The collective narrative of the Four Gospels now moves through a series of travels. Jesus visits Jerusalem, then reunites with the Twelve at Tiberias (or Bethsaida), they land at Gennesaret Village (after the walking on the water incident), and then Jesus makes for Tyre north of the lake on the coast of the Mediterranean. A reference is made to Jesus also visiting the coasts of Decapolis before looping back to “Dalmanutha” (an undiscovered place; probably a bad transcription of the name Magdala in ancient manuscripts), and then reaching Bethsaida.
Within these travels, the combined narrative presents four important discourses, nearly in a row. In this case, I mean discourse as a discussion with an audience, particularly one in which Jesus replies to prompts with some kind of extended answer and not necessarily a prepared sermon. A group of scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem interrogate Jesus about disciples not washing their hands when they eat. Later in Tyre, a Greek woman approaches Jesus requesting him to heal her daughter and a short discussion ensues. Again later, scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign of his miracle-working power; soon after, Jesus’s disciples forget to bring bread for a voyage across the lake, and in both episodes, Jesus draws out a discourse on hypocrisy and performative worship. And finally, in Jerusalem Jesus heals an infirm man, and Jewish people there accuse Jesus of having violated the Sabbath, and Jesus replies with a discourse about what it means for him to be the Son of God.
At the heart of these four discourses is Jesus contending against playacting, what the word “hypocrisy” literally meant in its original Greek. (Our English word “hypocrite” is Greek in origin.)
On Defilement
In two episodes, possibly in close proximity to each other, a group of Jerusalemites confront Jesus about his adherence to Torah. We’ve already covered well the important context of purity culture surrounding such confrontations. The Pharisees and “certain of the scribes” upheld and even policed the commandments in the Torah stipulating cleanliness. Many things could render someone unclean under the law, or “defiled.” A very long list of cleanliness and dietary commandments that Israelites enforced as law acquired many interpretations and applications over time. Our own Word of Wisdom in D&C 89 contains specific admonitions that in the 20th century got interpreted into various modern proscriptions. (For instance, as a youth, I was once warned by my bishop to avoid chocolate because it could contain caffeine, which he said was prohibited by the Word of Wisdom; we all have similar stories.) We can find regional variations, which was true of Pharisees and scribes in Jesus’s day who insisted certain traditions were as sacrosanct as the written Torah.
These Jerusalemites observed a hygienic ritual before eating: washing their hands. And they taught that one became defiled by eating without so washing. To Jesus, they held up the Jerusalem elders who wouldn’t even touch food after they had been to the market, and then would make sure to clean their cups, pots, and other vessels. Mind you, these ancient folks didn’t clean their utensils out of microbial hygiene; they did this as an extension of Torah purity codes. And now they find fault with Jesus’s disciples for not doing the same.
The implication here is clear: the Pharisees and scribes insisted that Jesus’s disciples were defiled and must attend to purification rituals, which, obviously, they weren’t doing. So they further implicated Jesus in breaking commandments, not following his priesthood leaders, and disobeying God.
Jesus replied to their questions with strong words. “Well hath Esaias [Isaiah] prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” There’s a bit of a textual issue with this quotation: if you look up Isaiah 29:13, you won’t see the full quote, just the first sentence. Because of this, readers of the King James Version have assumed the second part, “Howbeit in vain do they worship me…” was Jesus’s own words and not still a quotation from Isaiah. It turns out, in Jesus’s time, all of that was a complete quotation of Isaiah, the copying of the earliest Old Testament manuscripts incidentally dropped that second sentence. (If you look up Isaiah 29 in the Septuagint, the earliest compilation of books as the Old Testament, you’ll see what I mean.) To Jesus and especially the Jerusalem scribes who at the time were caretaking the Isaiah text, all this was a well-known Isaiah prophecy.
Textual issues aside, it’s clear Jesus invokes Isaiah to call out these contentious Pharisees and scribes. Right away, Jesus points to their performative religiosity. These men attend to purification for the display of purification, to be seen as pure and undefiled. Such performance devoid of actual authenticity had only the effect of honoring God with their lips but not with their hearts, thus worshiping in vain. Jesus’s criticism went squarely after their status as the authorities in Jerusalem, the leaders: teaching their own traditions as God’s doctrines disqualified them. We can hear an echo from the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus had described such performative devotion as “they have their reward.” Inauthentic displays of devotion did nothing to engender an actual relationship with God, and so only afforded some admiration from others, something hollow compared to what God offered. These people weren’t really pure, they only acted pure.
