NOTES for Mat 15:12-21

When we read in the Gospel that this woman was a Canaanite, it does not mean she was "second-rate," or of the wrong origin, or had somehow else failed to please Jesus. We know, having read the Gospel and simply sensing it in our hearts, that Jesus is always ready to help and heal the poor, the sinful, and the rejected. For the evangelist's first listeners it was entirely clear that she was a real pagan: she believed in pagan gods, worshiped them, and offered sacrifices to them. That is exactly why the Lord subjects her faith to such a test - to help her understand why she is turning to Him for help and not to her own gods.

Here a line is drawn between a person's pagan ideas and turning to Jesus, that is, prayer. Prayer to Christ, and to the Father in Christ, is incompatible with paganism. At the same time, paganism does not necessarily mean belief in other gods. It can also be the very ordinary Christian hope not in the one God, but in something else: money, one's own abilities, one's political party, the thought that things will somehow work out, and so on. Paganism is when we live not for God, but for someone or something else, most often simply for ourselves. If we, while being such pagans, want to ask Christ for something and turn to Him in prayer, we will need, together with this Canaanite woman, to pass through a complete revaluation of our faith and understand why we have turned to Christ and not to our idols...

Today's reading again offers us two episodes that, at first glance, seem directly unrelated: the healing of the Samaritan woman's daughter (vv. 22-28) and the miracle of the multiplication of food, similar to the one described in the previous chapter (vv. 29-38; compare Matt 14:13-21). And yet there is a connection between them. That connection runs through the Kingdom, whose manifestation underlies the events described in both episodes. After all, both the miracles and the healings mentioned in the Gospel narratives essentially always speak of one thing: the Kingdom which, in the Savior's words, "has come near."

For the listeners of the evangelist Matthew, the law of Moses is not simply a set of obscure rules and ordinances. Matthew quotes the words of the Lord Jesus that "heaven and earth will pass away sooner than one stroke of the law" (Matt. 5:18). In what, then, does the conflict between Christ and the Pharisees consist?

For the Pharisees, it appears, the law is a set of commandments by doing which a person can please God, draw closer to Him, and fulfill His will for humanity. Such is the approach of religious consciousness in general, for which the essence of the relationship between God and a person consists in performing certain actions that God prescribes for people to perform. A familiar approach, is it not? What, then, does Christ say about the law? In His interpretation, love for parents is higher than an offering to the temple, and purity of heart is more important than purity of hands. This is the direction toward which the Mosaic law points. Then, in order to live according to God's law, one must be more attentive to the heart and to relationships with God and people than to the performance of laws or rules.

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?

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.