Monday, August 21, 2017

Breaking The Law

"Breaking The Law"
Matthew 15:1-20

A book titled, Odd Laws, has compiled laws that are still on the books in some states.  For instance,
In Oregon, it is illegal to hunt in cemeteries.  (You might accidentally kill a dead person!)
In New York it is illegal to arrest a dead person or charge them with some offense.
In Massachusetts it is illegal to sell exploding cigars.
In Tennessee, if you leave a person's gate open you can be fined up to $10.
Also, in Massachusetts, it is not legal to stable a horse on the second floor or higher of a building.  (But I guess it is OK to stable your horse if you are in a ground floor apartment.)
And, in Wyoming, it is the law that spittoons be emptied and cleaned daily.
In Lawrence, Kansas, all cars entering the city limits must first sound their horn to warn the horses of their arrival.
Also in Kansas, rabbits may not be shot from motorboats.

It seems there are laws for everything and every circumstance.  As I have just shown, a number of these laws were written to cover some offense that may have been important decades ago, but are not important anymore.  Yet they still remain in force.  And that is the question with these old laws:  who is going to enforce them?  I mean, are you going to put up a surveillance camera at your gate, if you lived in Tennessee, to see who leaves it open and should therefore be fined?

Should these antiquated and unnecessary laws be kept on the law books?  They are laws, after all.  But just because they are laws, does that make them sacrosanct, unalterable, and therefore unremovable?

A bigger, more philosophical question might be, Why do we need all these laws?  What really is the most important thing to remember behind all these laws?

And an even bigger question is, What does God really expect from us?  How does God really want us to be?  Does it matter to God if we break the law, and keep our horse in our third floor apartment?  Or if we do not clean our spittoon every day?  Or, as the Pharisees confronted Jesus that day, if we do not wash our hands properly?  What is most important to God?

Notice that in this conversation, Jesus ends up talking with three different groups of people.  First, Jesus talks with the Pharisees and Teachers who are concerned only with the fine nuances of the Law of Moses.

At this time, Jesus was in Gennesaret.  This delegation of Pharisees and Teachers of the Law of Moses came from Jerusalem.  It was an approximately 90 mile trip.  On foot, it would have taken 3 or 4 days.  On horseback, maybe a day and a half.

This was an investigative delegation, most surely sanctioned by the Sanhedrin, which was the main Jewish ruling council.  This wasn't a sympathetic delegation that was truly interested in Jesus.  Reading Jesus' words to them over and over, it is clear to me that his tone is one of exasperation and frustration.

Certainly Jesus must have been wondering why they came all that way, on foot, to ask him why his disciples don't wash their hands according to the Jewish religious traditions.  Why not a better or more profound question like, Will Wile E. Coyote ever catch the roadrunner?  Or, What is the meaning of life?  Or, Is there life on other planets?  Or, What does God really demand?

Instead, they ask the weighty question about hand washing.  Here is what the law required.  Jewish law requires that the water used for ritual washing be naturally pure, unused, not contain other substances, and not be discolored. The water also must be poured from a vessel as a human act—that is, the water can not flow out of a tap. Water should be poured on each hand at least twice. Contemporary practice is to pour water on each hand three times for most purposes using a cup, and alternating the hands between each occurrence.

But nothing is said about the towel used to dry your hands.  I'm not sure what is supposed to happen if, earlier in the day, unbeknownst to the adults, their kid came by and wiped his nose on the drying towel.  All that hand washing for nothing.

Notice, also, how the Pharisees qualified and substantiated how important it was to wash hands in this way:  “Why is it that your disciples disobey the teaching handed down by our ancestors?"  This is just another way of saying, "We have always done it this way."  To the Pharisees, the only reason hand washing is important is not for hygiene or some other logical reason.  It is only important because it was an ancestral law.  "We have done this for a long, long time."

Jesus' reply uses their rationale against them.  He questions their disobedience to a not long held tradition, but to God's law in the 10 Commandments.  Specifically, "Honor thy father and mother."  The Pharisees got around that Commandment in the following way.  It became Jewish tradition, according to this Commandment, that the children are to take care of their parents until they are dead and buried.  This means take care of them in every way, but most importantly, financially.

But the Pharisees got around that by saying they could dedicate their wealth to God and God's work, and thereby not have to be responsible to their mother and father financially.  They make an oath to God about what they do with their money, and an oath, according to Jewish law was irrevocable.  What the Pharisees had come up with was just traditional law based on one of the Ten Commandments, but the traditional teaching usurped and was given more weight than the commandment itself—which was from God.

