How many times does a child hear, “Wash your hands”? And in our virus sensitive society, it’s not only the children who hear that. In Matthew 15:1–20 Jesus was criticized for a failure to wash hands, but not for hygienic reasons. He was accused of breaking tradition.
Don’t worry too much about unclean hands. Jesus was criticized for allowing his disciples to break the tradition of the elders. Handwashing was serious business for the Pharisees. Mothers want children to wash their hands because the house stays cleaner. We’ve discovered germs, and hand washing keeps us healthier. For the Pharisees, unwashed hands meant that the food one touched became ceremonially unclean, and thus the person(s) eating it also became unclean. (These Pharisees came from Jerusalem, perhaps doing some sort of investigation of Jesus.) Further, the washing became an act of righteousness, a means of justification. They specified just how the hands were to be washed, with water poured over them. The accusation against Jesus was not just that he or his disciples neglected a ceremonial washing or two, but was something far more serious. He, as a teacher and leader, was allowing, or even encouraging his disciples to ignore the tradition of the elders. The traditions of the elders had arisen as a fence to protect the people from breaking God’s law. The fence soon became a burden, and the emphasis shifted from obeying and glorifying God, to keeping human tradition. Someone told me of living near a synagogue that inherited those tradition. The commandment to keep the Sabbath was expanded to exclude all carrying, even of a child. Fathers would walk to worship with children who could walk. But their wives had to remain at home, sometimes for years, caring for children too young to walk on their own. A human addition to God’s command had superseded the command to worship. Closer to home, even in reformed circles, even in our own denomination, I’ve see those who may have started out with a well-meaning effort to oppose humanistic egalitarianism end up taking the position that all women are subordinate to men and even that women are ontologically inferior to men. Beware of adding to God’s law. It is a short step from requiring that which God does not require to ignoring and denying what he does require, as John Murray reminds us. It can be easy to set up human rules as standards of godliness. Jesus points out that the source of contamination in God’s eyes is something far more important than unwashed hands. What goes into your mouth is simply consumed, verse 10.
Continue reading “Clean Hands and Dirty Hearts”
