Some reminder of where we are at this point in Matthew’s narrative: the story has been running, we might say, on two parallel tracks. One track tells about Jesus’ immense generosity in healing all who come to him and about the crowds that gather to listen to him and seek his help. The other track is a story of conflicts with an increasingly angry group of devoutly religious people. (Matthew has also clued us into another threat to Jesus—the ruler Herod Antipas, who is suspicious of Jesus because of his popularity and because he revives Herod’s guilty conscience regarding John the Baptist.) 

One thing that ties these two strands of narrative together is the issue of purity. It is a matter of cardinal importance to the devout. Jesus, on the other hand, while not rejecting it entirely, subordinates it to another element in the faith of Israel: the love of neighbor. He freely risks impurity by, for example, touching lepers and even an apparently dead body (9:18-26). In chapters 15 and 16, these two strands will be brought into closer relation to each other.

I notice that this time his questioners come from Jerusalem (15:1). Does that make a difference?

Yes. Later on, after the destruction of Jerusalem in the Jewish War, Galilee would become the center of Jewish religion. But in Jesus’ day, that was definitely Jerusalem’s role. So this represents an escalation of the conflict. The local champions of strict piety haven’t made much headway in combatting this wandering preacher and healer. Now, a new team enters the picture from Jerusalem itself. 

But the question they raise is about tradition, not purity, isn’t it?

Yes, but the tradition in question is a purity tradition—the washing of hands before eating. There may be some question as to how universal this tradition actually was among Jews of Jesus’ time. But it’s easy to see why it would have been at least a widespread practice among the devout. The purity of food was always open to question unless it was produced, stored, handled, cooked, and shared under carefully specified conditions. Clean hands helped ensure that the food remained pure. But for a wandering group like Jesus and his followers, water for washing hands might not always have been readily available. 

Still, Jesus responds in terms of tradition.

Quite right. After all, his challengers framed the issue in terms of tradition, even though a purity rule was their example. Since their direct objections about issues of purity hadn’t gotten anywhere, they are trying a kind of flank attack by accusing him of carelessness about tradition. And Jesus responds by saying, in effect, that tradition always has to be subject to higher values, offering as a negative example a tradition that allowed children to circumvent their obligations to their parents by stating that their property had been designated as a gift to God. Some scholars question Matthew’s understanding of the practice, but the practice that Jesus refers to here may not be identical to the form found in later Rabbinic Judaism.

So Jesus rejects the tradition because it violates the Ten Commandments?

Yes, the scriptural honor due one’s parents can’t be compromised by mere tradition. It’s a bit odd, of course, to find Jesus insisting on this when he has repeatedly distanced himself from the centrality of the family and insisted that his disciples will have to do the same. Still, the presupposition of the devout from Jerusalem in this story is that the existing tradition is inviolable, and Jesus counters that presupposition by arguing that there are higher values that even venerable traditions cannot annul.

This is a powerful argument, since his questioners can’t avoid acknowledging the pre-eminence of the Torah. Tradition was supposedto be a way of making the Torah usable in the current era—quite different in many respects from the era when it was written down. It couldn’t, in theory, be used to contradict Torah. But Jesus goes further by attacking his questioners with a quotation from Isaiah 29:13, accusing them of substitutinghuman rules for divine ones. (The quotation comes from the Septuagint and differs a little from the passage as you find it in the NRSV.) Tradition isn’t just something inherited from the the past (“the elders” in vs. 2); it is the creation and property of those who enforce it (“your tradition” in vs. 3, “human precepts” in vs. 9).

But if this argument is about tradition, why is Jesus’ following speech to the crowd (15:10-11) all about purity?

Because purity was the real issue. The complaint, remember, was that the disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating—a purity issue. The authorities from Jerusalem are presenting it as an issue of disrespect for the tradition precisely because other efforts to criticize Jesus’ attitude toward purity haven’t gotten far. Jesus rejects all absolute adherence to tradition as such, but the real chasm between him and his questioners is purity.

In effect, he dismisses purity, too.

It would be more precise to say that he relocates it, though that may not be very different! Purity codes always focus first and foremost on bodily boundaries, particularly bodily orifices. A person’s purity is threatened by what may go into the mouth, by how one treats bodily wastes, by sexual acts. And remember that, as we said earlier, impurity is contagious, which means that purity requires constant vigilance to preserve.

