Section 23What really makes you dirty?

One day some Pharisees and religion experts came from Jerusalem to check up on Jesus, whose reputation had been filtering down into Judaea.

"Why," they asked, "do your students eat with defiled hands?"

By defiled they meant unwashed. The Pharisees and orthodox Jews in general insisted on washing their hands diligently prior to eating – a practice handed down by tradition. Even on returning from the market, they would not eat without first bathing. They had all kinds of ritual washings, including for cups, pottery and brass pots.

No one denies that in general it is a good idea to wash hands, as well as dishes, before eating. But there is a difference between being advised of a good practice versus being criticized as immoral for failing to follow this practice. We may reflect that when the disciples were with Jesus, there was no need for worry about the germ theory of disease.

"Isaiah was right about you frauds when he prophesied, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. They worship me in vain, teaching people to follow man-made rules. You ignore God's law and stick by human traditions."  [wrm.x1]

Jesus continued, "Moses said, honor your father and mother. But you tell your followers that tithes and offerings  [wrm.1] come before taking care of your poor old parents! So your rule has nullified God's word. And you do many more things like that."

Jesus called out to the people nearby. "Listen to me and understand: A person is not defiled by what goes from the outside to the inside. It's the things that proceed out of a person that defile him!"

A bit later, his disciples said, "Are you aware that the Pharisees were offended by that saying?"

"Every plant not planted by my Father will be rooted up," Jesus replied, adding, "Don't worry about them. Can the blind lead the blind? If so, both will fall into a pit."

Later, when they were indoors, Jesus' students asked him to be more explicit.  

"You don't understand either?" he responded. "You don't realize that what goes into a person doesn't defile him because it doesn't go into his heart? It just goes to the stomach and then is flushed out."

(Later, Christians saw that statement as meaning that people can eat any kind of food, that Jewish dietary laws were not to be enforced.)

"It is what proceeds out of a person that defiles him. For from within, from the human heart, come forth all sorts of evil ideas."

Following from evil intentions are sick sex acts, thefts, false witness, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness. "It is these things that defile the person. But eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person."

Tiring of so much public attention, Jesus and some of his men took a trip northwest into the region of the Syrian towns of Tyre and Sidon, which were on the Mediterranean. Jesus stayed in a house where he tried to keep his presence under wraps. But that idea didn't work.

Almost as soon as he got there, a local woman cried out to him from outdoors: "Sir! Please help me! My daughter is horribly tortured by a demon!"

Jesus replied, "Madam, I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel."

The woman was not Jewish, but a Greek-speaking Syrian.

He continued, "The children must be filled first. For it is not proper to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

"True, Sir," she answered. "But even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the children's table."

"For saying that, you can be on your way," said Jesus. "The demon has left your daughter."

The woman returned home and found the girl resting in bed, with no demon.

After the visit to Syria, the Jesus group crossed Lake Galilee and went on a teaching and healing tour of the Ten Cities region. That area, which contained both Jewish and Gentile settlements, was south of the lake and east of much of Galilee.

At one point, a deaf man who also had difficulty with speech was brought to him. Jesus took the man aside into a private place. Putting his fingers into the man's ears, Jesus sighed, looked skyward and said, "Open!" Next Jesus spat on his fingers and put some of the spittle onto the man's tongue.

It wasn't long before the man's ears opened and his speech became easy to understand.

Jesus told those present to keep that miracle quiet. But, to no avail. Telling people not to talk just made them talk more!

Sometimes God prefers that people not see how he does things. We may conjecture that Jesus wanted privacy so that he could keep doubt away and focus his belief in the power of God to achieve this work – as was the case when he healed Jairus's daughter. Some have wondered why Jesus needed to physically touch a man's ears and use spittle as part of the healing. Shouldn't Jesus simply have spoken a command, and performed the healing? Did not what Jesus was doing have an echo of primitive – and forbidden – magic? In fact, we may consider that perhaps he wanted privacy because of accusations that he was healing people via Satanic magic.

In any case, several thoughts occur:

¶ Who are we to tell God how he and his servant should heal someone?
¶ Spittle from Jesus would have had curative power. He had never sinned. So anything coming from him was holy.
¶ The fact that Jesus needed privacy and that he sighed deeply enough for others to hear implies that this case was very difficult. A great problem had to be overcome. Hence, he needed to do things that helped focus not only his belief in the coming of the cure, but also the afflicted man's belief. That is, the actions helped to focus thoughts in the right direction.

Realize that persons deaf from early childhood generally have no capacity for ordinary speech. They can make a few noises that their close relatives understand, but cannot speak because they never learned a verbal language. 

Not only can they not speak, they cannot think in words. In fact, their inability to think verbally can severely affect their ability to think in abstract terms – that is, to think the way the average adult thinks. But even a person who becomes deaf after learning to talk could lose the ability to speak well from lack of hearing himself speak. (This is why it is so important for the deaf to learn sign language at an early age.)

So it seems very likely that Jesus not only had to miraculously repair the man's physical hearing system, he also wished to be sure the man could speak fluently, which would require giving him a new mental structure that "remembered" how to speak and knew the meaning of words he had never heard before.

Quite a tall order – even for a wonder worker!

People began to realize, this rabbi does nothing that isn't excellent. The deaf hear, the mute speak, the sick are healed, the lame walk, the blind see.

A lot of people also began to wake up to the fact that the God of the Jews must be real.

We may remark that though Jesus' reputation was hard to stifle, different people saw different miracles, with some seeing greater ones than did others. So though people hoped to obtain healings from him, they were unaware of who he was. By and large, they did not detect that he was their Savior even though they were hoping for miracles.

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