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

As is often the case, there is a lot of things in this passage of note and I was planning on touching on many of them.  So, I went back to the first story in this passage to begin.  And I was struck by the question Jesus’ disciples asked Him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”  Jesus was not even a little bit apologetic about offending the Pharisees.  His response to His disciples made it clear that He was not concerned about offending them.  I want to note that this was not the first time where Pharisees had confronted Jesus over details in a way that suggests they were looking for something “wrong” rather than listening to see if He was correct.  In His response to His disciples Jesus makes it clear that He is not going to spend any time worrying about offending people who are busy looking for reasons to be offended.  The Pharisees were not worried about offending Jesus, or His disciples, but Jesus was supposed to worry about offending them?  But Jesus’ reason for not worrying about offending them was even more basic: in their hunt for reasons to find fault they had lost track of the basics.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees here goes back to what He said in the beginning of Chapter 7 of this Gospel when He told us, “Do not judge,…”  There He went on to talk about addressing the major issues in our own lives before we confront others over minor issues in their lives.  Here He points out that the Pharisees are focusing on a minor issue in other people’s behavior while overlooking a major issue in their own lives.

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