Matthew 15:8-9 NIV “‘ These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’”
A little background on the context of Jesus’s words above: the Pharisees have shown up as Jesus has been healing the sick and ministering to large crowds. They’ve asked Jesus why the disciples don’t wash their hands before they eat. The Pharisees are pretty riled up about this and can’t believe the disciples are breaking tradition. Some things never change; my mom hounded me about this when I was a kid, too! If I could have only been a biblical scholar back then and come back with some scriptural rebuttal on why I shouldn’t have to!
Jesus, of course, calls them out on their hypocrisy, mentioning how the Pharisees are missing the point. One particular “tradition” they’d been following was designating all their wealth to the church. This seems noble until Jesus points out that the commandment to honor your mother and father means financially taking care of them first. The priority here is family, then church.
Jesus ends his scolding with the verse I’ve recorded, which actually requotes a passage in Isaiah 29:13.
This is the quintessential challenge for us, even today. The hand washing rule in Judaism was man-made, added to the giant codex of “things we must do to be clean/pure…aka worthy.” Did you know that out of the 10 commandments, the Jews expanded these to over 600! Now, is there anything wrong with washing your hands before you eat? Of course not. This isn’t the issue; the issue was the Pharisees’ focus on outward behavior and human traditions as more important than the inner state of their heart.
The key in the verse is “their hearts are far from me.” The word in Greek for ‘heart’ is Kardia, which is defined at the center of our being, both thoughts and feelings. Interestingly, the word for ‘away’ is the Greek word apecho’. There is a distinct double focus for this word; it means letting go of something by picking something else up. The object is far away because you dropped it to grab something else.
Isn’t this the case with our hearts regarding God? He doesn’t leave us or go away from us, but when we chase after something else (our own ‘gods’; desires, new trends, leisure, pleasure, success, but also rules, legalism, politics, etc), we ourselves go away. Again, it’s important to emphasize that none of these things are evil in and of themselves. Leisure is a good thing, success is a good thing, rules are good things… unless they become more important to us than the state of our heart towards God.
What I wanted to depict in this artwork is how our worship and honoring God with things we say is pointless if our hearts are far away from God. I depicted this with a dark stone weight in the shape of a heart. The words of “praise” and “worship” are the arrows pulled down and trapped by the heart. The arrows go every which way because of the Greek word above used for ‘vain.’ Mat’en means aimless, pointless, and unsuccessful. I wanted to depict the Pharisees as a teacher, with the ruler to gauge “worthiness” based on the stacks of rule books labeled “Tradition.”
A point of reflection: are you like one of the students being taught that your worth is based on outward behavior and following rules? Or maybe you have been in the teacher’s shoes, hyperfocused on traditions and admonishing others of their errors? If anything, you’ve likely witnessed people you’ve encountered doing this. For me, I must remind myself daily that it’s the state of my inner heart, not my outward actions, that Christ gave his life for.
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