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Acts 10:15
"What God has made clean, do not call common." It seems that in the days of the Master Israel had taken the considerations of Leviticus 11 to such an extreme that for religious people it rendered fellowship with common folks and non-Jews impossible. There is nothing wrong with doing due diligence to the Commandments as Yeshua Himself taught extreme measures in order to avoid breaking them (Matthew 5:27-30). In these issues, Yeshua was helping the leaders of Israel to apply these commandments in balance with other ones concerning their universal mission to the world, which required fellowship and contact. What He was teaching was, the idea of, “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others (Matthew 23:23)”. Yeshua personally spoke to Peter about it in a vision telling him, “What God has ‘tahor-ed’, do not ‘tamei’ (my literal translation from the Hebrew text of Acts 10:15) thus allowing him to go to the house of the Roman centurion Cornelius. By obeying Peter initiated a revolutionary theological break with the Judaism of his day. He was throwing the newly-born Nazarene movement into its universal mission of teaching Torah to the gentile world, move that Paul followed in Syrian Antioch and later in Turkey, Greece, and finally Rome. As great as a disciple as he was for being the one chosen to challenge the stiff religious status quo of his day, Peter’s weakness for acceptance often surfaced. We saw him denying the Master the night of His arrest, and again in Antioch, to Paul’s horror, withdrawing himself from fellowship with gentiles (Matthew 26:75; Galatians 2:11-14). In both cases Peter yielded to peer-pressure and fear. He was afraid to stand up because he valued the opinions of men. It is easy to blame Peter, but what the Master was teaching here was of utmost importance. Whereas He retained the ideas of holiness, of being ‘set-apart for God’, Yeshua was teaching to not apply them in a way hampering our mission of being a ‘light’ to not only our brothers, but also to the world. The Master in effect was saying, ‘Do my will and trust Me for your sanctity; you can never attain it anyways!”; “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others (Matthew 23:23)” Sad to say, I meet many today who ‘separate’ themselves from even their relatives, people even divorce on the same sort of imbalanced religious grounds. I would like to say here that the Master must be ‘rolling in His grave’, but we know that He is not in the grave. He actually watches us wondering how come He, He who is the Holy of Holy of Israel, set-apart for God from creation, He felt it necessary to put on the ‘tamei’ impurity of the world in order to reach us, but we, we are too ‘holy’ to do it? Even though Peter denied the Master in front of men (Matthew 10:33), the Master forgave Peter and reinstated Him (John 21:15-18). Later Peter also repented from his self-righteous separatism in Antioch and died as a martyr while ministering to the believers in Rome. May we also like Peter and Paul learn the proper balance of the commandments, and may it be in an easier way. A wise man may learn by his experiences, but a wiser man learns by the experiences of others!
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Matthew 7:4
Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? The seventeenth verse of Leviticus nineteen carries the commandment to rebuke our stray brother. In English it is written in this manner, "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him (Leviticus 19:17), but I would dare say that much in this verse is lost in translation, so here is a literal Hebrew from it, ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart but you shall exhort him properly and not bear sin because of him’. The Hebrew is difficult to translate because it carries two conjugated forms of the verb exhort, that is why I added the word ‘properly’. From this verse Jewish sages have derived two commandments; 1-To exhort one’s brother; 2-To not shame one’s brother. Here is how it works. Sages have wondered about the twice conjugation of the verb exhort and have connected it to the last part of the instruction which warns us about carrying sin because of our brother. Here is the commentary of the Baal Shem Tov about it, ‘The double expression teaches us how one should approach the difficult commandment of criticizing others. First (the first expression) reprove yourself! You cannot properly reprove others if you are arrogant and think you are perfect. You must recognize your own shortcomings so that you will feel empathy for the sinner. When he recognizes that you feel for him he is more likely to accept your criticism. After you have examined yourself, then (the second expression) can you go and reprove your fellow’. It is very easy to get carried away in self-righteous indignation about others. Sometimes debates turn into arguments and we forget that the person in front of us is not just an opinion but a person made in the image of God and worthy of dignity. In our efforts to vindicate ourselves in our own eyes or those of others we may win an argument at the cost of shaming our brother through insults or making him loose face. What have we won then? We may have won the dispute but as we lay sin upon him, we also lay it upon our own soul! The interpretation of the Baal Shem Tov of this Levitical instruction falls completely in line with the words of the Master in our attitudes towards other’s weaknesses when He says , Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye (Matthew 7:3-5). How different was the attitude of the Master, instead of shaming and laying sin upon us, he justified us and carried our shame upon Himself. A tall order, but the example we ought to follow! |
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