Jesus then explains true defilement: what comes out of the person, that is what defiles the person. In Luke, Jesus points out how these Pharisees had made clean “the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.” What follows was absolutely radical in its time, what I can’t emphasize enough: read through all of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers—hugely important books of the Torah that outline all the laws of Israel—and tell me they don’t fixate rather constantly on all the external sources of uncleanliness and defilement. And then consider these words from Jesus directed toward devoted students of those very laws, no less: “Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him.” Nothing? He clearly wanted them to get the point, telling them to listen to him, everyone of them. Nothing. Not the food, the dirt, the blood, the lice, the mold, the cups, plates, whatever. Guys, this was huge—Jesus just tossed out, what, 90 percent of the everyday codes of the Torah? Yep. And he revolutionized everything. No, the external world doesn’t defile you; your interior self, your true self, that is the only thing that is or isn’t defiled. “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”
We can sense the frustration of moving from visible moralism to invisible moralism. I can see your hygienic practices, whether you wash your hands or dress in laundered clothes or clean your house; I can’t see you thoughts, your feelings, your motivations. I can’t tell how you’ve been injured by life, what setbacks still afflict you, and what contexts those bring to your decisions, your mistakes, and your behavior. One person merely putting out their hand to embrace another human being could have performed a monumental feat of courage, overcoming decades of abuse from their upbringing and from society; while that same act performed by another person could involve malicious intent. We can’t see defilement, which should completely alter our moral orientation. Concentrate on yourself: cleanse the inner vessel within you, confront your own shortcomings and weaknesses.
On the Children’s Bread
Mark and Matthew mention Jesus heading to the borders of Tyre and Sidon and there meeting a Greek woman. Marks says this woman was “Syrophenician by nation” and Matthew says “of Canaan.” This has led many English readers in the 18th and 19th centuries to make racial assumptions about this story that in truth, really aren’t there. First off, a Syrophoinikissa is a later first-century name for Phoenicians who lived in the Roman province of Syria at the time of Jesus. You probably have heard of Spartans, Trojans, and Athenians. These were separate Greek nations that we often just associate with ancient Greece rather than smaller localities. Phoenicia had a similar Greek affiliation, so “Syrophenician” in the King James text shouldn’t send us into racial speculation. This woman was very simply a resident of Tyre, a city of ancient Phoenicia populated by Greek people—Greek by heritage and by language. The fact that Jesus appears to converse with her so freely has some scholars thinking Jesus must have spoken Greek; otherwise, we’d have to imagine a Greek woman of Tyre speaking Aramaic with Jesus, which seems quite unlikely. The detail that she was Canaanite doesn’t match the context whatsoever and has been attributed by some careful analysts to scribal error in the earliest manuscripts. Even so, the term “Canaanite” could have meant simply “foreigner,” since some Jewish Christians apparently called some Romans “Canaanites” when clearly Romans weren’t from Canaan. (This reminds me of the nineteenth-century vernacular of pioneer Latter-day Saints in Utah who often referred to non-members as “Gentiles” regardless of ethnicity; this meant even Jewish people could have been labeled “Gentiles” for not being church members, a strange semantic shift, indeed!)
This Greek context for the story is hugely important. It governs how we understand what Jesus says and why he says it. When we take this episode out of context, we can end up treating Jesus like he favored certain races over others, which in my careful assessment misses the account altogether. Put simply, Jesus sat at dinner in a Greek household in the region of Tyre when a Greek woman approached him, entreated him to leave with her to where her daughter was afflicted with “an unclean spirit,” and Jesus replied, “Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.” In this case, the surface-level/literal reading actually aligns with the context. In these coastal households, the Greek custom was to serve children their food ahead of everyone else. In some households, the children served the adults the food, and so the children were supposed to eat quickly. Dogs, like swine, scavenged the refuse, including dinner scraps. Jesus’s statement implies that the woman had approached him during the children’s course of dinner, and that to leave at that moment would attract the household (like so many miracles did) into leaving as well, and Jesus didn’t want the dogs to eat up the children’s food while they would be away. So, he calms the woman by saying they could attend to her daughter in due time once the children had eaten.
But the woman points out that the dogs aren’t a problem because the ones there will eat the crumbs that fall from the table. She’s eager for her daughter to be healed and is confident the children there won’t suffer for it if they leave right away. They can leave enough crumbs to keep the dogs satisfied. Jesus reacts much the same as he did with the Centurion who had asked Jesus to heal a servant from a distance: here, he tells the woman her daughter was already healed.
