Mark 7:5, commentary and pictures

The question was a public challenge put by a deputation of Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem who had come to watch Jesus after He stayed away from the Passover where they had expected Him and had laid a trap for Him. They were sent for the express purpose of watching Him to find something with which to accuse Him, yet they did not attack Him directly but accused Him through His disciples before the multitude. The charge was that the disciples did not walk according to the tradition of the elders but ate bread with unwashen hands, and it was made hoping to provoke controversy and to draw words from Christ of which they could make capital against Him.

The tradition of the elders means numberless rabbinical rules of ceremonial purification before eating, including washing of hands, cups, pots, brazen vessels and tables. It was a mass of oral traditions wholly human and conceived by narrow minds, professedly made to guard the law given from Sinai. That human tradition was exalted above God's commandments and treated as more sacred and more essential than the precepts of Jehovah, being given preference when the two collided. By supplementing God's commandments with human inventions taught as doctrine, the leaders displaced God's requirements, blurred the difference between sacred and common, and turned lifeless formalism into the counsel that must be followed.

Keeping these washings had become an endless round and a long struggle against ceremonial defilement that a lifetime was scarcely enough to learn. The minute particulars about exactly what ceremonies were to be observed were senseless, unreasonable forms and trifling distinctions that God never commanded or required. Yet neglect of them was counted a heinous sin to be punished in this world and the next, and destroying the transgressor was counted a virtue, while occupation with them turned attention away from the great principles of God's law. Christ and His disciples did not observe these washings, and the spies made that neglect the ground of accusation that the disciples did not walk according to tradition but ate bread with unwashen hands. Jesus answered with authority and divine power, exposing the questioners as hypocrites who laid aside the commandment of God to hold the traditions of men.

The questioners, the controlling religious leaders including Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes, represent those not converted and not sanctified through the truth, with perverse ideas and self interwoven in all they do, without oneness with Christ and without active Christian fellowship. They cherished jealousy against all they supposed did not keep the letter of the law and dealt most unfairly with Christ. Their hostility over difference of opinion on these forms contributed to their killing the world's Redeemer. To hold and follow this tradition is to leave Christ who has the words of eternal life and to take sides with His opposers against Him.