From The Heart

 

Matthew 15:1-20 (CJB)

Jesus quotes Isaiah:

 …..⁵ But you say, ‘If anyone says to his father or mother, “I have promised to give to God what I might have used to help you,” ⁶ then he is rid of his duty to honor his father or mother.’ Thus by your tradition you make null and void the word of God! ⁷ You hypocrites! Yesha‘yahu was right when he prophesied about you,

⁸ ‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far away from me.
⁹ Their worship of me is useless,
because they teach man-made rules as if they were doctrines.’”

 

“Thus by your tradition you make null and void the word of God!”

I found out some things about promising to give to God (korban) in order to cheat on the obligation to honor parents. The hypocrisy lay in manipulating the law by a kind of legalese. By officially naming something of value as ‘korban,’ a person could justify not using it to support their parents. But designating an asset as ‘korban’ didn’t mean that it was actually given to God. Instead, the designation served as an entailment that prevented its use for any other purpose. That meant that when circumstances changed—as in the death of the parents—the label of ‘korban’ could be removed, and the wealth or asset would revert back to the owner. In order to do that, though, a person would have to completely disregard the reality of God to manipulate the law in their own favor. This is what made them hypocrites. (Note: there was no such thing as secular law in the Jewish world at the time that Matthew was written, except for Roman law, and Roman law had a tradition of allowing conquered states to govern themselves largely by their own indigenous laws.) What they were doing was sort of like creating a religious tax shelter that allowed them to avoid the obligation to care for their parents and keep the money for themselves.

 

“Their worship of me is useless….”

This one is the kicker, though. In this seemingly straightforward phrase there is a world of implication. It assumes that it’s possible for worship to be useless.

Some of the other words used to translate the Greek ‘matēn’ are ‘folly’; ‘in vain’; ‘fruitless.’ Personally, I like ‘useless,’ because it implies that worship both can, and should be, useful. (Just a note: this word ‘matēn’ is only found in this passage, and the parallel passage in Mark 7:7)

This understanding connects with the Zen principle of ‘skillful means’ and makes it possible to understand an act of genuine worship as being an authentic act of practical, hands-on service in the Realm of God.

Also, the original quote from Isaiah, which is paraphrased in Matthew, also mentions ‘the heart,’ and echoes what Jesus says later on about “what comes out of the heart.” It also gives another gloss on ‘useless,’ using the phrase ‘lip-service.’

Isaiah 29:13 (CJB)

¹³ Then Adonai said:

“Because these people approach me with empty words,
and the honor they bestow on me is mere lip-service;
while in fact they have distanced their hearts from me,
and their ‘fear of me’ is just a mitzvah of human origin —

 

^…..17 Don’t you see that anything that enters the mouth goes into the stomach and passes out into the latrine? ¹⁸ But what comes out of your mouth is actually coming from your heart, and that is what makes a person unclean.

 

 

What comes out of our mouths comes from our hearts.

No getting around it— Our words reveal our hearts.

 

Hearts can be stony and hard

Closed; walled off from the world.

Out of such hearts come bitter, brittle words—

Words that deserve to be called lies.

But all hearts can be broken,

and it’s hard then, for such hearts to lie.

 

Mary Oliver knew about such hearts, in her poem:

“Lead”

 

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.