The point of emphasis in this story isn’t some kind of class or racial status that Jesus was enforcing, but rather the woman’s urgency to entreat Jesus right away on behalf of her daughter. This pokes a hole in an argument that some of Jesus’s disciples took up after Jesus’s resurrection. Some insisted that Jesus favored the Jewish people ahead of the Gentiles; some further insisted that Jesus only ever intended to visit the Jewish people and never the Gentiles; and others (like Paul and eventually Peter) insisted Jesus favored the Gentiles all along and simply visited the Jewish people first out of a privileged order to fulfill prophecy. Setting aside the disciples’ later infighting over the question of missionary preaching, it’s clear from this and other episodes that Jesus simply ministered to whomever approached him in trust and earnestness. A non-Jewish Centurion, a non-Jewish widow from Nain, a Samaritan woman, others in Samaria, this Greek woman were all examples of Jesus responding immediately and without reservation to Gentiles—and, moreover, examples of Jesus pointing to them as examples of greater trust than all of Israel.
On the Sign of Jonah
Scribes and Pharisees approached Jesus again, this time “tempting him” (in the original text: accusing him) by seeking a sign, presumably some kind of grand miracle like the feeding of the multitude or casting out a spirit. “Why doth this generation seek after a sign?” Jesus replies. He affirms that no sign will be given. That’s Mark’s version of events. Matthew and Luke have Jesus giving a short discourse on the sign of Jonah, what archaeologists see in the material artifacts of earliest Christians as the first emblem of Christianity: the fish. “Ye hypocrites,” they have Jesus saying, “ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?” As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale/fish, so the Son of Man would be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
We know the wording is fishy. (Pardon the pun.) It’s because Jesus wasn’t buried three days and three nights in between his death and resurrection. As we’ll see when we visit that part later on, Jesus died on a Friday around twilight just before the Sabbath and was entombed Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night, and then was not found in the sepulcher on Sunday morning. That would be two nights and one day buried, not three days and three nights.
What’s more: the discourse mentions the “men of Nineveh” and the “queen of the south” rising up in judgment against their generation, a rhetorical reference that appears in literature—including the gospels of Matthew and Luke—after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Mark was the only of the four gospels written before the sack of Jerusalem, and curiously, it omits these sayings. There’s a possibility that this “sign of Jonah” discourse was retrojected back onto Jesus by people decades after the fact because of early Christian oral traditions about the sign of the fish. Mark suggests Jesus simply said he didn’t respond to demands for signs, and that tracks with the rest of the gospel narratives about Jesus: he had not come to put on a show, but rather to minister to people in goodness and love. The playactors were those who used religion for performance, those interrogating Jesus about a sign proving him to be on God’s errand.
The story immediately continues with disciples forgetting to take bread onto their boats and while crossing the lake, realizing it, and Jesus using the occasion to warn them against the “leaven of the Pharisees.” Apparently, these disciples took Jesus for talking about literal bread and literal leaven, as though the Pharisees’ recipes weren’t kosher or something. But Jesus mentions the miracle of the feeding of the multitude, and they notice the analogy and understand that Jesus was warning them against the performative religion of the Pharisees—the “doctrine” that wasn’t really doctrine, the tradition that masqueraded as doctrine. And his analogy with the leftover baskets of bread from the miracle brought their attention back to him and not abstract commandments or traditions. The path away from the leaven of the Pharisees was receiving the bread of life direct from the source—Jesus’s own words not supplanted by others’ or by traditions. (More on the “Bread of Life Discourse” next time.)
On the Word of the Son of God
We mentioned how John’s narrative of Jesus making a trip to Jerusalem around this time probably didn’t match the chronologies given by Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and that this could mean one episode occurred at the end of Jesus’s life rather than during this part of the ministry. Even so, it’s not like we have much counterevidence to rule out John’s placement of the story, and so I include it here as one of these four important discourses for how it aligns with this theme of Jesus exposing hypocrisy.
“Wilt Thou Be Made Whole?”
John has Jesus visiting Jerusalem for an unnamed feast and while visiting the pool of Bethesda, healing a man with an infirmity of 38 years. Jesus first approached this man and asked him, “Wilt thou be made whole?” Let’s entertain this invitation: what if in our prayers and in our relationship with Jesus, we discovered him asking us this same question? What do we think would follow? Think about this man: 38 years of being immobile and reduced to the ground, and then Jesus, a stranger that this man doesn’t know, asking him whether he wishes to be made whole. The man’s reply was what we might say, to the effect of, “I don’t have any way of being healed, I’ve tried.” And then Jesus giving this invitation: “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” Just think about it: what would it take internally, psychologically, for this man, with his infirmity being what it was, to respond? To stand right then and there? Many if not most of us have known people with injuries who had to labor to stand in physical therapy and the strenuous effort that can take.
