NOTES for Mat 15:1-20
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?