Matthew 15:1-20 | "Jesus Versus Traditions"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The most powerful thing that I was impacted by this last week happened on Friday when Eileen Anderson was sharing about the last few weeks of Jay Anderson's life.

And she she said that it in the last couple of weeks, at one point she and Jay were alone talking about Jay's condition and the terminal cancer that he had.

And Jay responded with something to the effect of this is what the Lord has chosen for me.

He is sovereign.

And he was resting in that.

Such a powerful thing.

That when life is not what we expect, we can rest.

That this is what God has chosen for us.

He is sovereign in that.

Powerful thing that impacted me.

Will we face something like that?

And will we respond in that kind of way?

Do you know what develops that in a person?

The Spirit of God through the Word of God.

So, with that, would you take the Word of God, open it up, or your device, and find your way to the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 15.

You know, we all live with certain traditions.

Most of us likely have followed some traditions, some family traditions in the last few months.

We have Thanksgiving traditions.

We have Christmas traditions.

We have New Year's traditions.

My New Year's tradition is to not stay up till midnight.

How many of you have seen Fiddler on the Roof?

Wow, it looks like the majority of you are missing out.

Fiddler on a Roof is a play that has immortalized the concept of tradition.

Pardon me while I get this out of my face.

The play seeks to communicate the life of a Russian Jew of that time, portraying it as being as precarious as a fiddler playing on a rooftop.

In the play, the Jewish father struggles to maintain his family and religious traditions, even as his children are seeking to break those traditions.

And finally, perhaps the worst tradition, is that they are forced to leave their traditional home.

Much of Fiddler on the Roof is lighthearted.

Because it's making fun, making light of traditions.

Traditions are, after all, manufactured conventions.

But they often derive from strongly and long-held convictions.

Convictions about life, convictions about society, convictions about culture, convictions about our world.

And because traditions sometimes have convictions upholding them, it can be difficult to tell when our traditions have taken on too great a significance.

That was the case with the situation in our scripture text this morning in Matthew 15.

Jesus has been healing and teaching in the area of Israel that is known as Gennesaret.

It's a location where the Lord described himself to people as the bread of life.

And it's during that time of ministry that Jesus is confronted by certain religious experts.

For they do not wash their hands when they eat.

But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father.

So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God.

You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

And Jesus called the people to him.

Hear this and understand, he says.

Leave them alone.

They're blind guides.

And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.

But Peter said to him, Jesus, we still don't get it.

Explain the parable to us.

And Jesus said, Are you also without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into your mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled?

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and that defiles a person.

For out of the mouth, sorry, out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander.

These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.

Amen.

We could easily spend a couple of weeks touching on what Matthew records here.

Maybe more than that.

But I want us to grasp the units as a whole, because Matthew shows us that this is one single section of text.

It begins with a confrontation over the Lord's disciples eating without washing their hands.

And the end of verse 2 brings that entire section to a conclusion by Jesus saying eating with unwashed hands doesn't defile anyone.

So this is one unit.

It's all happening together.

This is all about Matthew's description of Jesus being confronted by the scribes and the Pharisees.

And the initial question is about tradition.

Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?

Now the last verse, verse 20, reveals the underlying issue behind the question.

It's a question of defilement, of being impure before God.

See, the scribes and the Pharisees observed the disciples in some way eating without performing the traditional rinsing of the hands.

So the religious leaders had concluded Jesus' disciples have defiled themselves, and Jesus hasn't done anything about it.

No righteous teacher would allow his disciples to defile themselves in his presence.

Jesus, what's going on?

Why are you doing this?

Now before we get into what's going on here, we need to set our thinking in the proper context.

We all, maybe sometimes without realizing it, we all have reasons for our patterns of cleanliness.

Some of us bathe every day because we don't want someone else to be offended by our odors.

Right?

Some of us wash our hands before we eat because we know that our hands have been places and carried germs that we don't want to have inside of our bodies.

Maybe you don't think about these things, but they're really there underneath why you do things.

Some of us don't like the feel of being dirty.

And so we clean ourselves often.

