Untitled Sermon
There is no hint that they wanted more than healing, no hint that they came to become disciples. They came to take from Jesus, to use him for their ends, much like the crowd that saw Jesus multiply bread and followed him, merely hoping for more food
While Jesus was healing, “some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem” (Matt. 15:1). This sounds ominous. There is only one reason for the theological leaders of the nation to come all the way to the northern countryside (for Gennesaret is not even a town). An official delegation, they will investigate this popular teacher who behaves rather suspiciously. They came to confront this Jesus.
According to Josephus, “The Pharisees have imposed on the people many laws from the tradition of the fathers not written in the Law of Moses” (Ant. 13.10.6 §297)
As Baxter says, “men think God’s laws too many and too strict, and yet make more of their own, and are precise for keeping them.
By refusing to answer, Jesus captures the agenda. This is an important strategy. We must ask the right questions and set aside the wrong ones. When there is confusion, we should try to discover what the essential issue is. When there is a discussion, we need to try to frame the debate correctly. For example, in an apologetic discussion, a secular person will occasionally ask a believer, “How can you believe such a thing in the twenty-first century?” We can reclaim the agenda by asking, “What makes you think the truth depends on calendar dates? Do you think that the truth is like milk and eggs, so that it comes with an expiration date?” Jesus asks the right question. The Pharisees asked about violations of the elders’ tradition; Jesus asks about violations of God’s law
The Pharisees indeed had a tradition that violated the law “Honor your father and mother” (15:4). Their tradition claimed to support and explain God’s law. In fact, their tradition supplanted and subverted it. The law says we owe our parents honor above all. Jesus specifies two ways for children to respect their parents. First, they must speak respectfully. One law, Jesus reminds them, stipulates that if a child reviles, slanders, or curses his parents, he is liable to death
Second, Jesus says, we owe our parents aid in their later years. If they are poor, we owe them financial help. If lonely, we visit them.
If we walk through the seasons of life, we can survey the duties children owe their parents today. When a child is four, he owes his parents obedience. When a child is fourteen, she owes obedience with respect, without rolling the eyes, sighing, letting the jaw fall slack, and slouching under the load of parental folly. When a child is twenty-four, he owes communication. When thirty-four, she owes time with the grandchildren. When forty-four or fifty-four, we owe whatever care our parents need, for their body or their soul.
If we walk through the seasons of life, we can survey the duties children owe their parents today. When a child is four, he owes his parents obedience. When a child is fourteen, she owes obedience with respect, without rolling the eyes, sighing, letting the jaw fall slack, and slouching under the load of parental folly. When a child is twenty-four, he owes communication. When thirty-four, she owes time with the grandchildren. When forty-four or fifty-four, we owe whatever care our parents need, for their body or their soul.
The tradition of Corban, whereby something is dedicated to God and so is no longer available for secular use, was sometimes invoked with the result that substance needed by elderly parents was denied them (v. 12). By uttering the words of a Corban vow, thus making it impossible to assist one’s elderly parents, one has in effect violated the commandment of Lev. 20:9 and stands condemned: “anyone who curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death …” Thus the Corban vow, by this reasoning, itself becomes a curse against one’s parents and so violates both the command to honor one’s parents (i.e., care for them) and the command not to curse parents (i.e., through harmful speech).
Jesus and Paul both say they tried to attain holiness by regulations and law-keeping. But unless the heart is right, holiness is impossible. Without love for God, the quest for holiness becomes legalistic. It substitutes human tradition for God’s law and substitutes human effort for God’s grace
Protestants readily criticize Catholic traditions, which Catholics revere as practices handed down from centuries past from bishops and popes whom God led. But Protestants have their traditions too. For some of us, the words of a favorite confession or the thoughts of a leading author are as authoritative as the word of a pope.
Local churches have their traditions too—their prayers, their styles of speech that grant a sense of belonging to the group
If we swallow a gnat at a picnic, if we forget to wash the dirt off our lettuce, if we bite into an apple and ingest some protein with our fruit—half of a worm, for example—we may be disgusted, but we are not morally defiled.
What matters, Jesus said, is who we are at the core of our being, which Jesus calls the heart. If we gossip, curse, and utter cruel criticism, that defiles us far more than eating a worm does. If evil words come out of our mouths, it shows that our hearts are unclean. Jesus said, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him ‘unclean
Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown has a shrine to Doubleday, but the research center right next door says that Doubleday lived in another town and was a mere teenager in 1839. Alexander Cartwright deserves the credit for inventing modern baseball in 1845. Since Doubleday did promote baseball and was a great man (an army general in the Civil War), the praise seems like harmless hypocrisy. But religious hypocrisy is not harmless. It must be torn up, so true faith can take root.
Nicodemus, the rabbi and Pharisee who came to Jesus one night for conversation, illustrates the lesson. Although Nicodemus was “Israel’s teacher,” Nicodemus called Jesus “a teacher who has come from God” (John 3:2, 10). Nicodemus offered to speak to Jesus as his peer, even though Jesus had no rabbinic training or credentials. Nicodemus sincerely intended to be generous and to speak to Jesus rabbi to rabbi. But Jesus had an alternative agenda. He told Nicodemus (to paraphrase), “You have no idea what you are saying. You cannot even see the kingdom, unless you are born anew by the Spirit of God” (3:3–8). This left Nicodemus sputtering, “How can this be?” (3:9). It must have been unsettling to Nicodemus, but he needed to be unsettled—uprooted! Nicodemus was a religious man; Jesus wanted to plant faith in him, but he had to uproot his religion first. And it worked, for Nicodemus appears again at the end of John, as a believer (19:39).
True faith is not ethics, or tradition, or religious practice, or even good theology. True faith certainly has a content. It affirms certain truths (facts) about Jesus and human nature. Jesus died for our sins and rose again for our justification. We are sinners, incapable of self-reform or self-exculpation. True believers affirm those core ideas. But faith is more. True believers have a heart for God, a desire to know Christ in his suffering and his glory, a desire to partake, as far as we can, in his life. It includes love for the triune God and a secret union with Christ. Then this heart expresses itself, our passage implies, in loving words and deeds. But it is always more than words and deeds. Jesus “uprooted” the religion of Nicodemus so Nicodemus could have real faith. Jesus wants the same for us. Away, then, with hypocrisy and religion. Let us turn to Christ as he is offered to us in the gospel and give ourselves to him in true faith.