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I. THE MOST NATURAL ACT MAY BE PERVERTED INTO A RITUAL SIN. The disciples were seen eating with unholy hands, that is, unwashed! How this came about we are not told; probably it was a case of necessity: there was no water to be had. Probably it was a choice between going without food and being ritually correct, or being ritually incorrect and supplying the wants of nature.

II. THE MEANING AND USE OF RITUAL IS CONSTANTLY LOST SIGHT OF BY SMALL MINDS. "The Pharisees and all the Judaeans, unless for a pygmy's length they wash the hands and arms, do not eat." The Talmud (Lightfoot) directs that the hands be washed to the elbow - a rule like that here hinted at; "pygmy" denoting the arm and hand. The custom went beyond what the original ritual required. And so the associations or the market-place were thought peculiarly profane. They carried the rule out in application to cups, jugs, copper vessels, and couches; things which cannot feel, which are not spiritual, and which therefore are no subjects of "baptism. The root of the error was:

1. Blind respect for custom. Custom commands our respect; but a blind respect defeats its end and meaning.

2. The reversal of the spiritual order. That order is: first the spiritual, then the material; the body for the soul. The Pharisaic order was: first the material, and the spiritual through the material.

3. The postponement of the present to the past. What tradition of the fathers can make it a duty to neglect the welfare of the sons? The rules of the past conserved the privileges of the present; if they block the way and tend to hurt human life, they must give way. We must study the perspective of duties if we do not desire to become narrow in intelligence, and defeat the spirit of law.

III. ATTACHMENT TO RITUAL MAY ACTUALLY OBSCURE THE VIEW OF RELIGIOUS DUTY. Religion begins in the heart. Unless we love our God and our fellow-man, we shall miserably blunder in our construction of duties. Great teachers have always placed us at this moral center; face to face with God, in immediate relation to his universal imperative.

1. Isaiah (Isaiah 29:13). He taught that the lips might readily be made to do duty for the heart; and that invented obediences might distract from the genuine, natural obedience of the right and loving heart.

2. Moses. To go back further in the stream of sacred tradition: no name more honored than that of the great lawgiver of the desert. He distinctly enunciated the duty of filial reverence, founded on the instincts of the heart. How were the Pharisees carrying this out? The way in which Christ refers to this is keenly ironical.

3. Christ himself. The Pharisees can and do actually evade the great command of filial piety under the show of obedience to the ceremonial Law. By a general consecration to the temple of whatever might be useful to parents, it was made sacrilege to give anything to them, because whatever was given to them was included in the vow." A miserable trickery, cheating God of his due while seeming to obey him! Tradition may be so followed as to subvert its very essence; for there is no tradition respectable which does not enshrine Divine commands.

IV. THE TRUE VIEW OF PURITY RESTORED.

1. Impurity is not from without but from within. The external defilement may be cleansed away. It is not part of the man. The moral impurity is. It is only what the imagination conceives and the will affirms that is real for us. "In morals and in religion the conscious mind is everything" (Godwin).

2. This true view may require an effort to attain. Strange! the disciples "could not quite see it!" "And he said to them, Are you also so inconsiderate?" And Christ must explain to them the lesson as to a class of tyros. Want of thoughtfulness in the mind is like want of stirring and raking to the garden-ground. The weeds and mosses soon creep. The man's thought is soon overrun by the trash of opinion and empty practice, if he will not think for himself.

3. The human source of evil. It lies in the thought, the fancy, or imagination. Lust "conceives "a thought of pleasure, clashing with the thought of right. The conception germinates, and brings forth a deed. But a splash of mud that we receive on our garments in crossing the street has no effect on our conscience. And generally, what we do not adopt as part of ourselves, cannot be imputed to us as sin. "What does not affect the moral character, cannot affect the relation of man to God" (Godwin). - J.

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KJV: Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and certain of the scribes, which came from Jerusalem.

WEB: Then the Pharisees, and some of the scribes gathered together to him, having come from Jerusalem.