What a close reading of the Gospel of Matthew demonstrates is that Jesus was no milquetoast. Through His words and actions, He represented a real threat to religious traditions. (He still does!) He also threatened the positions of those religious leaders who relied not on God, but on those traditions. (He still does!)
The point is that Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, has a demonstrable personality. Absolutely loving and absolutely just, bent on bringing the fallen human family, back into relationship with God, He has decided preferences. He cannot abide those who deliberately obstruct others' view of God. He is intolerant of the legalisms that religious dictators use to elevate themselves, knock others down, and leave God's true will for us in the dust.
1. Matthew 15:1-9. Matthew 15 opens with the Pharisees posing a question designed, as most of their questions of Jesus were, to trip Jesus up. "Why," they asked, "do your disciples play fast and loose with the rules?"
Specifically, the Pharisees wonder why the disciples don't ritually cleanse their hands before eating. Mosaic law said that if a person touched something impure, then they would be rendered impure and unqualified to participate in any religious rituals. Jesus doesn't necessarily disagree with the customs of His people. Nor is He commending bad hygiene. But He does believe that the Pharisees have got things backwards. Religious law, Jesus says, is meant to benefit us. We don't exist for the benefit of the law.
Jesus will not allow the Pharisees to take a holier-than-thou approach to Him or His disciples. Instead of answering the Pharisees' question, He shoots one back at them:
"Why do you use your rules to play fast and loose with God's commands?..."Notice that Jesus isn't talking about God's rules, but the Pharisees' rules. They had found 612 rules in the Bible (our Old Testament) and from them, they had extracted all sorts of other rules. They were quick to use them as strait jackets on others.
They also had created casuistic exceptions to their rules. For example, if a person wanted to travel on the Sabbath, they could get around the command, the Pharisees thought, by only traveling "a stone's throw," that is the distance you could throw a stone. The Pharisees eluded violation of this rule and traveled great distances by continuously throwing stones ahead of them as they traveled. (Can you picture this in your mind? How stupid the Pharisees must have looked? But how righteous they would have convinced themselves they were being? Lest we laugh too hard at them though, aren't their things that we do just so our neighbors will think we're good people?)
The Sabbath, as Jesus was prone to point out, was not invented to be a noose around human beings. The Sabbath was meant to be a day of respite for people and a time to hear God's Word. In other words, the Sabbath was meant to bring liberation.
But the Pharisess, as was their inclination, turned Sabbath law into one more arena in which they could proudly "earn" spiritual merit badges. (Although not in God's eyes. From God, we cannot earn salvation or merit. It's all a gift to those who believe in Jesus Christ!) They also demonstrated how much contempt they actually had for the law--and by extension, the God Who gave the law--by bending it to do what they wanted it to do.
Jesus went on:
"God clearly says, 'Respect your father and mother' and 'Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.' [Jesus knows the Law better than the Pharisees.] But you weasel around that by saying, 'Whoever wants to, can say to father and mother, "What I owed you I've given to God." That can hardly be called respecting a parent. You cancel God's command by your rules. Frauds!..."Jesus is here referring to a Jewish custom--the law of Corban--that said that anything that belonged or had been offered to God couldn't be used for anyone else. The Pharisees said that if you had some personal belonging which you would prefer not to be used by your parents, you could claim it was devoted to God and be freed from any obligation to share with or care for your parents. This loophole was used willfully by some to sidestep God's command to honor mothers and fathers.
There's not a trace of milquetoast in what Jesus says. He excoriates the Pharisees for giving their religious rules higher place than God Himself, the love of God and neighbor to which God calls us, or the very commands they ostensibly uphold.
2. Matthew 15:10-20. Jesus then calls the crowd together to explain why His disciples didn't undertake the proscribed ritual cleansing before having dinner. "It's not what you swallow that pollutes your life," Jesus says, "but what you vomit up."
Nothing that comes at us from the outside can inevitably tear us from a relationship with God. It's only what we do that can do that.
3. Matthew 15:21-28. We see the extent of Jesus' compassion in an incident involving a Canaanite woman. It takes place in the region of Tyre and Sidon, two cities that are important in this area where non-Jews, specifically Phoenicians and Canaanites, live. If you remember anything about the Old Testament, you know that the Canaanites were the occupants of the land God gave to His people, the Israelites, many hundreds of years earlier.
For more on this passage, read here.
4. Matthew 15:29-39. More of Jesus' compassion, in contrast to the seeming indifference of His disciples, is seen in the balance of the chapter. Jesus is bent on fulfilling His mission of bringing the Kingdom of God to the whole world. He makes it clear that we are either in His way or standing with Him. Never think of Jesus as a milquetoast!
[Check out the previous installments of this series:
Long-Awaited Savior
Scholars from the East
The Freedom to Be Weird
This is a Test
Trusting What You Can't See
The Theme Taken to Its Ultimate Expression
Happiness
Explicating the Beatitudes...and More
Authenticity and Trust
Jesus' Radical Ethics
Friend of the Outcasts...
The Conflict Deepens
Guidelines for Loving the World for Christ
No More Religion!
The Subversive God
Stories About the Kingdom
The Emperor Who Had No Clothes vs. the God Clothed in Humanity]
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