Beer, biscuits and butter – is that settling for less?

Beer, biscuits and butter - is that settling for less?  Some people will ask, "less than what?"  Others will just say, "I'm fine with that."  How about you?  Is that enough to make you happy?  Keep you happy?  Or do you want more?  A whole lot more? Of course, some know the three B's as butter, bacon and bourbon.  Especially if you're from Kentucky, apparently.  Or maybe for you, bacon and butter are good enough.  Anything with a B can be used.  But the question remains - is that enough for you?  Or is it settling for less? Beer, biscuits and butter - is that settling for less? is article #1 in the series: Settling for less. Click button to view titles for entire series It seems weird - a site about religion talking about beer, biscuits, butter and bourbon.  Relax, I'm not going to get into the evils of drinking and eating unhealthy food.  Anything, taken to excess, can be bad for us.  Even presumably healthy things like Orange Juice - too much acid that's bad for our teeth and too much sugar that's bad for pretty much everything.   No, we need to consider something Jesus said.  Something we probably just assume means we can eat whatever we want.  Pork, shellfish, and other tasty foods aren't prohibited anymore.  Which is true - up to a point.  There's still the issue of too much not being good for us.  But Jesus points out a whole new category of things that we should have been watching out for all along.  But probably didn't.  Check it out.  

Clean and Unclean

15:1-20 pp — Mk 7:1-23

Mt 15:1 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Washing hands - or not - isn't really the issue here.  It's going to get a whole lot bigger when Jesus gets to the real problem.  It's going to be a question of settling for less.  Settling for physical cleanliness, rather than spiritual cleanliness.  More directly to the point, clean versus holy.

Mt 15:3 Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ 5 But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,’ 6 he is not to ‘honor his father’’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

Mt 15:8 “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Mt 15:9 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”

Jesus introduces the concept here that what I'm calling settling for less came about because of rules taught by men.  Yes, there were actual physical reasons for some of the prohibitions in The Law.  But there was also the intent for the people to be not only physically clean, but holy as well.  But because the Israelite / Hebrew / Jewish leaders taught more about cleanliness than holiness, those points were lost.

Mt 15:10 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. 11 What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’ ”

Here's the point at which we really rejoice over the ability to eat pork fat and loads of shrimp, crab, lobster, Etc.  But that misses the main point.  The big thing Jesus is saying is, what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean. 

Here's the eye-opener. What comes out of our mouths might not have anything to do with what went in our mouths!  This isn't a case of getting sick and vomiting because we ate something bad.  No - it's something entirely different.  Like settling for less - beer, bacon, bourbon and butter instead of being holy.

Mt 15:12 Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”