Seeds for 10/02/2023 - Matthew 15:1-9
Scripture: 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, “And 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.’”
Observation: There’s tradition (lower-case) and then there’s Tradition (with a capital T). Charitably, many traditions develop from habit and precedent as practical ways to apply biblical wisdom and commandments to life. The challenge is that traditions (lower-case) can calcify and evolve into ends unto themselves rather than a means to a greater end.
The eminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
That differentiation helps us hear what Jesus is driving at with His critique of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. They are stuck with traditionalism—a legalistic “dead faith of the living.” The tradition of their elders had taken the place of the deeper Tradition (capital T) of Moses, the scriptures that reveal the commands of God, the “living faith of the dead.”
Isaiah nailed it. Those lower-case traditions give lip-service to God, but they produce a heart that is more into them than into Him. The solution from Jesus, however, is not to set aside Tradition (scripture going back to Moses), just traditionalism.
Application:
Where do you see temptations to emphasize lower-case traditions over the great Biblical Tradition?
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, show me how to hold strongly to your Word and hold lightly to my traditions. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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