We might have varying and very different reasons for our cleanliness, maybe even more than one reason functioning at a time.

But we can't grasp what Matthew is saying here unless we view cleanliness like a Pharisee.

So we need to get our hearts and minds into the shoes of a Pharisee.

You've probably heard that phrase, cleanliness is next to godliness.

Yes, you have heard it.

Cleanliness is next to godliness.

That actually has an Old Testament background in the law of Moses.

Because certain ritual cleansings were required for Israel, especially of priests.

Exodus 30, for example, describes how priests were to wash themselves before entering the temple precinct to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people.

They had to clean themselves.

There were ceremonial cleansing.

So if someone had a skin disease of some kind, like leprosy, and God took that away, they had to go through a proper cleansing process.

But the primary intention of those requirements in God's law was to remind people of God's holiness.

Because impurity, sin, keeps you from God.

Now, God meant spiritual impurity.

And that was pictured in outward cleansing.

So a priest was reminded of this every day by the requirement to wash in order to come to serve in the temple worship ceremonies.

He was reminded, I am a sinner and I need to be washed of my sin just like I wash my body.

And so too, God's people were reminded of those requirements and of the necessity of internal spiritual cleansing as they came to worship.

So the washings of the Old Testament were intended to be an outward, visible sign of the purity that God expected on the inside.

But over time, that picture of God's desire became further and further entrenched in Israel's traditions.

So those traditions were further and further ingrained in Israel's practice until eventually there were oral spoken laws that were added to the written law of God's word.

The Pharisees had 613 of them.

Imagine trying to fulfill all those, plus what God says.

So those traditions eventually became commands that were expected of people.

In fact, one rabbi taught, and I quote, whoever lives in the land of Israel and eats his common food with rinsed hands, may rest assured that he will have eternal life.

You better make sure you wash your hands.

You want to know what those hand requirements were?

I'll tell you.

The traditions stipulated the exact amount of water to be used equates to about the amount that would fill up one and a half eggshells.

And what you did is you held your hands out and you poured the water on the hands at the tip of the fingers so that it would run down your hand and drop off at your wrist.

Because the water starts out pure, and by the time it gets to the bottom of your hand, it's impure.

And then it has to drop off of your body.

So if the water starts running back down, guess what happens?

The impurity, the uncleanness gets back on your hand.

They did that.

Then they did it a second time, and the second time they let their water run down their fingertips and off the ground, onto the ground.

Finally, yeah, there's a third step.

You have to rub your hands with your fists.

And somehow that finishes the process.

A strict Jew would do that before every meal and even between courses of meals.

We need to grasp, though, one more tradition before getting to Matthew's intention here.

And Jesus brings this up in verses 5 and 6.

But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother, yeah, sorry I can't help you.

What you would have gained from me is been given to God.

So he doesn't need to honor his father.

That was the tradition, that was the Pharisaic law.

So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God.

Now, given to God here is a single word in Matthew's original language.

In Greek, it's Doran.

You may have been more familiar with the translation of in it.

In Hebrew, it's korbin.

Korbin or Doron.

It simply means gift.

It's just a word for gift.

In this case, it's a gift given to God.

It was considered a special kind of offering, a pledge, if you will, to give God something that would become his entirely when you died.

But while it belongs to God now, he lets you use it.

But after you die, you don't get to use it anymore, so then it goes completely to God.

It was like establishing a donation to the church in your will.

But you get to use the money until then.

Or the object until then.

So in Israel's law, the content of those pledges could not be used by anyone else.

Or transferred to anyone else, but could only be used by the giver themselves personally while they're still alive.

So, for example, let's say you pledged your olive tree in your yard to the temple.

Because to pledge it to the temple is to pledge it to God.

So you pledge that when you die, the temple gets your olive tree and all of the produce from the olive tree.

So you die, and the Sadducees come and they start taking care of your olive tree.

They prune it, they care for it, they take the fruit, they take the olive oil, they sell it, they get the money.

But as long as you're alive, you get to do that.

It only becomes truly theirs, truly God's when you die.

