Between the narrative so far and the discussion of "Clean and Unclean" that will now follow, Matthew inserts a summary statement about the Lord's healing ministry, 14:34-36: "And when they had crossed over they came to land at Gennesaret. And when the men of that place recognised Him, they sent round to all that region and brought to Him all that were sick, and besought Him that they might only touch the hem of His garment; and as many as touched it were made well."
A change of scene signals a change of theme in Matthew's Gospel, and that is part of his purpose. But there is more to it than that.
We have seen that one of Matthew's sub-themes in Book IV The Church is 'little faith.' The Church is the community of faith in Jesus, and Matthew is well aware that its faith is small. The difficulty we have in exercising a robust faith besets the Church in every age. We are for ever lamenting that our faith is weak. Matthew wants us to see - he very much wants us to see - that we should not let it paralyse us. The power of Christ is so very great that even a very little faith is enough to release it in quite astonishing ways. Faith as tiny as a mustard seed is enough to produce miracles. Peter's faith was timid, but he walked on water nonetheless. And the timidity of faith is here emphasised again in the fact that the crowds in Gennesaret hardly dared do more than reach out to touch the fringe of Christ's garment. But it was enough: "as many as touched it were made well."
The magnitude of the miracle is not commensurate with the magnitude of our faith, it is commensurate with the magnitude of Christ's power: that is the truth Matthew wants to hammer home. Faith is only the means by which we 'plug in' to that power; but so great is that power that even a faulty connection can have quite extraordinary consequences. We normally interpret the thing Jesus often said, "According to your faith be it unto you" as meaning "according to the measure of your faith be it unto you," as though to say, "The size of the miracle will depend on the size of your faith." I am not sure that we should. I think we should understand Jesus to have meant, "According as you have faith at all, large or small, so shall it be done unto you." If Christ's power to save were available only to those of great faith, precious few would be saved.
It is the presence of faith that matters, not its magnitude.
I would like to take this a stage further. I find it thought-provoking that in this Book of the Church there are in fact three such summary statements.
1. The first was in a lonely place;
14:14, "As Jesus went ashore he saw a great throng; and He had
compassion on them and healed their sick."
It was a chiefly Jewish crowd.
2. The second was in a populous place; 14:34-36, "When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret. And when the men of that place recognised him, they sent round to all that region and brought to him all that were sick, and besought him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well."|Gennesaret, the district on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee, was in our Lord's day heavily populated with a mixture of Jews and Gentiles.
3. The third will be in a foreign place;
15:30-31, "Great crowds came to Him, bringing with them the lame,
the maimed, the blind, the dumb, and many others, and they put them
at His feet and He healed them, so that the throng wondered when they
saw the dumb speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking and the
blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel."
He had withdrawn by this time to the region of Tyre and Sidon, His
one venture into strictly Gentile territory.
Whatever other reason Matthew may have had to include these three summaries, he is surely making a missionary point by their progression. The power of Christ to heal is for all nations. Matthew wrote for the Jewish Christian community, and all the language of his third summary statement - about the lame, the maimed, the blind and the dumb - is familiar Old Testament language about the Messiah. Matthew is saying that the Messiah of the Jews was given by God to bring healing to the nations. The reference to the fringe of His garment emphasises that: that is about as near as a Gentile dared get to a Jew. He makes the point even plainer by saying that the Gentiles in Tyre and Sidon "glorified the God of Israel." (15:31) The point may seem unremarkable - until we recognise that He does His miracles for Roman Catholics the same as for Protestants, for South Africa's blacks as well as for its whites, for Arabs as well as Jews, for Hari Krishna devotees as well as for nice evangelical Christians, for whores as well as for Church Wardens, for hippies as well for the gentry. It does not matter who touches Him - healing virtue goes forth from Him to all. What is important is that they come to Him. He makes men whole - any men, any women. The power of Christ to heal and save is for all - even though their faith be small.
One of Matthew's major concerns throughout his Gospel was the Gentile Mission of the Church, and it was the eyes of Jewish Christians he was trying all the time to open to it. Matthew would have made as agreeable a travelling companion to Paul as did Luke!
In this brush with the Pharisees and scribes we meet again the repeating pattern: Jesus does miracles, with the result that some respond favourably while others respond with criticism and hostility.
It is astonishing. Read v. 36 and v. 37 together and they say: "Jesus healed people all round the place," and all the Pharisees could say was, "You don't teach your people to wash." Let a man preach like an angel of God, and all some people will say is, "He wears his hair long." Nor was it a passing thing with them, as though they sniffed in haughty disdain, and 'cut Him.' They got really angry with Him. They came from Jerusalem to Galilee to have it out with Him. It was a head-on clash between Jesus and the leaders of orthodox Jewish religion.
But we ought to be fair to them. When they said, "Your disciples do not wash," they did not mean, "Grubby urchins." What they really meant was, "They're an ungodly lot; you should teach them better." In their view it was the observance of religious rituals that made you godly; you could not be godly if you did not do them. The exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees was the collision of two views of religion, two views of what obedience to God is about. And there is no way the two views can meet and both survive.
The 'cleanness' that concerned the Pharisees was ceremonial, not moral; yet to them the ceremonial cleanness was a matter of obedience.