I’ve wondered about what Jesus, with his wisdom and grace, might say to me after my reply to his invitation to be made whole. Would he say, “Face your anxiety” to make me whole? Would he say, “Love this person”? Would he say, “Rise, and embrace your estranged relative”? Would he say, “Sit with your questions and discomforts a little longer”? Certainly he will say whatever will make us whole—which for us offers this question about ourselves: are we actually willing to be made whole? Would we trust him, like this man of a 38-year infirmity did to stand? Or would we be like the rich young man who, when put to this same invitation, walked away because of his many possessions?
“Making Himself Equal with God”
In short, once people observed the infirm man walking about, they pressed him for who had performed the healing. Once they identified Jesus, they accosted him. In the temple courtyard, Jesus had a dialogue with them about what could have been so offensive about his ministering to a man with an infirmity. It won’t surprise us to read Jesus’s interlocutors accuse Jesus of having violated the Sabbath. When Jesus responded by saying, much like he had as a child in that same temple courtyard, that he did his Father’s work, the accusers balked—to their overly strict sensibilities, Jesus appeared to be “making himself equal with God,” a blasphemy. At this, Jesus replied with an extended remark.
“The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” What a critically important statement—Jesus makes clear how he reveals our Heavenly Father to us. He does what our Father does; he says what our Father says. This means we have Jesus before us as living revelation, not a textual one, or a prophetic one, or a visionary one, or any of the many other ways God reveals things to humankind. To observe Jesus is to observe our Heavenly Father in action. So, yes—a huge, resounding yes—to their outrage: he was making himself equal with God.
Of course, this truth would require those around Jesus to reformat their thinking and their traditions. We could go piece by piece through this discourse and point out how Jesus, like he did in the Sermon on the Mount, presents antitheses to the Torah. Just imagine this! Antitheses—counterpoints—to the Law of God. They had grown so reliant on law and commandment that they couldn’t see God in their midst. Jesus had to point out the love of God, the quickening of God in Jesus and others, the judgment of God and how judgment was supposed to occur, the life of God that the Son of Man was supposed to bring in delivering judgment. But the force of these antitheses, like the Sermon, was to redirect attention back onto the living, breathing revelation of God in Jesus. Obviously, this carried no egotistical or attention-seeking motivations. Jesus simply and clearly stated the true relationship of Jesus to God, of God to us, and of us to Jesus.
“The Father Judgeth No Man”
“The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son.” Jesus manifestly altered the tradition and expectation of the audience (and frankly, for a lot of Christians who read this differently today), who insisted God the Father would stand in judgment in a great Judgment Day or Bar of God apocalyptic event. No, Heavenly Father won’t judge the world, not according to Jesus—it is Jesus who will judge the world. And what’s striking about Jesus, the one so vested with this responsibility and authority, is that he inverts the expectation of judgment. Whereas the judge, we suppose, will marshal evidence to weigh our righteousness or worthiness, Jesus as Judge does quite the opposite: he advocates for us, he defends us and presents us to our Father, he is the one insisting that we are worthy and that we belong with our Father.
Jesus follows this up by saying that he doesn’t accuse anyone: “Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.” Notice this word accuse, which in the original text is the same that gets translated elsewhere as “Satan”; clearly Jesus doesn’t say, “Do not think that I will be Satan to you before the Father” or that Moses = Satan. We have to remember how the notion of satana had not evolved into a personality, that the role of an accuser or prosecutor was understood as something angelic, not demonic. (The Middle Ages would change all this, of course.) Still, Jesus forthrightly affirms how his judgment won’t condemn, but rather advocate. He won’t accuse but will instead advocate. Moses, however, does accuse, something that certainly would rile up the crowd to hear. This isn’t just any prophet Jesus invokes, but Moses, the prophet of prophets in their time. But the law and traditions handed down from Moses had, by then, become accusatory. Jesus rejected that and affirmed his role as Son of Man, Son of God, and personal advocate.