Here's the deal, though.

You couldn't take the olive oil from that olive tree and sell it to help your family.

You could only sell it to help you.

If you wanted to take a vacation to the shores of Sicily, fine, do that.

Help your family with some medical bills, sorry, can't do that.

If you pledge your retirement funds to God, to the temple, and your aging parents need help, you couldn't use those funds.

But you could still use it to pamper yourself.

It was a way of protecting what was yours from other people.

And that pattern promoted pride, greed.

And as Jesus says here, breaking the fifth commandment of dishonoring parents, all in the name of honoring God.

Some would say to their parents, sorry, I can't help you because what I have to help you with has already been given to God.

So to dedicate property or money to God is it's lawful, it's reasonable.

But not, Jesus says, at the expense of breaking the law of God.

Demonstrated here by the command to honor one's parents.

That's when tradition takes on too much significance.

That's what Jesus is saying here.

It effectively says traditions are more important than God's word.

And they take on an authority that is greater than Scripture.

And that leads us to the main point of this encounter.

A proper view of traditions is one that humbly submits all of our customs to the authority of Scripture.

That's what Jesus says in verse 6.

He says the Pharisees have ripped away the authority of Scripture in place of their traditions.

God's word, he says, is rendered impotent, it's powerless.

And so they've proven the truth that Isaiah wrote about.

Jesus didn't say that traditions were for the birds.

We happen to have a nice piece of beef on Christmas Day.

That's a good tradition.

He didn't say the traditions were unimportant.

He says that you shouldn't put them in the wrong place.

Traditions aren't condemned.

Jesus didn't say, stop washing your hands before you eat.

He didn't say that.

He says, I'm establishing the proper place of traditions.

And a proper view of tradition humbly submits all customs to the authority of God's word.

So to get us thinking and processing about this, let's talk about the elephant in the room.

I'm doing something this morning that I don't remember doing before.

If memory serves me well, which it may not, I have never preached on a Sunday morning standing behind the pulpit wearing jeans.

You noticed, I know.

In fact, it's been a rare time that I have preached without a jacket.

I feel naked.

Just be thankful.

This is not Old Testament times when the prophets did have to go naked at the command of God.

Just be thankful for that.

See, this is the most dressed down that I have ever stood behind a pulpit on a Sunday morning to open up the Word of God.

Now there are enough folks here this morning that there's a good chance that I've already offended someone simply by dressing like this on a Sunday morning.

Some of you may be disappointed in me.

Maybe you haven't heard much of what I said because you're too focused on how I've been dressed.

On the other hand, there might be a significant number of people here who like it that I've dressed down a bit.

You appreciate the casualness.

And then there are those of you in the middle who are really curious.

But don't really care one way or the other.

See, the preacher's attire is tradition.

But for some folks, that tradition takes on a life of its own and it gains the weight of law, of commandment.

And before you know it, you care more about the pastor's appearance than you do the bitterness in your own heart over the person who offended you this week.

You care more about what the pastor is wearing than your anger toward your spouse or your children or your lust or your covetousness in your heart that is hidden from everybody.

On the other side of the coin, you might like deconstructing traditions.

Yeah, suit and a tie are old-fashioned and stuffy.

There is always a method to my madness, friends.

I wore a full suit and tie last Sunday.

Today I'm dressed down.

I wanted to get that contrast.

It's good to tear down traditions, some might say.

The danger is that in deconstructing traditions we might fail to consider the destruction to our own soul from the pornographic patterns of life or the gossip we consume to feed our insatiable desire for knowledge of others.

That's the first of two truths about tradition from this encounter.

Traditions tend to subdue God's voice.

We hear more about traditions, that's more prominent.

And God's word is quiet.

Traditions can be good, and and they can even have righteous intentions.

You will never find me behind the pulpit on a Sunday morning in shorts and a t-shirt.

Sorry, not going to go that far.

There's nothing in scripture that forbids that.

Someone choosing to dress like that doesn't necessarily have an evil heart.

But my Sunday morning tradition has a reason.

