Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we open with Jesus dealing again with the complaints of the Pharisees.

They're upset that his disciples don't wash their hands before meals.

If this sounds familiar,

it should. Jesus dealt with this himself back in Luke 11 when he went to dinner at the Pharisees

house. But this time the scribes and Pharisees have apparently traveled from Jerusalem to

Galilee, which is almost 80 miles, to address this situation. Per usual, Jesus points out that

this isn't breaking God's law, it's breaking man's traditions.

Just because their religion set this up as their law doesn't make it God's law, according to

God's law, only the priests had to wash their hands before meals.

Jesus points out the hypocrisy in their accusation, because he says they break the actual law in order to keep

their man-made traditions which are sometimes in conflict with God's law. Then he quotes the words

of Isaiah in reference to the people of Jerusalem. The passage talks about people who do acts of

worship and have the appearance of godliness, doing and saying all the right things, but who don't

actually love God. They love their religious acts. They love being right, but who don't actually love God. They love their religious

acts. They love being right, but they don't know anything about righteousness, because that

only comes through a relationship with God, not through their good deeds. This whole thing is probably

a little unsettling to the disciples. Imagine being a teenager who didn't wash up before dinner,

and suddenly a bunch of religious leaders make an eight-day round trip just to rebuke you for it. Jesus addresses the disciples and all the people who had seen this go down, and he sets the record straight for them. He's like, look, my disciples aren't in trouble here. They didn't do anything wrong. These Pharisees want you all to believe that you can

become unclean because of dirty hands, but they're just making stuff up. It's not only untrue, it's irrational.

Later, when he's just talking to his disciples, Jesus circles back around and says,

wash your hands or don't. It doesn't matter. What does matter, though, is what comes out of your

...