It shouldn’t surprise us to read how this message, something absolutely true and within Jesus’s prerogative to proclaim, was roundly rejected and labeled blasphemous by his immediate audience. They preferred their traditions and their devotion to law over building a direct-line relationship with Jesus and with God. (That reminds me of what we have in D&C 84 about the higher and lesser priesthoods, a short description how ancient Israelites, when invited into God’s presence rejected the offer, preferring instead that Moses ascend the mountain and give them a law to live by. But, I should leave that digression alone at the moment!)
“Ye Think Ye Have Eternal Life”
Then Jesus anticipated their rejection and pointed out their error. “The Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not.” Jesus refers here to himself in the third-person: God had sent Jesus, but because God’s word had not abided in them, they couldn’t believe Jesus. “Search the scriptures,” Jesus continues, “for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” Keeping this statement within the dialogue, it’s clear that Jesus is telling them that searching the scriptures had been their error—“ye think ye have eternal life” in the scriptures, but no, eternal life is in Jesus: they are they which testify of him. In other words, scripture testifies of Jesus, otherwise it’s not scripture. And if we use scriptures in such a way that they distract us from Jesus, we only think we have eternal life; we don’t actually nurture his word within us. Jesus continues, “And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.” Again, this isn’t Jesus encouraging his audience to search the scriptures, but quite the opposite—he’s telling them to come unto him for eternal life, to hear the testimony of the scriptures that points to him, the living revelation of God.
We do have a translation error in the King James Version of this passage: the word isn’t “and” but rather “but”: “in them ye think ye have eternal life, but they are they which testify of me.” The Greek is unambiguous with this word and I don’t have a good answer why the King James committees presented “and” here, but that’s the issue, if it brings a little more clarity. Also, the Greek verb for “search” in the statement “Search the scriptures” is not conjugated in the imperative/command form the way it appears in the King James English, but rather as the present plural indicative—the grammatical way of saying “You [all] search.” It’s one of those instances where, in translating the Bible correctly, we discern a very different meaning.
Let’s read the statement in its surrounding text, remembering not to cherry-pick the verse, and it’s quite emphatic that Jesus supersedes scripture:
And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not. [All of you] search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: [but] they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life. I receive not honour from men. But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.
I’m reminded of an analogy that scholar and theologian Adam Miller has talked about, that of a telescope. A telescope helps us see something else, not itself. We look through a telescope, and if everything is calibrated and in focus, we see light we otherwise cannot see, which magnifies and clarifies something else. The scriptures are supposed to be a telescope toward Jesus, where, if calibrated rightly, we’ll see Jesus clearly. But how often, like this antagonistic audience around Jesus, do readers make the scriptures the focus? Scriptures, prophets, saints—we’re all pointing to Jesus, and it’s Jesus who saves, it’s Jesus who judges, it’s Jesus who leads and advocates. When we have Jesus before us, it’s time to receive direct from him and to live by his word, the only word that is the bread of life and the living waters sent from heaven.
Authenticity
Together, these discourses show Jesus confronting the performative aspects of his audience’s religiosity. People couldn’t receive the miracle because they fixated on the particulars: uncleanness, proper Sabbath observance, the commandments in the scriptures. Jesus called out hypocrisy, which in this instance meant playacting or “cosplaying” righteousness. Real authenticity cuts through such performative devotions. The Greek woman displaying real concern for her daughter regardless of the customary dinner rituals, she was legit. The infirm man standing at the invitation to rise up and walk, he was legit. The caretakers of scripture who insist on chapter-and-verse conformance, the Pharisaic figures policing the boundaries of Sabbath observance—they had not the word abiding within them and found themselves contending against the Son of Man himself, and by extension, against Heavenly Father, since Jesus did nothing but what the Father revealed to him, as he said.
We can ask ourselves about our own authenticity. Are we focused on Jesus? Do we hear him, as our Father in Heaven has invited us to do? Or do we let other voices (even (gasp!) the voice of Moses) distract us from Jesus? Alma in the Book of Mormon offers a very salient commentary on this same dynamic: “Can you imagine to yourselves that ye hear the voice of the Lord, saying unto you, in that day: Come unto me ye blessed, for behold, your works have been the works of righteousness upon the face of the earth? Or do ye imagine to yourselves that ye can lie unto the Lord in that day?” (Alma 5:16–17.) Jesus sees the truth; he is the truth. No amount of performing the part of the “righteous” will actually be righteous. Like humility, the righteousness is a product of other virtues. You can’t call yourself that and still be that, the one cancels the other. So, like Jesus demonstrated, we can be with him how he was with God: we do what we see him do, and let that be the light of Christ, the living water, the bread of life within us.