Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 15

Scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem—The presence of these individuals on the scene is significant in every way. They had been prominent in similar accusations.

They were the ones who had accused our Lord of blasphemy for forgiving sins (Matthew 9:3), of eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:11), of disregarding fasts (Matthew 9:14), of casting out demons by Beelzebub (Matthew 12:24), and of breaking the Sabbath (Matthew 12:2; Matthew 12:10).

We can believe it was their presence in the synagogue of Capernaum that led our Lord to adopt a form of teaching so unlike the usual tone of His Galilean ministry . And now they return to the attack with a new and characteristic accusation.

They wash not their hands when they eat bread. Mark, writing for Gentiles, explains the nature of the tradition more fully (Mark 7:3–4). What the Pharisees insisted on was not cleanliness as such, but the avoidance of ceremonial pollution. They did not shrink from dirt, but from defilement.

If they had been in the market, they might have come in contact with a heathen or a publican. If they ate or drank from a metal or earthenware cup, the last lip that touched it might have been that of a heathen, and therefore that too needed purification. The pride which led them to stand aloof from the rest of mankind showed itself in this, as in all their other traditions.

They could afford to tolerate such indifference from peasants and fishermen, as these belonged to the crowd they scorned as the brute “people of the earth.” What shocked them was to see the disciples of One who claimed to be a Prophet or a Rabbi indulging in that indifference. According to their traditions, the act they complained about stood on the same level as sexual impurity and exposed those who were guilty of it to excommunication by the Sanhedrin, or great Council.

By your tradition — It is better translated as, for the sake of your tradition. Our Lord’s answer, it should be noted, is an indirect one—an argumentum ad hominem. He shows that their traditional casuistry was in direct opposition to the “commandment” of God. The natural inference from that antagonism was that their tradition, in itself and apart from the commandment, had no binding authority as a rule of life.

God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and thy mother — At first, it might seem as if our Lord Himself, just like the Pharisees, had taught people to think lightly of the commandment He now emphasizes. He had called on people to forsake their father and mother for the sake of the gospel (Matthew 4:18, 22) and had excluded from discipleship those who loved father and mother more than Him (Matthew 10:37). We should not ignore the difficulty this presents.

However, the answer is not difficult to find. In our Lord’s teaching, a lower, natural duty was to give way in exceptional cases to a higher, supernatural one; otherwise, it remained in full force. In the teaching of the Pharisees, by contrast, the natural duty, enforced by a direct divine commandment, was made to yield to a rule that was purely human, arbitrary, and conventional. The two cases were not analogous but stood on an entirely different basis.

It is a gift—Mark (Mark 7:11) provides the Hebrew term, Corban, which was applied to anything consecrated—theoretically to God, but practically to the service or decoration of the Temple. In Matthew 27:6, the Temple treasury itself is called the Corban.

The casuistry of the scribes in this matter seems so monstrous at first that it is difficult to understand how any intelligent interpreter of the Law could have approved of it, except that the teachings of scholastic and Jesuit moralists present equally striking instances of perverted ingenuity.

The line of reasoning that led them to such a startling conclusion seems to have been this: diverting something consecrated to God for lesser human uses is sacrilege. Therefore, a man who declared his property as Corban was bound not to spend it on supporting even his closest relatives. However, the timing for fulfilling this vow was left to his own discretion, and no one had the right to hold him accountable for any delay.

With this loophole, the Corban practice became an easy method for evading natural obligations. It could be used to block the claims of the closest family members, even while the man continued to enjoy the use of his property and postpone fulfilling his vow until the very end of his life. Indeed, it seems this casuistry went even further, suggesting the consecration could be merely temporary—blocking the claims of a specific person and then expiring when that person passed away.