Last updated on October 23, 2024
In yesterday’s reflection I wrote about Jesus’ compassion for the crowds that were coming to see him. He had compassion because they were harassed, and the primary ones doing the harassing were their Roman rulers. But they weren’t the only ones doing this. The Jewish rulers were also culpable.
After the Israelites were set free from slavery in Egypt, God brought them to a new land and established them as a nation. Part of being a nation was having laws, and he gave them these laws through Moses. It started with ten commandments, and from there those were fleshed out.
Over time, the number of laws grew, and at the time of Jesus there were over 600. From 10 to 600. That’s quite a jump. And this law, which was originally meant to provide a good foundation for living the lives that God wanted for his people, had now become a real burden. There was always something that a person was doing wrong, and the Pharisees were quick to point them out. And they had a tendency to major on the minors, which was very frustrating to Jesus because he knew the effect it had on the people. You never knew which of these 600 rules the Pharisees were going to be focusing on in a given day.
It was also frustrating to Jesus because the Pharisees were hypocrites. In this passage from Mark 7 Jesus points out this hypocrisy. Jesus told them, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! (Mark 7:9). As an example, he reminded the crowd that one of those original ten commandments was to honor your father and mother. Yet the Pharisees, who loved their loopholes, had a law that said if you said that everything you owned was “devoted” to God, then you were free from the obligation of taking care of your parents in their old age.
With this law (Corban) the Pharisees had completely missed the point, and they were doing more harm than good. Jesus said to them, “Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that” (Mark 7:13).