They Missed It

November 22, 2012

Hands are so interesting.  In Matthew, Jesus laid hands on the sick and they were healed.  And silly people kept asking him and quizzing him as to why his disciples ate without washing their hands.  They completely missed what Jesus was doing with His hands.

Yesterday we said hands can cause us to stumble.  These guys who were quizzing Jesus were certainly allowing hands to trip them up.  It was “custom” to wash your hands before eating, so when they saw the disciples go against custom, it tripped them up.  They were focused on rules and not religion.  Another place in the Bible it says true religion, pure and faultless, includes looking after those in distress and keeping oneself from the pollution of the world.  Wow, these guys missed it altogether!

Jesus was using his hands to bless and heal those he encountered, and the onlookers were only seeing unwashed hands of the disciples.  They concluded that the disciples’ hands were filthy, unworthy of sitting at the table.  But Jesus was showing them that keeping one’s hands unpolluted required more than running them under water – it required reaching out to those under pressure – and relieving it.  He was demonstrating true religion.

The term “religion” gets a bad rap these days, but Jesus lived true religion. He is our example of how to use our hands.  To sit at His table didn’t require washing the dirt off one’s hands before eating; it required following Jesus himself and reaching where he reached, touching where he touched…