So, what the Pharisees and Teachers of Jewish law were saying was, if you want God to like you, you better follow the rules and traditions that have been held on to for centuries.  But what Jesus was replying back to them was, If you want God to like you, if you really want to know what God expects, your heart and God's heart must beat as one, and your thoughts and God's thoughts better be in synch.


Next, the conversation shifts to the crowd.  In the previous chapter of Matthew, we find out that this crowd was made up of "all the sick" in that area, including those who carried or brought the sick.

Matthew says that Jesus called the crowd together.  In other words, he was very intentional in who he was addressing next.  He wanted them specifically to listen to what he had to say.

Most of those in the crowd, being sick, diseased, or touched such people would have been deemed "unclean" by the Pharisees.  Being unclean described, from the Old Testament times, a person or thing who contracted ritual "uncleanness" (or "impurity") from a variety of ways: by skin diseases, discharges of bodily fluids, touching something dead, or eating unclean foods.

An unclean person in general had to avoid that which was considered holy and take steps to return to a state of cleanness. Uncleanness placed a person in a "dangerous" condition under threat of divine retribution, even death, if the person approached the sanctuary. Uncleanness could lead to expulsion of the unclean person from the community. In order to avoid being expelled, the unclean person had to undergo purification.  Hand washing was one of the ways of purification—to become clean again.

Jesus, in one brief statement to the crowd, wipes away all Jewish traditional teaching about what is considered clean and unclean.  Because, as I just stated, the Jewish leaders used their traditional teachings about cleanness and uncleanness to keep people away from God.  Jesus would have none of it.

Hand washing, what you can eat or not eat, whether you have a physical malady or are healthy—all that doesn't matter anymore in the big scheme of things.  Those rules are simply externals.  As Jesus stated in verse 9, "…the (Pharisees) teach human rules as though they were my laws!’”  Jesus alone, as the Son of God, knows what God is and is not interested in.

This must have been great news to the sick and infirm, as well as to those who brought them.  According to Jesus' statement, now it is not a matter of formalistic legislation and tradition.  That is too easy.  Instead it is a matter of the heart:  to love and live with the unlovely and unloveable; to help the needy at the cost of one's own time, money and comfort; to forgive what we think is unforgivable.

What matters to God is not so much how we act, but why we act.  Jesus is saying the how will follow the why, once we get that right.  Legalism and keeping the law can not substitute for, or assume a relationship with God exists.  It just means you are following the prescribed laws and traditions.  And the opposite is also true, to the delight of the crowd:  neither can we assume that some physical or mental condition automatically excludes us from relationship with God.


Lastly, Jesus has a conversation with the disciples.  They were, especially Peter, worried about how Jesus had insulted and offended the Pharisees and Teachers of traditional law.  Instead of trying to patch things up with the Pharisees, to Peter's horror, Jesus insults them even more deeply, making his statement about the blind leading the blind so that both fall into the ditch.

One of my favorite Farside cartoons shows a posse with torches being lead by a bloodhound through a dark forrest.  The bloodhound is thinking to himself, I can't smell a darn thing."  It was evidently important to Jesus that those who are leading others, especially in terms of relationship with God, know where they are going.

The significant question here is, Who is Jesus' intended audience for his blind leading the blind statement?  The assumption is the Pharisees and Teachers.  That would be a safe assumption.  But what if Jesus was doing a bank shot off the Pharisees at his disciples?

Peter kind of gets that it was a bank shot statement.  He asked Jesus the meaning of the ditch parable.  What Peter is really asking: “Are we the ones you are talking about?  Are we the blind?  By taking sides with the Pharisee delegation about them being miffed, are we not understanding something significant here?  Are we, by being sympathetic to the Pharisee rule mongers, missing something important?”

Soon, Jesus will be turning the whole Gospel operation over to the disciples.  If they don't get grace, if they don't get what God is about in God's opened armed embrace of everyone, then they will only become blind guides, leading themselves and others into the ditch.  If they go the way of rules and judgement, of exclusion and hatred, and not love and grace, they will be failures in God's eyes.  Instead of what God wants from us, we will become the hate mongers, the divisive, the KKK, the white supremacists of Charlottesville.  The ditch, and not God, will become our future.


Jesus talked to three different crowds that day.  His message was the same to all of them.  Deciding who is in and who is out of the club is not the way of Jesus, and is not to be the way of Jesus' followers.  Making rules that exclude and demean others is not the way of Jesus or of his followers.  Majoring on the minors is not the way of Jesus or of his followers.  Those who push only the rules of exclusion are only demonstrating the truth that their hearts are empty of love as God loves.  That they have gotten something so basic and so Godly so wrong.  That they are in the ditch.  And the only way to get out of the ditch is to break the traditional laws of hate and exclusion.

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