Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees are debating a highly complex and developed system of Jewish purity regulations at the time of Jesus . All societies had purity laws of one sort or another; our children today are taught when and how to wash their hands to prevent infection and disease, and any restaurant owner has a very strict code of hygiene. So, what’s the problem? Why would anyone grumble about purity laws?

First, we need to distinguish the surface issue from the underlying issue. The question Jesus was asked was about purity; but the first answer he gave was about people obeying human traditions rather than God’s word; and he gave an example.

The debate between Jesus and the Pharisees was between two different ways of understanding what it meant to be a good Jew in the first century. This wasn’t just about doctrine or what we would call ‘ethics’, but about political agendas as well.

The charge Jesus levels against the Pharisees and legal experts is that, by teaching as fundamental law what is in fact only human custom rather than divine revelation, they are guilty of hypocrisy. They are claiming to be teachers of God’s truth and law, but in fact they are only teaching human traditions.

To make his point, Jesus reminds them of a clever way in which a tradition, or custom, was being used to enable people to get around their financial obligations to their parents. Like a cunning tax accountant finding a loophole in the law which enables someone to get away without paying any tax at all, the legal experts had found a way in which someone, by declaring their property to belong to God, can be free of all further obligation to their parents. Hypocrisy indeed: it was God who commanded the duty to parents in the first place, and officially ‘giving the money to God’ actually makes a mockery of the God they are claiming to honor.

The wider issue for Jesus and the Pharisees was: who speaks for God today? Who is offering a way of life which honors the God who spoke through scripture (something Jesus assumes throughout)?

The Pharisees had built up over two centuries an agenda which was both political and religious. The two went together. The traditions they had developed meant that scripture was being interpreted and applied in a particular direction, supporting a particular program. Jesus was challenging the very basis on which the Pharisees had built up their ‘traditions.’

Jesus’ argument for what He was doing was that it was the fulfilment of scripture. Go His way, and we got scripture thrown in. Go the Pharisees’ way, and scripture – supposedly the basis for tradition, but actually often undermined by it – would lose out.