{"id":543,"date":"2013-02-18T07:47:47","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T07:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robstarner.com\/?p=543"},"modified":"2013-02-18T07:47:47","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T07:47:47","slug":"the-blonde-leading-the-blind-thoughts-on-matthew-1514","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/?p=543","title":{"rendered":"The Blonde Leading the Blind: Thoughts on Matthew 15:14"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jesus’ imagery of a blind person leading a blind person (Matthew 15:14) is so familiar to most of us that it hardly elicits more than a quiet yawn. \u00a0Altering the characters as in the above title just may create enough of a jolt to kick-start the engine of Jesus’ intention.\u00a0 Of course, it also risks offending all my fair-haired siblings in Christ, so for that I offer in advance my sincere apologies.<\/p>\n

The general (perhaps even secular) point of this figure of speech is this:\u00a0 if you want to arrive at a destination of your own intention, make sure you have a reliable guide. Example:\u00a0 You find yourself stranded in an unfamiliar city, and you want to get back home.\u00a0 What do you do?\u00a0 Right! You ask for help.\u00a0 But you don’t just blindly pick the first chump you bump into (or who bumps into you!).\u00a0 You have certain criteria in mind:\u00a0 What evidence do I have that this person can be trusted to help me and not do me harm?\u00a0 Does this person know where I need to go?\u00a0 Does he or she know how to get from where I am now to where I need to go?\u00a0 A negative answer to any of these questions generates no small degree of anxiety.<\/p>\n

What we are talking about here is the necessity of critical evaluation as opposed to blind faith.\u00a0 Wisdom urges us to judiciously evaluate not only those whom we follow but every piece of advice they offer along the way.\u00a0 Jim Jones expected people to follow him mindlessly.\u00a0 Jesus did not.\u00a0 He earned our trust by a life entirely faithful to God’s will, and he demonstrated his competence as our guide by showing us that (1) He knows where we are (estranged from God by our sin); (2) He knows where we need to go (God’s eternal presence); and (3) He knows how to get there (not only does He know the map, HE IS THE MAP!! (John 14:6).\u00a0 As the very embodiment of God’s Word, Jesus is our very own interactive Map!).<\/p>\n

Jesus uses the ridiculous one-sentence mini-parable of a blind person leading another blind person in order to show that following the lead of the Pharisees is equally ill-advised.\u00a0 His point could not be made any more vividly:\u00a0 your highly respected religious leaders, the Pharisees, are not reliable guides at all.\u00a0 True, they know where you are (“sinner-ville”); and true, they know where you need to go (“Saint-town”), but they do not know how to get you there<\/em><\/strong> (rules and regulations?).\u00a0 You see, according to the Pharisees, we are sinners because we sin.\u00a0 Our sinful acts make us sinners.\u00a0 Stop the sinful acts and, voil\u00e0, we are no longer sinners.\u00a0 This approach fails on at least two fronts: first, it misunderstands the sin problem, and second, it suggests that we can solve this problem ourselves.<\/p>\n

Jesus’ deployment of the “blind leading the blind” mini-parable is sandwiched between two very similar aphorisms (sayings) that are almost certainly addressing the Pharisaic approach to Jewish dietary restrictions.\u00a0 The first is the more subtle of the two:\u00a0 “What defiles a person,” Jesus said, “is not what goes into the mouth; it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person” (Matthew 15:11).\u00a0 What’s His Point? \u00a0Surely it is this:\u00a0 The Pharisees are so concerned about external compliance with various rules (here, specifically, dietary restrictions, i.e., what goes into the mouth<\/em>), but what comes out of the mouth<\/em> is the true indicator of spiritual condition, because the mouth speaks “from the abundance of the heart” (Matthew 12:34).<\/p>\n

What this suggests is that sin is ultimately a matter of the heart, which is the center, not of the emotions (as in modern Western thought), but of the will, intention, or decision.\u00a0 Put bluntly, sin is a mindset or posture against God.\u00a0 Thus, we are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners.\u00a0 Sinning is what sinners do.\u00a0 The solution, then, is not to stop sinning,<\/em> that is, to perfectly live up to external rules and regulations; the solution is to stop being sinners<\/em>, that is, to keep on being transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).<\/p>\n

Jesus’ point seems almost obvious from our vantage point, but the disciples appear to have missed it at first.\u00a0 They come to Jesus and inform him that his dietary saying has unnerved the Pharisees (who, by the way, meticulously follow the external law code that even includes rules they themselves created).\u00a0 Jesus immediately portrays the Pharisees as blind guides, chides His disciples for missing the point, and, in a kind of last ditch effort to bring the disciples to understanding, extends the dietary aphorism to its VERY graphic lower limit:\u00a0 instead of pointing to what comes out of the mouth<\/em>, He lowers Himself to alluding to what comes out of the . . . . well, other end of the digestive tract (Matthew 15:17).<\/p>\n

The disgusting nature of this illustration actually compounds its rhetorical force.\u00a0 A heart set against God always generates disgusting and immoral behavior.\u00a0 Only a heart transplant wrought by God’s grace through repentance and faith will solve the sin problem both on an individual and a global scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesus’ imagery of a blind person leading a blind person (Matthew 15:14) is so familiar to most of us that it hardly elicits more than a quiet yawn. \u00a0Altering the characters as in the above title just may create enough of a jolt to kick-start the engine of Jesus’ intention.\u00a0 Of course, it also risks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-themes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robstarner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}