Matthew 15:20

“These are the things which defile the man. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.”

It is such things that really defile a person. But eating with unwashed hands (while not a good idea hygienically) cannot defile the inner man. Thus Jesus is saying that the Pharisees are concentrating attention in the wrong place. They think of themselves as pure, and as all the problems being outside in the ‘world'. Thus they think that by ritual they will be able to keep themselves acceptable to God. But the truth is the opposite. The real problem with ‘uncleanness' is that it is within our hearts because we are ‘evil' (Matthew 7:11; Matthew 7:17; Matthew 9:4; Matthew 12:34), that is, are ungodlike, and ruled by passion and prejudice and false belief. It is true that we are to keep ourselves free from the taint of the world (1 John 2:15) but in the end our main problem is with ourselves. Thus while we do need cleansing, it will not be accomplished with water. For in fact in the Old Testament water never ‘cleanses'. Unless conjoined with sacrifices water is only ever preparatory to cleansing and ‘bathing' is regularly accompanied by the phrase ‘and will not be clean until the evening'. Thus the Pharisees had actually to twist a basic premise of Scripture in order to suit their purpose.

‘But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.' As Matthew often does he sums up by referring back to what started the incident (see Matthew 15:2). Compare Matthew 12:45 with Matthew 12:39; Matthew 16:12 with Matthew 16:6. He is not suggesting that the whole incident has been limited to this question, but that the initial question has been answered.

Note On Cleanness and Uncleanness.

It will be noted that Jesus is not here commenting on the Levitical laws of cleanness and uncleanness which are not in question. Nor is He oversetting them. He is concerned with a ritual which has grown up in the tradition, which is actually misrepresenting the significance of the genuine ritual. He considers therefore that the attitude of the Pharisees towards ritual is basically at fault. Thus He does not discuss which ritual is valid and which is not. Rather His answer gets to the root of the question as to what should be of prime importance in a person's life with God. Given that a person wants to please God, and be pleasing to Him, His whole point is that the Pharisees' concentration on the wrong things has led them totally astray. They have made ritual the arbiter of everything else, and in order to bolster their position have introduced false ritual. In their view it is right ritual that determines people's standing with God. He on the other hand makes the attitude of the heart central. His point is that God looks not at the externals but at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). The purpose of any ritual was, in fact, to make people have the right attitude of heart. While it accomplishes that, therefore, it may be retained. But the logic of that is that once the ritual failed in bringing about the right attitude of heart it should be dispensed with, which is why later that is what happened. Once people had in Jesus the Great Example (Hebrews 12:1), the lesser examples could fall away, and that would then include the wider ritual also.

The Scribes and Pharisees had introduced the new ritual of the washing of hands because they had the wrong idea about the ritual. Nowhere had the old ritual suggested that men were constantly being defiled day by day, as a result of general contacts. It had dealt with uncleanness arising from specific known cases. Nor had it suggested that that uncleanness could be removed by bathing in water. Bathing in water was in fact preparatory to other methods of dealing with uncleanness. It removed external dirt from the flesh (compare 1 Peter 3:21) so that men could then wait on God. There was in fact no instant way of removing ritual uncleanness. Such removal always required the passage of time.

The purpose of the laws of cleanness and uncleanness was in order to bring out the wholesomeness and perfection of the living God. At the other end of the spectrum was the sphere of death and unwholesomeness. Within the spectrum were different levels of uncleanness which related to death and blood, and different levels of unwholesomeness. Its purpose was in order to encourage people to live wholesome lives, and to avoid what was unwholesome. Thus clean creatures lived in the right sphere and avoided the dust of death. Unclean creatures lived in unwholesome spheres and were connected with the dust of death. Skin disease was a living death and must not come within the camp. Sexual excretions were a giving out of life, thus rendering a person closer to death, or in the case of blood were a direct giving out of life. Eating animals whose blood had not been offered to God was to partake of death. To touch what was dead resulted in being contaminated by death. And so on. But in most cases, once an unclean situation had been remedied, being restored simply mainly required the passage of a certain length of time in isolation after washing in water, sometimes connected with other ritual.

Jesus did not criticise these ideas. To Him wholesome living was important. It was a very different matter when He considered the ideas of the Scribes and Pharisees. They contributed not to wholesomeness but to superstition and prejudice, and suggested that water could wash away uncleanness. However, there is no doubt that His treatment of their misrepresentation brought out the non-necessity for the laws of uncleanness (as Mark 7:19 b discerns) once His own death and resurrection had produced a better example for men to look to. People who could look to the crucified and risen Christ no longer needed examples of wholesomeness and unwholesomeness. In that they had all the lessons that they needed. Thus in Acts 10 God revealed to Peter that the laws of uncleanness need no longer apply.

End of note.