Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts. You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.

The pharisees here are calling out the disciples for not following the tradition of cleaning before eating. But Jesus knew well God’s law, and that this particular rule was a creation of man and not of God. The laws of cleanliness in the book of Leviticus were given to the jews by God to help them to avoid disease and contagion. But they were never meant to subjugate and enslave people by the law. So how did we get to the point where these church leaders were more concerned with their own laws over God’s?

It started with a sincere desire to not ever transgress God’s Law. The church leaders created rules that would prevent themselves and by proxy, everyone else, from ever getting close to breaking the law…, essentially building fences around the law. But then they became overly legalistic about their own rules, and ended up building even more fences around their fences. For example: In God’s law, if a jew had come into contact with a dead body or blood, or other things that are full of disease, then you are unclean and cannot eat or be around other people until you are clean of potential disease. But in order to protect against offending god in any way, the pharisees extented this “uncleanliness” moniker to every aspect of jewish life…, be it temple access, or participation in daily communal life, or even entering your own home.

The pharisees and scribes were the keepers of the law, and the job that they gave themsleves was to keep track of all the laws and “help” the Jews navigate the legal structure of the vast morass of laws that they themselves had created. But these rules got so numerous that they came to be burdensome, and the obsession with following their own “man-made” law became more important to them that it ultimately distorted the actual reason for why the law was given in the first place.

While the pharisees probably understood God’s law and the actual logical reason for all the rules, the average jew probably did not. So the pharisees began to think of themselves as parents watching over their children, and believed that their job was ultimately to protect these simple jews from themselves, instead of actually teaching the jewish people God’s actual law and why it is so important to follow.  The people, on the other hand only knew the pharisees had many rules, and that if they wanted to practice their faith and gain access to the temple, and basically do anything in their jewish community, that they had to do what the pharisees said. This lead to distrust, and indignation of all parties involved.

And so Jesus is calling them out for not actually doing their jobs…, for not actually teaching the law to the people, and the reason for it, but instead using their knowledge of all of the laws to aggrandize themselves with status, power and wealth. In todays reading we find that Jesus (the actual law incarnate) has taught His disciples the true meaning of the law, and as such these men understood what it is that God truly wants from us and they were following those laws, and not the rules of the fallen and corrupt men. If that too is your goal in life, then all of the other things will logically follow. St. Augustine once said “Love God and do as you will” and I think that is also what Jesus is saying here as well.

Help me lord to love you first and foremost, and to make that the driving principal of my life. Amen.