When is a Commandment Not a Commandment?

When is a commandment not a commandment?  It's a question we struggle with.  The scriptures require careful reading and Matthew's story of the Pharisees' criticism of Jesus's disciples eating without washing their hands provides an illustrative example.

This story takes place in Galilee.  Both Matthew and Mark write about it.  Mark states that the Pharisees had come up from Jerusalem to see Jesus and they noticed that when the disciples ate they did wash their hands.  The story below is related by the Gospel of Matthew.  They had ... concerns.

Matthew 15:1-14.  

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 'Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?  They don't wash their hands before they eat!'

Jesus replied, 'Any why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?  For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.' But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is 'devoted to God,' they are not to 'honor their father or mother' with it.  Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.  You hypocrites!  Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: 'These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.  They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.'

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, 'Listen and understand.  What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiled them.' 

Then the disciples came to him and asked, 'Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?'

He replied, 'Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.  Leave them; they are blind guides.  If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.'

There is a lot of background missing to this story.  It sounds a bit like, “Hey, Jesus!  Why don’t your disciples eat oranges?”  And Jesus replied, “God really hates that you like apples.”  And the disciples were left confused.

Jewish scholars constantly searched the scriptures to discern their meanings.  The Pharisees, in particular, had their own genesis during the days of the Maccabean kings when they rose up in rebellion against Jewish kings who would pervert the Torah to suit their own political greed and they fought and paid for their zeal with their lives.  They had dedicated themselves to maintaining the purity of Judaism in a corrupt, Hellenized and Roman world that could care less about the Torah and the Creator.  Sound familiar?

The Rabbis studied the Torah and used  the Midrash – an interpretive method of inquiry, examination and commentary to discern the truth. Finding the kernel of truth and keeping its visible in ways that the people would understand.  These interpretations became part of the Mishna, a body of law and explanations based on the Torah; the guiding document for all Jewish Law.  

Halakah is the technique of taking this Law and defining what compliance looked like.  Here's a completely made-up example.  The law says you must stop at stop signs.  But what does that mean?  You might say that to “stop” means that you must stop no further out than 2 meters from a 6-sided red sign with the white, centered, letters STOP.  You must remain stopped for no less than 1 minute. You must accelerate your car at a rate of no less than 0 to 25 mpg within 1 minute.  If you do not do all of these things, you have violated the commandment to stop at a stop sign.

The commandment to wash one’s hands before eating is an example of the Midrash Halakah interpretative method.  It is also the heart of the argument captured in Matthew's story.

When the priests serve in the Temple, they are required to ritually wash themselves.  Sometime during the 9^th century BC, in Solomon’s temple, as the priests sacrificed the animals given to them, they were required to ritually wash their hands as well before eating the sacrificed animals.  The Babylonian Talmud says this was at the initiative of King Solomon and only applied to priests, on duty in the temple, before they ate sacrificed animals.  It did not apply to anyone else.

Sometime around 32 BC, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai had gained followings for their wise interpretations of the Torah.  Both of them came to the conclusion that the priests of Aaron’s lineage had hands that were always unclean and they needed to ritually wash before eating ANY food offered them in the Temple.  

These Rabbis claimed that this new practice wasn’t new at all – it was an inspired interpretation of what had been standard in the days of Moses.  The Jews had just forgotten to do it. 

This was a period in Jerusalem's history where they struggled to define just what a Jew was. Jerusalem and Judea at this time were in the throes of an internal civil war that had been going on since Alexander the Great hellenized the world in 323 BC. The Romans were already pulling the political strings in Jerusalem and Marc Antony had placed Herod the Great on the throne despite the fact he was not fully Jewish.  The Maccabean families were plotting how to regain the throne but their religious purity was suspect as well.  They had blatantly usurped the powers of the High Priest when they had been in power.  Many Pharisees had fought a long guerilla war against the Maccabean rulers to force them to return to a pure Judaism and large numbers of them had been crucified by the Jewish king for it.

The Torah prescribes the death penalty for those priests who ate their offerings in a state of uncleanness.  Whereas before it had been satisfied by the act of ritual bathing the new requirement (or the "revived" requirement) was that there must be an additional hand washing to be legitimately purified and comply with the Torah’s command.

Some 60-70 years later, the schools of these two Jewish sages were bickering amonst themselves over who had to wash their hands and when.  The Pharisees of Shammai's school tended to more zealous to defend ritual purity.  They now felt that all Rabbis and their followers should wash their hands before eating anything.

This is where the story picks up.  Jesus calls them on the fact that they have been continuously inflating their legal interpretation of the commandment that PRIESTS ON TEMPLE DUTY eat sacrificed meat with clean hands to the point where it now had nothing to do with the commandment in the Torah.

“You break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” Jesus informs them.  He calls them on the fact that they are presenting this inflated interpretation as a commandment from God.  He points out another instance where, through their inflated interpretations, they have made the initial commandment meaningless – that of the duty to support one’s parents.  The Pharisees have allowed people to skip supporting their parents if they gave the money to the Temple instead, arguing that supporting God is better than supporting one’s family.  No dice, says Jesus.  “…their teachings are merely human rules.”

It is interesting to see how the Pharisees’ arrived at these interpretations and instructive for us.They would take a verse’s specific meaning and then expand it into a general principle.  For example,

Matthew 6:26. 

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they?

The specific meaning of that verse might be:  God the Father loves the birds and gives them food although they have not earned it.

How could you expand that meaning?  There are a couple of ways.  You could say that it means that God the Father LOVES US and will take care of US even though WE haven’t earned it.  You could say that because God the Father loves us, we don’t have to do anything to earn it and he will take care of us. 

I would argue that Jesus is not getting rid of the ritual laws of purity.  He is warning the Pharisees (and us -- as I apply the same technique of expanding the meaning) about the dangers of expanding the meaning of the commandment into other circumstances.  It's a bit of a slippery slope. I would also argue that he is warning about confusing best practices with commandments.   

I would be interested in hearing your interpretation.