TheoTrek — A Journey with God in Discipleship
Defining Acceptability
Matthew 15:15-28
Rev. Chrístopher Harbin, First Baptist Church, Huntersville, NC
18 April 2010
The Jews were very concerned with ritual purity, ancestry, and questions of belonging and participating in the traditions associated with the Law. Most of the concerns of ritual purity surrounded the issue of being acceptable to God and not offending God’s holiness.
There were laws regarding what we might consider nothing more than manners and customs, but which served to deal with distancing themselves from sin and the inadvertent breaking of God’s instructions to the chosen people. There was nothing wrong with most of this, but it often became abusive when law, procedure, custom, and practice took precedence over giving value to God’s priorities of justice, mercy, love, and care for those without power and privilege.
Jesus seemed to the disciples to throw the baby out with the bath water at times, so they challenged him and he challenged back for them to review their priorities. He reminded them that God was not so interested in the external aspects of law, but in the motivation of the heart.
Then he took it a step further. He led them outside the safe confines of Israel into enemy territory. There they were confronted with a woman who was ritually impure. From the traditional Jewish perspective, she was worthless. Jesus answered her pleas from that traditional standpoint, but then he ignored the tradition to deal with her in grace. It was an opportunity for the disciples to make a new judgment based on grace and not tradition.
She was already acceptable to God because of her faith and God’s willingness to offer grace. It was not law or tradition that made her acceptable. It was the love of God, even for one who religious tradition shoved aside as worthless chattel. The rules about keeping internal purity suddenly fell away in the face of grace. Are we ready to use these new paradigms to determine acceptability? It may be, after all, that what is really worthless is much of our definitions.
—©2010 Chrístopher B. Harbin