Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

I am going to try to connect what Jesus says in His debate with the Pharisees at the beginning of today’s passage with His comment to His disciples in chapter 16 about being on guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about His disciples failing to wash their hands before eating, He responded by pointing out how they had developed traditions around one of the laws of Moses which functioned as a loophole against the requirements of a different one of the laws of Moses.  After He did this, His disciples were aghast that He had risked offending the Pharisees.  And this is where it gets interesting.  Jesus was not the least bit concerned with offending the Pharisees.  This deserves a bit of unpacking.  Who were the people whom Jesus was unconcerned with offending?  They were those who had just attempted to shame Him by pointing out that His disciples did not live up to their standards of righteousness.  And what had Jesus done which offended them?  He had pointed out that their standard of righteousness did not measure up to the one laid out in the Law of Moses (or perhaps just His interpretation of that Law, since I am sure they would have had an argument making their interpretation the right one).  The point being that they were not concerned with offending Him, why should He be concerned with offending them?  Which brings me to the point about the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  Those two groups operated from the assumption that they were the arbiters of righteousness and offending them was a sin against righteousness, but if you were offended by them, it was merely a sign of your unrighteousness.  And this allowed them to fool both themselves and others into thinking that anyone who opposed their selfishness was unrighteous.

That did not go where I thought it would, but I am going to stick with it.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.