But long before Jesus, people had also begun to extend the language of purity to apply to what we might now call “moral” or “ethical” issues. And, in vss. 10-12, Jesus frames this shift in the form of a definition—one that actually replacesphysical purity with “purity of the heart.” Taking his dictum seriously means that physical impurity simply ceases to be a central concern. That doesn’t make it an evil, and Jesus himself, as far as we can tell, continued to observe it for the most part. But physical purity is no longer a form of access to God, nor is physical impurity a barrier. Cleanliness, it seems, is not in fact next to godliness after all.

This is a pretty cryptic way of saying all that.

Yes, but memorable, isn’t it? A good pithy saying. Jesus’ questioners, in any case, understand exactly what he’s saying and “take offense,” as the disciples report to Jesus. Jesus’ response is very harsh: “they are blind guides of the blind.” With that, he effectively denies them any authority at all. 

On the other hand, the disciples don’t seem to be sure what Jesus meant.

Yes, fortunately for us, they ask for clarification (15:15). Food, even if eaten with impure hands, just goes through the body. It has no effect on one’s purity. True purity must reside in the heart—the body part that metaphorically stands for intention and purpose and integrity, as Jesus explains in vs. 18. This doesn’t make purity any less important; if anything, it becomes more so. But the nature of purity has been radically shifted.

But then Matthew throws us another surprise in the apparently unrelated story of the Canaanite woman. What’s the connection with purity there?

The first clue is the word “Canaanite.” Compare the quite different terms Mark uses in his version of the story (Mark 7:24-30): he describes the woman as “Greek-speaking, Syrophoenician by descent.” Mark’s language is what contemporaries might normally have used. It meant that she came from roughly the area that is now Lebanon and, like many people there, was Greek in culture. Matthew, however, deliberately chooses an archaic term, drawn from the Torah and the Book of Joshua. He was technically correct, for the distant ancestors of the Phoenicians were, in fact, Canaanites; but the word “Canaanite” is used here because it was deeply pejorative. It characterizes the woman as a member of that ancient people whose idolatry and impurity brought down the wrath of God on them and resulted in their destruction in the land of Canaan (roughly modern Israel and the Left Bank) and replacement by the people of Israel, as recounted in the Book of Joshua. This woman is not just any gentile outsider. She’s the accursed “other,” a supreme example of how physical impurity brings on God’s wrath.

And Jesus ignores her!

Yes, he’s being totally aloof. He won’t even acknowledge her existence. But notice that the woman addresses him in Israelite terms: “Lord, Son of David.” That makes it more difficult to ignore her. After all, even at the conquest, some Canaanites were accepted into the people of Israel, most notably the harlot Rahab and her family (Josh. 6:22-24). And this woman has set aside ethnic hatred because she has heard that, in Jesus, the power of God is at work for healing. Why can’t Jesus, too, move beyond ancient enmity? Eventually, the disciples appeal to him to get rid of her, and he responds—not to her, but in her hearing–that he was sent only to Israelites. When she persists, he gets still more insulting with his language about dogs. 

Dogs didn’t have a good reputation in the ancient world. They existed mostly as urban packs, ranging the city to look for scraps. They even feasted on the dead on battlefields, as Homer says at the beginning of the Iliad.(There’s only one “good” dog in the Scriptures. If you’d like to meet him, you should read the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha.) Dogs were about as unclean as anything could get. 

I can’t imagine why the woman would put up with this.

She wants healing for her daughter. And whether she has heard reports about Jesus’ teaching on purity or simply understands intuitively that the God Jesus serves is not constrained by anxieties about purity, she presses him in a way that he cannot say “no” to: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” It’s exactly what Jesus himself has been saying over and over. God’s inexhaustible goodness is not limited to the pure. It overflows and erases that boundary. 

Why does he say, “Great is your faith?”

Better yet, “Great is your trust,” the more precise translation. Like the centurion in chapter 8, her trust in God’s goodness has enabled Jesus to cross a boundary. She has, in a sense, converted him to a wider understanding of his own teaching. At the same time, he performs the miracle without touching her or her daughter. Even though purity is no longer essential in approaching God, he continues to observe it. Perhaps that’s for the sake of other peoples’ anxieties—his disciples, for example, who might find too close an approach to this Cananite a little too shocking.

Next up: FEEDING AS MIRACLE AND METAPHOR (15:29-16:12)