Why do I dress with a coat and sometimes with a tie?

It's because I represent my heavenly father.

And my father isn't just any father, he's the sovereign of the universe.

And I represent my Lord, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords, at whose name every knee will one day bow.

And the way I appear before you in an official capacity as his representative reflects his glory.

I hope you don't come here to hear the preacher talk his own thoughts.

I don't have any thoughts.

All I'm here to do is to tell you what the king has said.

That's my tradition.

And in some way, even this morning, I'm having a hard time wrestling with in my own heart am I truly representing my king?

But it's in no way a law that I can hold on others.

Traditions are good, especially as they point to Christ.

But we should not preserve our traditions as commandments over other people.

Traditions can even hinder us from hearing God's voice clearly.

The Pharisees emphasized purity and impurity.

Which do we hear?

Allison and I served a church with an evening Thanksgiving service the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

That service kind of had an evangelistic flavor to it, and we invited the neighborhood.

That service was followed by a supper of chili, fried oysters, and oyster stew.

And no one, no one remembered, even the old folks, no one remembered how it how that tradition became chili and oysters.

But they did remember that it started way back in the 1800s as a wild game feed.

Everybody'd go out and hunt, they'd bring back whatever they collected, and they'd have a meal together.

Somehow that morphed into chili and oysters.

That tradition was harmless.

It was harmless.

It fed fellowship and empty stomachs.

But the stench of the oysters was terrible.

The church building smelled like oysters for days.

The tradition defiled the building with its odor.

Jesus said that the ceremonial cleansing rituals required by the Jewish traditions did the same thing.

Now that that little church building was not truly defiled.

It wasn't unclean, it just didn't smell good for a few days.

Eating with dirty hands doesn't make you impure before God, but it might make you sick for a time.

Jesus said that the problem with some of the Jewish traditions was that they subdued God's true intent so that people couldn't hear what God really intended.

God intended to reveal the impurity of the human heart, not the impurity of a dirty body.

And if you focus too much on the external, you will not hear what God says to the heart.

Now there's a second and even greater danger with traditions.

Traditions tend to void God's voice.

Now in our current culture, we might use the term cancel instead of void.

When traditions gain enough weight, they begin to carry an implicit authority, don't they?

You remember what Solomon said?

That a fool, even a fool is thought to be wise if he keeps his mouth shut?

But then he opens it and proves that he's a fool.

Even a tradition can be believed to be a law if it lasts long enough and has a significant enough following.

And the longer the tradition lasts, and the greater its following, and the louder its voice, soon someone will begin to cancel God's voice in favor of the tradition.

See, God's law was clear.

Parents are to be honored by their children.

Even Jesus implies into adulthood.

That even includes financial support in old age.

But if we must give our hard-earned resources to support our aging parents, that means I'm going to have less to spend on myself and less to give to my children.

That's right.

So you can see where this leads, right?

It's going to end at the place where we have covetous hearts.

The Jewish religious leaders came up with an oral law that stood beside God's law, right?

And eventually it came to be on top of God's law, and eventually it squashed God's law so that it could not be heard anymore.

You could donate to the church and not be taxed on that donation.

Oh, wait, that's our country.

You could promise to give what you have now to God at the end of your life.

In other words, if your savings account was considered Corbin, then it already belongs to God.

But the Pharisees taught that God is so gracious that he allows you to use it and spend from that savings, but only if you spend it on yourself.

How kind of God.

You could satisfy your own sin of covetousness by making a promise that took effect after you died.

In other words, they legalized coveting.

Some of those scribes and Pharisees took advantage of that legal loophole to not support their parents.

They would spend on themselves, but not on their parents, and so by doing so, their tradition voided it.

It canceled out the word of God that commanded honoring one's parents.

The danger of traditions is that they can subdue God's voice.

Let's think for a few moments, though, about this from God's perspective.

So we've been thinking about it from tradition perspective.

Let's look at the other side from God's perspective.

Matthew reveals to us that God's voice actually calls out tradition's hypocrisy.

Traditions, Jesus says, are great for the outward display of religious devotion.

