Bible Verse Lookup
Mt 15:4
Chapter 15
4
For God commanded: Do your duty to your father and your mother, and whoever curses his father or his mother is to be put to death.
For God commanded: Do your duty to your father and your mother, and whoever curses his father or his mother is to be put to death.
Commentaries
On Tradition – On True Purity.
The Pharisees and scribes of Jerusalem ask Jesus about his freedom and that of his disciples regarding traditions, which they had misused and turned into law. In this case, the ritual is washing hands before eating. Jesus turns the question into a debate and uses it to teach his message with confidence and clarity. Ultimately, all those traditions of legal purity had no other purpose than to preserve the identity of the Jewish people as God’s chosen people among others. And this is, in fact, what Jesus challenges by getting to the root of what makes a person pure or impure, worthy or unworthy before God: what comes out of their heart and is reflected in their actions, not the kind of food that enters their mouth.