Lessons from Matthew 15: Hypocrisy

How do you handle it when someone confronts you with the truth?

The kind of truth that exposes your heart, your thinking, and your deeds. The kind of truth that penetrates your heart and sears your mind. The hard to swallow kind of truth!

Do you get easily offended? Do you get angry? Try to blame others? Or do you simply just deny such truths and go on your way?

Or do you take the truth when it is given and examine your heart, your mind, and your actions and seek to admit your fault if true and move on to take the appropriate actions to eradicate the error?

And what if that person who is giving out that truth is Jesus Himself? What do you do then? How do you react to the truth of His Word and what do you do if that truth doesn’t fit your agenda or what you understood to be true?

Over the next few lessons, we will see different responses to the truth of Jesus’s words.

In the first division we will see that Jesus condemned the religious leaders for their hypocrisy (Matt. 15:1-20). Then we will see where Jesus commended the faith of the Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:21-28). Thirdly we will see that again, moved by His compassion, Jesus fed the 4000.

Jesus condemned the religious leaders for their hypocrisy

So it appears that after the great miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew 14, and the events of Jesus and His disciples in the storm, and the great healings that took place in the town after, the word about Jesus and His ministry and miracles continued to circulate. It also appears that this news became very important on the agenda of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.

So important that we are told in verse 1 that they took time off from their religious rituals and came to Jesus all the way from Jerusalem.

These leaders approached Jesus by asking Him a question. They said, “Why is it that your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Now it wasn’t that they didn’t wash their hands before they ate. It’s just that they didn’t ceremonially wash their hands the way the Jewish religious leaders did.

You see, ceremonial hand washing was originally instituted by God only for the Jewish priests before they handled the godly items of the temple. This was to show that reverence and special handling was necessary for the things of God. This ceremonial cleansing of the hands was like that of a doctor or nurse before surgery.

But what happened was that the Jewish religious leaders (not God) extended this requirement to all Jews under all circumstances before eating. In fact, the Pharisees had imposed some 39 other regulations on the people such as Sabbath restrictions, dietary laws, and others.

They considered these laws essential to their religion, even though they were not required by God.

Do you think there are laws and rituals practiced today that are not required by God?

Terri Hamman

Faith & Fitness Coach