It is possible.

It is possible to attend church religiously, all dressed up in a nice suit.

Never miss a Sunday.

And turn around and condemn those who watch an online service because they cannot get out of their home.

And yet, the one who shows up for in-person services spends the entire service in judgmental thoughts about the preacher, the musicians, the volume, the parents of the crying babies, and everyone else that comes to mind, while the one at home humbly gives thanks to the Lord for the technology to hear his word from the pastors of her church.

You hypocrites.

A little over 20 years ago, I noticed a young lady coming to church on Easter Sunday.

From the pulpit, I could see her.

She came in late.

I could see that she looked a little disheveled and maybe out of sorts.

She was the out-of-place person in that little church.

It would have been very easy for anyone to judge her that morning for any so-called impurities with quotes around it.

But anyone who would have done that would have been a hypocrite that day.

Because that morning, that young lady awoke with a strong impression in her spirit that she should go to church.

So she got up early, she got ready to go, went out to her car, and it wouldn't start.

So she started to just give up and go back into the house.

But she decided that God wanted her to be in church that day.

So she got on her bicycle and she rode a mile down the gravel road to the church, getting bitten by a dog on the way.

That's why she was disheveled.

After church that morning, she returned home riding her bicycle home.

And that afternoon trusted in Jesus to save her from her sin.

Oh, that thousands upon thousands of disheveled and otherwise impure people would darken the doors of churches, would stain the carpets with spilled coffee, would cause discomfort because of their not belonging to hear the gospel and to follow Christ.

But would we be hypocrites?

If that was here.

God calls out tradition's hypocrisy.

When tradition's voice is finally quieted, and God's voice is heard.

Problem is that when God's voice is finally heard and he corrects things, it offends people.

Notice verse 12.

The disciples came and said, Jesus, did you know that the Pharisees were offended?

As if by now they don't know that he knows everything.

Did you know that the Pharisees were offended when you said this?

Now to illustrate this, I'm going to follow God's pattern and risk offending people.

We have an unwritten and unspoken tradition here at Faith Evangelical Free Church that the Christian and American flags are posted at the front of this sanctuary room.

When they've been removed for one reason or another, they always find their way back.

Their presence in this room is an American patriotic tradition.

But nowhere in Scripture does God's word declare that they should be present.

But what if they were a stumbling block to someone who has come to Christ from an entirely different national background?

Would you put your tradition over their following Christ?

When tradition, I'm sorry, when Jesus demands your utmost commitment and loyalty, when Christ demands you take up your cross, not your flags, are you offended?

A flag's presence symbolizes authority.

It symbolizes trust.

It symbolizes following.

It symbolizes submission, respect, and honor, among other things.

Would you be offended if they were removed because the elders determined that they represented conflicting calls of authority and submission that Christ demands only for himself from his people who are gathered to worship him?

If I haven't done it yet, I probably really turned you off now.

Really tried hard to find elements of our gatherings that mirrored what's going on here.

The Pharisees, Jesus says, are not believers in Him.

They're blind guides with blind followers who would eventually suffer the consequences for their blindness.

And it's here that we see the results of elevating tradition over God's word.

Jesus says tradition eventually leads to destruction.

If you put tradition over God's word, eventually the blind people are going to lead the blind people into a pit.

Meaning they're not going to get out.

He goes even further.

He says, My father has not planted these blind people.

That takes us back.

Back to the parable of the sower and the seed, and Jesus said, Listen, there's an enemy who sows weeds, who sows tares.

They're going to grow up together, but at the end of the age, the weeds are going to be pulled up first and they're going to be taken away and they're going to be burned.

He says, These blind Pharisees are not plants that my father has planted.

In other words, they're weeds.

They're seeds sown not by the sower, but by the devil.

Because they miss the freedom that comes from God's word rather than the restriction of traditions.

See, Jesus' followers, Jesus' disciples, are free to eat.

The blind, following the blind, only get what the blind can find.

The tragedy, I think, is even multiplied when people called by the name of Christ are offended by the plain expression of his word when it confronts their traditions.

