Matthew 15:1-20
The Daily Office
The story jumps around a lot today. But there is one common theme: symbols and identity. The Pharisees want their fellow Jews to adopt various public rituals, such as ritual handwashing and only eating certain foods, to establish their identity as God’s holy people. To be holy is to be “set apart” from the rest of the corrupted world and marked as God’s own. Jesus responds in two ways. First, he points out how laws and public rituals can too easily become a loophole to avoid doing the right things that may also be the hard thing. Second, Jesus insists that symbols of tribal identity are no substitute for doing the right thing by your neighbor.
Sometimes, symbols really do mean something. When the successors of Alexander the Great tried to destroy Judaism, a few hundred years before Jesus, they brought statues of the Greek gods into the Jerusalem Temple. They also ordered that Jewish males not be circumcised. Just a symbol? Perhaps. But it clearly represented an attempt to eradicate the Jews’ worship of the One God. Circumcision, handwashing, food; they were symbols which Jesus’s fellow Jews had used to protect their faith for centuries.
But in the end, they are just that: symbols. And if symbols become loopholes, or a convenient way to divide “us” from “them,” then those who cling to them become “hypocrites,” people more concerned with appearance than the heart. It takes time to get to know a person. No one is going to open their heart at a first meeting. It takes time to see how someone’s actions add up to a life of giving, or just getting. Never let first appearances be your guide in judging others.
No comments:
Post a Comment