christian communities today, we are enabling stigma and violence against a marginalized group. 

Okay, so that’s the general overview. I will now focus on one chapter as an example of what anti-Jewish content in the Second Testament looks like. I recommend having Matthew 15 open as you read the rest of this post so you can follow along. 

Matthew 15:1-9

The first nine verses of this chapter are not part of today’s lectionary reading, but they’re important to its context and they along with verses 11-20 form the prime example of a passage of the Second Testament that criticizes the Pharisees. 

Verses 1-9 describe an instance where the Pharisees come to critique the actions of Jesus and his disciples, because they don’t follow the Torah’s instructions to wash their hands before eating. Jesus’s response is basically “well you break an even more important command ‘for the sake of your tradition’ so you’re hypocrites.” The author of Matthew then claims that Jesus whipped out some Isaiah against the Pharisees to declare that the Pharisees honor God “with their lips” but not their hearts. 

The author of Matthew casts the Pharisees in a negative light, when to me, if this encounter really did happen, their behavior is fine. Debates among Jewish schools was common in this day; they often did become vicious but I don’t think they had to be. Jesus and his disciples are Jews, and yet they’re not following some basic Jewish rules -- it makes sense the Pharisees were going to call them out. Jesus’s alleged response is a typical one of the Second Testament, painting the Pharisees as hypocrites.

But I find it hard to believe that the Pharisees as a group did not have God in their hearts as the text claims. The previous section mentions that they were critical of the way Sadducees collaborated with Rome, and how they sought to be innovative with the Torah. And we can look to another Second Testament text, the Book of Acts, for some evidence in favor of Pharisees’s genuine faith -- Paul was a Pharisee! In Acts 23, Paul stands before the Sanhedrin with its Sadducee majority and Pharisee minority and reminds them, “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees.” (Note that he says he is a Pharisee, not was! He now believes in Christ but continues to identify proudly as a Jewish Pharisee, “blameless” regarding his “righteousness to the law” (Philippians 3:6)). 

Matthew 15:10-20 

So 1-9 recount the confrontation of the Pharisees; in verses 10-20 Jesus calls together a big crowd to argue further against the Pharisaic view. The theology he presents here is beautiful, in my opinion: “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Still, it naturally offends the Pharisees, as they follow a Law that has certain dietary restrictions.

And again Jesus offers some harsh condemnation of Pharisees: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” (We’ll have to save addressing what contemporary readers must regard as ableism for another day.) Again, should we accept that the Pharisees were in spiritual darkness? That they were not “planted” by God? To believe so, when contemporary rabbinic Judaism is descended from the Pharisees, is dangerous indeed. This post has detailed many reasons to believe otherwise -- that the Pharisees were well-educated in their faith and followed it well. And they were actually less severe than their contemporary Essenes; but to the early Christian communities who were barred from worship in the synagogues it probably didn’t feel that way, leading to these condemnations of the Pharisees throughout those early Christians’ writings. 

Also, again, I want to bring up the fact that if Jesus did critique the Pharisees, he did so as a fellow Jew -- and that’s completely different from us as Christians, in our privileged position today, critiquing Jewish people. Like this post states earlier, Judaism in Jesus’ time was a swirl of different interpretations, and it was commonplace for them to debate with one another. 

Matthew 15:21-28

In verse 21, Jesus leaves the Pharisees and the Jewish crowds behind, so we’ve come to the end of the major anti-Jewish content of this chapter. Still, there are a few things to address in this passage in order to forestall possible anti-Semitism in modern readers. 

This is the passage delved into in my other post. The main risk of anti-Semitism in these verses, I think, would be for us to think something like “oh wow, Jesus’s culture (Judaism) was so exclusivist and xenophobic/racist/prejudiced.” So my caution is that we remember that such attitudes were not exclusive to the Jewish people in this time period. Moreover, it’s a matter of noticing the log in our own eye before criticizing the splinter in someone else’s eye -- we (I say this as a white American) are part of an even more bigoted culture, with much more actual power to oppress. 

So....What do we do about all this?

The first step to combatting anti-Semitism in Christian circles is to be educated about it. I hope this post helps with that. Here’s a link to another post that discusses the issue of Supersessionism and offers a link to a scholarly article on anti-Semitism in the Christan pulpit; that article includes some thoughts on how to address / correct the anti-Semitism.

Find Jewish bloggers and journalists and so on whom you can follow on social media and learn from. Don’t just listen to my perspective as a Christian! Listen to them first. (On tumblr, you can find lots of Jewish bloggers by searching the hashtag j.umblr without the period in it; I don’t want to show up in their tag since I’m not Jewish which is why I put the period there)

Amplify the Jewish voices you find on social media by sharing their content. 

Once we are educated, we can call anti-Semitism out when we hear it from other Christians. For example, if you hear a sermon where your pastor talks negatively about the Pharisees, talk to them about it. You can send an email if you’re too nervous to talk to them in person.

A big thing is that we should not force Jewish people to declare their stance in the Israel/Palestine conflict before we decide whether or not they’re “one of the good Jews.” That is anti-Semitic, just like making a Muslim disavow ISIS when that’s not even part of the conversation is islamophobic. 

What else can we do to fight anti-Semitism in our communities? I wish I had more suggestions, so please share more!!

And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she cries out after us.’ 

But He answered and said, ‘I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ ”