NOTES for Mat 15:1-20

Today's reading touches on one of the most important questions of religious life: the relationship between Holy Scripture and tradition. For every religion the problem of ritual purity has always been central, because ritual purity determines the very possibility of full participation in religious life. It is no wonder that the followers of the Pharisaic religious schools, being exceptionally devout people, asked Jesus questions concerning Jewish norms and rules of ritual purity. The question about washing hands is one of these questions (vv. 1-2).

In this case, of course, the issue is not hygiene but a purifying washing that was supposed to be performed before eating. The reference to the "tradition of the elders," however, clearly suggests that this is not about a commandment of the Torah, that is, of Holy Scripture, but about its interpretation connected with the Pharisaic tradition. Jesus answers a question with a question: can a commandment given by God and clearly expressed in Scripture be replaced by human opinions that have formed within any tradition at all, even an authoritative one? After all, any tradition is the fruit of human creativity, while the commandment is given by God (v. 3). By answering this way, Jesus appears to avoid the question, at least for a time. Yet very soon He answers it too, returning His listeners to the understanding of purity that the Torah originally implied (vv. 10-11, 16-20).

But on a more attentive reading it becomes clear that this answer is directly connected with the question of authentic and false tradition. Authentic tradition always puts first a person's spiritual condition, as well as his relationships with God and with his neighbors. This is what determines a person's destiny in the Kingdom, and also whether a person will be able to enter it at all. For religious consciousness, however, the external form is important. Any religiosity always carries something magical within it, even when the religion of Revelation is in view. And it often turns out that the external expressions of religiosity become more important than the essence. There is no dispute that God is more important than family; but does that mean that an offering for the Temple is more important than helping elderly parents? Hardly, since such an offering in itself does not determine the quality of the giver's relationship with God. Moreover, it may well turn out to be a means of forgetting about elderly parents without feeling any pangs of conscience, because formally the commandment has not been violated! Such formalism is always present to one degree or another in any religious tradition.

Perhaps this is precisely why Jesus did not create any new religion: Christianity is not a religion, but life itself in the Kingdom, and He constantly reminds His listeners that authentic tradition is the experience of the Kingdom. Such a tradition does not need to be maintained artificially: even without that, it will never lose its significance and will organically enter the Kingdom, becoming an inseparable part of it.

The accusation of breaking tradition comes from those for whom adherence to tradition has become an end in itself. Two positions collide; the dispute is over who actually keeps the law: the one who fulfills the external prescriptions, the necessary packaging of the law, or the one who keeps the essence of the law, even if from the outside it appears that the literal fulfillment of the prescriptions is being violated. But there is another problem: many pious rules are invented by people; they are not necessarily from God. How often the human obscures what has been given from above, and so we begin to substitute our ideas about God's will for His will itself!

Meanwhile, the Lord does not need the "correct" fulfillment of pious norms when it is indifferent to the true state of the soul. In guarding against ritual defilement from outside, and more broadly against any outside negative influence, it is too easy to lose sight of the evil within us that defiles us. But what nests inside us can prove to be a more explosive mixture than negative influences from outside. After all, we are the ones who accept or reject them.

If this approach causes someone to stumble, then such people have mistaken ideas about spiritual life. Christ's words about uprooting the plant not planted by the heavenly Father sound stern. But they contain a serious warning: if we see that a person has agreed to give in to temptation and has turned away from the Lord's ways, is it not because at first he rejected His will in the depths of his inner world?

All the most prominent religious systems—which, it should be noted, arose in warm climates—contain a concept of ritual purity and, conversely, defilement. This is usually understood to mean, quite literally, dirt: sweat, the dust that sticks to it, soot, and so on. All this leaves a person looking unfit to appear not only before the Most High but even before other people. The Old Testament is no exception, although the emphasis in the biblical concept of defilement shifts noticeably toward the moral sphere.

Christ does not reject the very concepts of defilement and cleansing. But, He says, it is not outward and accidental things that make you unworthy of the Almighty’s gaze, but what is done by your own heart. He contrasts the hygiene of the flesh with a kind of hygiene of the spirit: it is not dirt and soot that defile a person—a person, in Abraham’s words, is himself dust and ashes—but the active doing of evil. This is what spoils God’s design for the world; this is what disfigures creation.

It is natural that we, like the Pharisees, stumble over this, because it is far more convenient for us to establish outward cleanliness than to free ourselves from the evil in our own hearts. This is an essential checkpoint in the spiritual life: do you prefer appearance to reality?

But among other things, Jesus Christ’s words in today’s Gospel are an important revelation about the Father. Jesus explains to the disciples and to us that the Almighty looks at the essence of things. If you sincerely try to help your neighbor, it is the desire itself that matters in God’s eyes, not the weakness of its execution, because in that case He Himself makes up for your weakness. But if you do something vile, it remains vile in God’s eyes, however respectable its outward form may be.

The distinction between clean and unclean food, kashrut, has always played a special role in Judaism. This distinction is prescribed by the Torah, and the Torah connects it with the preservation of ritual purity. Purity, in turn, determines the possibility of sanctification, which is the goal and meaning of spiritual life both in Yahwism and in Judaism. But over time in Judaism, in the matter of kashrut, as in some other cases, a certain formalization took place: its meaning was not exactly forgotten, but moved into the background, while the norms and rules of ritual purity concerning food, like the norms of ritual purity in general, became an end in themselves.

Jesus returns kashrut to its original meaning. He says that the point is not what a person eats, but what he says. At first glance, words are not the most reliable criterion when the issue is the human heart. But they can say a great deal, often even what the person himself would prefer to hide. In particular, they often testify to the speaker's spiritual condition more than he himself may think, especially when they slip from the tongue involuntarily. And Jesus, of course, knowing this perfectly well, points out that the main purpose of all religious prescriptions must be a person's spiritual life, not religiousness as such. If that purpose is absent, religious norms and rules lose all meaning.

But this was not the only issue: after all, some teachers of the Torah had spoken of something similar even before Christ's coming. The issue was also that, for the Kingdom, the former norms and rules of ritual purity had truly become irrelevant in many ways. Of course, the question of purity in the Kingdom is in many ways even more acute than in our world, which is not yet transformed: in the Kingdom, as the experience of the early Christian community shows, any sin can prove deadly. But there it depends entirely on the human will, on one's intentions and value system. Nothing from outside can defile a person in the Kingdom. That is why Jesus speaks about what "comes out of the mouth": when the issue is words, one also has to speak about intentions, including those not always recognized by the person himself. Only they matter for the Kingdom. And all the norms and rules of external ritual purity matter to a person only insofar as he still remains part of our world, which is being transformed but has not yet been transformed.

If we recast the dialogue between Christ and the scribes in terms of modern life, what is being discussed becomes much clearer.

On the one hand, certain religious rules are put forward concerning the outward side of life and resting on the authority of particular people. The Greek πρεσβυτέρων is very accurately translated here as “elders”: it refers not only, and not so much, to people of ancient times as to those who are older and authoritative. In the New Testament Church the word immediately came to be used for clergy and leaders, regardless of age. We too now call people who are very much our contemporaries elders. On the other hand, the Savior says that such traditions (Latin traditionem, traditions) do not necessarily possess divine infallibility.

So: “Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For before Communion they do not read all the prayers prescribed in the prayer book.” He answered them: “And why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded: You shall not kill. But you say: if anyone works as a defender of the homeland, he may kill. Thus you have made the commandment of God void by your tradition.”

The scribes and the Lord use examples of completely different orders: a tiny detail of everyday ritual and one of the Ten Commandments. Christ’s conclusion sounds like a verdict: “In vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” The point, strictly speaking, is not that ritual is secondary; after all, one cannot do without it. The Lord Himself says: “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Mt. 23:23). Yet there are weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. By sinning against them, you cannot become truly human, even if you observe every smallest detail of ritual and custom.