THE THIEF COMES TO STEAL, KILL & DESTROY (PART III)

“Unbearable Burden of Rites, Rituals, and Traditions”

By Akin Ojumu

It is circa 1, and we are in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Lord Jesus Christ has just been labeled a blaspheming demon-possessed Samaritan by the Jewish religious leaders with whom He is engaged in a heated debate about His deity and equality with God. Boiling with rage for daring to say He is greater than their beloved Father, Abraham, the Jews decide He deserves to be stoned to death.

John 8:59

“So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.”

Upon escaping the lynch mob, the Lord Jesus and His disciples are now by the Pool of Siloam. There they come across a motley crew of invalids; cripples, blind deaf, dumb, and all sorts begging for arms. Pointing the Lord’s attention to one of the beggars, a man born blind, the disciples are curious to know the etiology of the man’s blindness. So, they inquire of the Lord.

 

John 9:2

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The average modern-day reader of the Bible, unfamiliar with the cultural and religious context, often glosses over the disciples’ question. But it’s important to know what the disciples are asking isn’t informed by some intellectual itch or unbridled curiosity. Their wanting to know whether the man’s blindness is as a result of either his own sin or the sin of parents is informed by a prevailing understanding of the causes of sickness and suffering. Like most Jews of their day, the disciples believed that sin was the primary, if not the exclusive, cause of all suffering or misfortune. 

From the perspectives of their cultural and religious worldview, sickness and suffering are considered to be divine retribution for sin. Therefore, those who suffer and are sick deserve their suffering and sickness. In their mind, that this man was born blind can only mean one or two things. It’s either he sinned while in his mother’s womb or he is being punished for his parents’ sins.

Of course, what this type of mindset does is that it shuts the bowel of compassion towards those who are suffering, sick, and afflicted. A religious system that indoctrinates people to believe that sickness and affliction are always the consequences of sins is a system that inevitably creates apathy, cruelty and inhumanity towards anyone unfortunate enough to be suffering, sick or afflicted.

It's this cultural and religious understanding of sickness and suffering that explains the reaction of the blind man’s neighbors to his healing. They could not see how a man suffering from the consequences of sin could suddenly have his eyesight restored. In their mind, he was not supposed to be healed and be freed from a life of beggary. The people had no frame of reference for the healing of a person born blind, as alluded to by the formerly blind man in his response to the religious leaders.

John 9:32

“Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind.”

So, in answering the disciples’ question, the Lord Jesus corrects their cruel and corrupted worldview. The man’s affliction, he tells them, has nothing to do with either his or his parents’ sin. By His sovereign prerogative, God has chosen to use the man’s blindness as a means to display not only His power and authority to the world, but also His everlasting love to the lost and suffering sheep of His pasture.

John 9:3

“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

With all that mind, let’s now examine how the religious leaders responded to the restoration of eyesight to the man born blind.

John 9:13-14

“They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.”

In the above passage, the Holy Spirit is pointing our attention to something crucial in this story. And it’s the fact that this miracle occurred on a Sabbath day. The reason that’s important is because it will explain the attitude of the Pharisees towards the formerly blind man.

When the Lord Jesus walked the earth, the Jewish religious leaders had so much corrupted the Mosaic Law that it had become unrecognizable from the Laws the LORD gave to Moses. In fact, the Judaism that existed at the time of Jesus was an apostate religion. The Jews of this period of time were essentially practicing an idolatrous religion consisting of man-made rules and regulations that had become a heavy burden for the people to carry. 

Matthew 23:2-4

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

By building layers upon layers of traditions around the written Torah, i.e., Mosaic Law given by God to Moses, the Jewish religious leaders made the keeping of the Law cumbersome and burdensome. In addition to the written Torah, the rabbis had also developed the Mishnah (the commentary of the rabbis on the Mosaic Law) and the Gemara (the commentary of the rabbis on the Mishnah). 

The Mishnah together with the Gemara constitute the Talmud, i.e., the Oral Torah, which the orthodox Jew considered to be as authoritative, if not more authoritative, than the Torah itself. In fact, here are some quotes from the Talmud:

“The words of the scribes are more lovely than the words of the Law.”

“My son, attend to the words of the scribes more than the words of the Law.”

Several times during the course of His 3-year itinerant ministry, the Lord Jesus was accused of breaking the “Tradition of the Elders” because He did not make His disciples to observe the Jewish ceremonial hand washing before meals. The “Tradition of the Elders,” the Lord Jesus and His disciples were accused of breaking is actually the Talmud.

Mark 7:1-5

“Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches. And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?””

While the Mosaic Law prescribed ceremonial washing for priests (Lev. 22:6-7), it did not require others to wash their hands in any particular way before eating. It's also important to understand that the washing or rising of hands before eating mandated by the “Tradition of the Elders” had nothing to do with hygiene. The washing of hands before meals was necessary because the Jews of this time believed that anyone who had touched a Gentile was defiled. The ceremonial hand washing was a way to purify the defiled person from Gentile-defilement. 

Also, the ceremonial hand washing before meals had to do with the teachings of the rabbis which said that a demon named Shibtah sat on people’s hands while they were sleeping. If the demon was not removed by ritual hand washing before eating, he would be transferred to the mouth, and would enter your body, and thus the person becomes demon-possessed.

As far as the Jewish Rabbis were concerned, the “Tradition of the Elders” was a necessary wall built around the Torah in order to make sure its content was not violated. In order to protect and preserve the purity of the Mosaic Law, they erected the metaphorical concept of a “fence around the Torah” by adding extra rabbinic rules and practices. They believe these “fences” act as a layer of protection, making it harder to accidentally transgress a core commandment.

The Scribes and Pharisees have become ‘bent out of shape’ because they were measuring the spiritual condition of individuals in terms of external conformity to traditional requirements and ceremonial rituals, rather than their sincere love for God and humble obedience to His Word (Source: Logos).

We’ll take it from here next time.