It all started with Moses. He designed a tent sanctuary in the wilderness and a ritual of worship to go with it - quite an elaborate ritual in which washings of all kinds played an important part. What is more, the whole elaborate scheme was inspired by God Himself. So the proper observance of it was a matter of obedience ... was it not? Well, yes, it was. But why? What God gave to Moses, as the letter to the Hebrews plainly tells us, was a "shadow of the heavenly sanctuary," and the ritual "a shadow of the true realities." The Tabernacle and its elaborate ceremony was a representation of truth. But a representation of a thing is always a lesser thing than the thing itself.
Art is another way of representing truth. But art itself is not that truth. The truth art reflects is always a bigger and a truer thing than the art itself. Picasso it was who said, "Art is a lie that convinces me of the truth." That was his way of saying it. The thing you use to illustrate truth is less than the truth itself: in some ways it conveys the truth; in other ways it obscures it. A sculpture, for example, will convey some things about the person of which it is a statue truly - their size and shape and their facial features, but its very immobility will hide other features, like the daintiness of a woman's gestures, say (if it is a statue of a woman). In much the same way, the architecture of a church and the rituals that are done in it may represent much that is true about God. But the building and the ritual are not themselves that truth.
Every representation of truth is at a remove from it. That is unavoidable, and it is perfectly acceptable so long as you keep the truth in mind while you do the ritual. But that is what human nature fails to do. We let the ritual occupy our thoughts until we lose sight of the reality it was designed to express ... as do lovers, who kiss in the first bloom of their romance and passionately express the truth of their love in the kissing, but twenty years down the track are still formally kissing one another long after real affection has died. In the beginning they knew that their love was more than mere kissing. But when love dies the kissing goes on, becoming ever more formal, more ritualised, until they get into the silly situation where they cannot give up the kissing because to do so would be to admit the truth they cannot now face, that love has died. That happens no less with religious rituals. Forms of worship, deeds of obedience that once were done passionately because they were true carriers of living worship from the heart, must still be done, and ever more elaborately done, long after the spirit of worship has died and ceased to fill them.
That elaboration of religious rituals is what was meant by the "Tradition of the Elders." There were two sections of the Law: the written Law as given to Moses (the Torah) and the oral Law (the Mishnah). The oral Law was the elaboration of the written Law as they tried to make it apply to changing conditions - and it ended up becoming not only more important than the original commandment, but more important even than the thing the commandment was given to preserve. In the end the truth recedes so far from sight that the ritual you devise to express it leads you to betray it.
The tradition known as the Corban to which Jesus referred was a case in point. 'Corban' was a word used to describe what you devoted to God; your offering, for example. Now the Law had commanded that you should make offerings of thanksgiving to God. Very proper. The Law also commanded that you should honour your parents, and that might mean supporting them out of your income when they were too old to earn their own. All this obedience could get to be expensive! So the Pharisees brought in a handy by-law to the effect that you could declare the support you gave to the old folks to be your church offering: you did not have to give both. That way you could get a reputation for piety at the same time as you were guilty of godlessly neglecting your old folks.
The will of God gives way to the will of man ... in the name of true religion.
It is what is in the heart that matters. When the heart goes out of our religion, we are left with an empty and deceiving religiosity.
It can happen that way with anything we do that is religious. It can happen that way with the charismatic's lifting of his hands to pray every bit as easily and emptily as the Anglican's liturgical praying (there are Anglicans who do truly pray in their liturgy ... and the lifting of hands - and the clapping of them - was Biblical long before it was charismatic). The Roman Catholic Mass may get to be like that; but so may the singing of hymns in Protestant worship. Does Jesus sometimes say with equal force of us and our lusty singing: "This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me"? Have we never caught ourselves thinking uncharitable thoughts about our neighbour in the pew or our pastor in the pulpit while singing hymns that profess a commitment to charity and holiness?
When the representation of truth has come to occupy us more than the truth itself, we elaborate it to try and recover the inspiration; but each elaboration carries us a stage further from the reality, until the very thing that was designed to keep us in touch with the truth ends up insulating us from it. The truth is lost; the representation has replaced it. We comfort ourselves that we are still 'in the way' because we do all the things we did when first we trod it, but we are not. "We honour God with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him. In vain do we worship, teaching as doctrine (truth) the traditions of men."
When we sing sentimentally, "At even 'ere the sun was set, the sick O Lord around Thee lay," we forget that the reason they waited till sunset was that they were religious formalists, who were not going to bring out their sick to be healed till the ending of the Sabbath was marked by the setting of the sun.
What Jesus did here was to wipe the table clear of all this accumulated religiosity, and upraise the living truth again in its place.
Washing was intended to express real cleansing of the heart and the mind. But the cleansing of heart and mind is not dependent on the washing of the body, nor effected by it. To wash before you eat is always sensible (if water is available for it) but it hardly affects the gratitude to God it that is in your heart for what is on the table.
The same considerations applied to the food laws (what was kosher and what was not) which the Jews observed. So Jesus said, "Hear and understand: not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles the man." It is the inwardness that counts, not the outwardness. There are Christians who observe Sunday rituals meticulously long after they have lost touch with God. What comes out of our heart makes us clean or unclean, not what observances we honour.
"There now," the disciples said, "You've gone and upset them!"
"Then upset let them be," the Lord replied. "You have to choose whether you upset 'them' or upset God."
Jesus did upset people. He still does. He is an offence to us - to our complacency - to the comfortable defences we erect to shield us from the searing flame of truth. We have to be willing to be offended - mortally offended - to be clean. And if we will not stand for it, we shall stay filthy.
It is because He loves us - loves us truly, loves us fiercely - that Jesus will not spare us the hurt. He puts the knife in. Because He is the Physician.
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