There's one final truth that we must not miss.

True righteousness comes from a change of heart, not from tradition.

Jesus ends his encounter with the spiritually blind Pharisees with a biology lesson.

Food goes into the mouth, to the stomach, and it's eventually eliminated.

Right?

Natural process.

Jesus says whatever originates outside of your body doesn't defile your body.

It's what originates inside a person that brings impurity.

Now he's speaking spiritually here.

If you eat with unwashed hands, it's not going to defile your spirit.

See, the Pharisees are trying to correct an impure heart by washing their hands.

A lot of good that does.

Change the heart.

This is what he meant when he said to Nicodemus, You must be born again.

Change the heart.

Once the heart is purified, that purification begins to be seen on the outside.

One commentator says it quite well.

He says, behavior flows from the heart.

And if the heart is changed, then with the law of Moses and the example of Jesus as a guide, men and women can find their way to the practical application of their obedience to the law of love and the radical demands of the God who is king.

You take care of the inside and you follow God's word and you look to Christ, and you'll find your right way to life.

But if you set around yourself traditions, expectations that God Himself has not set in place, you're just going to find yourself as a blind person.

What do we do with that?

What do we do with that?

Well, next week I will at least wear a jacket.

It'll make me more comfortable.

What traditions?

What traditions do we have?

No, it's not talking about what you do for Christmas, what you do for Thanksgiving, what you do for New Year's.

That's not the kind of thing we're talking about.

What he's addressing here are spiritual, religious traditions that we establish, that we raise up around ourselves, maybe even out of good and righteous intentions, that eventually take over and begin to plug our ears so that we don't truly hear what God says.

At the risk of offending you even more.

If you're offended, I've already turned you off, so may as well say one more thing.

It's not the responsibility of whoever stands behind this pulpit to apply the God's word to your life.

Whoever stands behind this pulpit, it's their responsibility to open up the word of God and to explain it to you.

So that you, with ears to hear, can follow the leading of the Holy Spirit to say, What are the traditions in your life?

I don't know the traditions in your life.

God does.

So you've heard the explanation of God's word, you've heard it, and now it's your responsibility to take God's word and to walk with his spirit and to speak with his spirit and to speak with Christ and say, What are the traditions in my life that need to be undone?

Demolish.

Crushed.

So that I can start hearing what God says.

This is just a reminder.

Dressed the way I am, I'm uncomfortable.

But I thought it would be a good way to illustrate.

You know what?

We have traditions.

And some of you were probably wondering about it, and some of you may have been distracted about it.

And if you were distracted by it, that may be a tradition that you need to work on.

Are there expectations that we have of God's people, of God's, God's, God's leaders, of God Himself that we have raised up and established as something that supersedes what God actually says?

So here's how you test that.

If it bothers you when that is not followed, it's probably a tradition that needs to be undone.

Not undone in that you don't do it anymore.

Not undone in that it's not followed anymore.

Not undone in that it's not respected anymore, but that it's undone in the sense of it no longer takes priority in your heart over the word of God.

That's why all we want to do on a Sunday morning is stand up here and pray God's word, speak God's word, and sing God's word.

Because as that becomes a priority in our worship, we then take that out and it becomes a priority in our life.

And when it becomes a priority in our life, other people see it and are drawn to it and say, why do you do it that way?

And you can say, Come with me.

I'll show you Jesus.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, may we see you.

Not in the way that we have made up in our own hearts and minds, as our own expectations of who you are and what you do and what you expect, but may we see you in your word as you reveal yourself.

Lord, by your spirit, work in us to open up any areas of our hearts and minds that we have established as not willing to have your influence, to demolish those traditions, those expectations, those standards, so that you and your word might rule.

That might be painful.

That might be really difficult.

So give grace by your spirit and power by your spirit to work through those so that we might have blind eyes given sight.

Use your word to draw people, to draw the impure to new life in you.

Even today.

May we see you with clear eyes, the risen and ascended and glorified Christ.

May we leave here today as your representatives, honoring you in all the ways that are just.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.